“We expected this!” Hindsight bias between inconsistency and pushing agendas in the UK
By: Bogdan Iacob
Tags: Covid, Epistemology, Hindsight Bias, Pandemics Politics, Public Morals

Covid-19

“We expected this!” Hindsight bias between inconsistency and pushing agendas in the UK Bogdan Iacob Follow Jul 25 · 8 min read

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

Following and presumably correcting what was claimed to have been a communication blunder, on the 20th of July, 2021, sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser of the UK’s government, stated for clarification that about 60 percent of people that were at the time hospitalized across the UK, being infected with Sars-Cov 2, had not been vaccinated against the virus. This obviously also means that about 40 percent of people that were hospitalized at the moment of the statement had actually been vaccinated.

Already in June, also in the UK, from the total deaths associated with the Delta variant of the coronavirus, about 63 percent occurred in vaccinated people (163 of 257 in absolute numbers, according to government data).

Finally, government numbers show that in the UK, around mid-July 2021, at a time when around 55 percent of the population had been fully vaccinated, making the country the seventh or eighth “most Covid vaccinated” and the biggest one to reach that percentage in the whole world, the number of people considered to be active cases of Covid is roughly equal to that of active cases recorded in mid-January 2021, when vaccination was barely underway.

A choir of media outlets (including, of course, the BBC and the monstrosity that is The Guardian, but also the likes of Medical Xpress or Business Standard) and fact-checkers (oh, those champions of politically convenient truths!) assured the public that there is nothing to worry about, that this is normal, even proof that things are going really well (that’s the Guardian’s approach, you guessed correctly) and so on. Everything is just going in perfect accordance with the brilliant, redemptive plan of competent authorities and pharma corporations. One catchphrase particularly stands out: „This is exactly what you would expect” (from an awesome, yet ever so slightly imperfect cure).

We cannot really tell from the mainstream media materials and the fact-checkers’ brilliant, thorough investigations (of course) if this is indeed something that the public should have expected, or, for that matter, if this really is normal, it means going well, as planned, etc. Their argument is that mostly fragile and elderly persons were vaccinated. Since those nevertheless remain old and vulnerable, their death would still presumably be precipitated by a coronavirus infection, even if they had been vaccinated. More fragile people were vaccinated, yet they are fragile, so they still die, that’s how the rather twisted story goes. It sounds weirdly off, but that’s not the main cognitive (and moral) problem.

The first main problem is that the argument is backed by no detailed statistical evidence, as it is usually the case with the fact-checkers’ dicta regarding such matters: no detailed information about the mean age of vaccinated and not vaccinated persons who passed away being infected with Sars-cov 2, no plotting of the age distribution of the two population samples against each other or against the age distribution in the whole population of Covid related fatalities, etc., etc. So, the argument -sometimes elaborately, albeit remarkably contortedly supported by metaphors involving sieves …- makes sense (if some epistemic gymnastics is deployed), but, if it is actually valid or it’s just (by now) classic media and fact-checkers’ bullshit, in fairness, we do not know.

The second main problem is that we highly plausibly do know, however, that this is not what a huge part of the public did actually expect. This is largely because it has definitely not been made explicit to them by “official” sources, namely government, mainstream media, pharma industry and so on. The vaccination campaigns and promos did not include phrases on the lines of “Yeah, for a while, at least, vaccinated individuals will still get the virus and will account for between a third and a half of those who will need hospitalization, as they get infected. Also, the frail ones will continue to die of Covid, in absolute numbers the vaccinated surpassing the non-vaccinated.”

This is not what was promised, for sure. What was advertised was that vaccination would surely cause a huge drop in a person’s likelihood to develop serious symptoms, like those requiring hospitalization or to die (which was quite often even deemed impossible, should one be vaccinated), compared with a person that has not taken the jabs. The vaccinated were supposed to be really safe from Sars-cov 2 infections and especially from developing serious symptoms. This is the takeaway that any sane person would extract, if she or he would have decided to believe the adamant statements about over 95 percent efficiency of anti-Covid vaccines and the litanies about how there is still a small chance that you could catch the virus, but you would only develop mild symptoms, if you had taken a vaccine, which was relentlessly pushed by government and pharma corporations alike. As a bewildering side note, a Romanian Covid guru (meaning “public health expert”) prophesized that there is a zero probability of developing serious symptoms, if you are vaccinated and somehow still get the virus. Well, no: in the UK and around the world many vaccinated people got infected, developed serious symptoms and were hospitalized. Some of them died.

