Anything that creates a distinction, is also self-limiting. Distinctions are boundaries. Sense organs, such as eyes create distinctions. They enable, but they also create boundaries, create misperceptions, such as visual misperceptions, as in the case of a mirage, which occurs when a natural phenomenon cannot be captured adequately by our limited sense organs and therefore is misinterpreted. No matter, how much anyone may tell you that it is a visual illusion, you still see water in a mirage. You may learn to tell yourself that it is not water, but your eyes see water.
A Road Mirage. Source: https://www.scu.edu/illuminate/thought-leaders/phil-kesten/why-do-we-see-mirages.html
It is the same case with two circles of equal size – one surrounded by larger circles, and the second surrounded by smaller circles. The second one appears to be larger than the first even if they are both the same size. The reason why that happens is that the second one is surrounded by smaller circles and appears larger. Even if you know that both circles are equal in size, your eyes tell you that the second one is larger. This is because our perceptions are never perfect. Distinctions, on the one hand, are enablers, but in other instances, they are sources of misperceptions.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebbinghaus_illusion | Inspired by Systems Thinking Made Simple: New Hope for Solving Wicked Problems by Derek and Laura