In fairness, looking at the UK situation again, the number of hospitalizations is much lower in mid-July than in mid-January of 2021, while the officially provided number of active cases is roughly the same. However, without significantly powered, large and/or well-designed experiments and analysis at our disposal, able to begin discriminating the contributions of various factors to the current situation, it is just impossible, for now at least, to know, with any decent degree of confidence, if the lower number of hospitalizations is to be mostly attributed to vaccination, naturally occurring decrease in Sars-Cov 2 pathogenicity, previous deaths of some of those most vulnerable, previous immunization acquired by going through the disease by a considerable number of vulnerable persons, improved general or specific, collective immunity of the population and so on.

Bottom line is that indeed there was no reason, a few months back, for the public to have expected the current situation, which is hardly consistent with the promises of over 95 percent vaccine efficiency, loudly vehiculated by governmental and medical sources. Reality just doesn’t seem to live up to such promises of the experts, by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how clever and evoking sieve metaphors one would wish to deploy. If parts of the public mistrust the official explanations about how normal the mentioned situations are and how they actually prove that all is going superbly well, those sections of the public are not to blame. And with thousands dying across the UK and throughout the world within weeks after being vaccinated, concerns about vaccines’ safety, too, not just their efficiency, won’t just go away by stubbornly repeating “it’s not because of the vaccine, they were old and/or sick, they would have died anyway.” Such simplistic phrases are particularly dubious, even disgusting, especially since, on the other hand, the old and/or sick people who died after testing positive for Sars-Cov 2 were swiftly and massively labeled as Covid casualties by authorities that seemed both dominated by panic and quick to embrace authoritarian, if not fully tyrannical approaches to crisis management.

Going back to the catchphrase “This is exactly what you would expect,” which is the line I adamantly take issue with, it’s crucial to remember that hindsight bias is an intellectual plague and a cognitive failure that caused countless epistemic fiascoes and to which we are all rather highly susceptible. Moreover, and more problematically, the results of hindsight bias in action are often indistinguishable from blatant lies, used by individuals or institutions to save an appearance of competence and honesty, when they are faced with revelations about how poor their predictions’ record is or how badly they suck at delivering on their promises. Lies aside, historians acting in good faith are, amongst the intellectuals, probably the most frequent victims to genuine hindsight bias (as brilliantly highlighted by Ferguson or Taleb, but already alluded to by the underrated, in my opinion, Isaiah Berlin), but social scientists do not really fare better (as consistently shown by Gigerenzer, Todd, Gell-Man and Peters or -anecdotally and caustically casual, in his case- Feynman). The world of finance and business has been seriously and repeatedly impacted by hindsight bias (as demonstrated by Taleb, Beinhocker, Bevelin or Kay), organizational and political decision making often suffer from it (one can go through the writings of Simon, Gigerenzer, Ferguson or Gurri for details), individual decisions and sense of identity can, more often than one might think, be negatively impacted by this particular cognitive bias (as convincingly claimed by Kahneman, Twerski, Wilson or Bevelin) and the very production of knowledge and search for truth can be hindered by it (as pointed out by Derman or by the formidable Nicholas Rescher).

As Bevelin puts it, in hindsight everything seems obvious. With the benefit of knowing what actually happened, one can retro-fit data in her or his model/story about the past, so that it is perfectly coherent, which, by the way, is no guarantee that the model/story is actually adequate/true. What just happened seems to be exactly what you would expect to have happened. But, if it is not what you did expect and actually predicted it would happen, your “would expect” story is childish bullshit at best, but often downright, sleazy manipulation attempt, accompanied by vane condescendence.

In the case of the epidemiological developments mentioned in the beginning of this text, which one is it, after all? Did the official sources (government, mainstream media, pharma etc.) actually expect them, but didn’t bother to inform the public about their expectations? Or they didn’t expect them and are now retro-fitting data into an otherwise plausible explanatory model, which is nevertheless epistemically unreliable, given the suspicion of hindsight bias (not to mention the suspicion of pushing a dodgy or cynical agenda)? Whether is one or the other, they appear all too willing to resort to either lying by omission or to lying by commission. This doesn’t look good at all, especially in times like these, when, in some countries of the European Union, governments are already pushing mandatory vaccination for vast categories of citizens and are denying rights to those who won’t take the vaccines, in a manner which is chillingly reminding of Nazi segregation tactics, yet it is supported -at least apparently- by the majority of the population. Nevertheless, since uncertainty reigns in complex systems, such as our societies, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what the future holds for us, and try to be as lucid and wise as we can throughout the challenges it might throw at us.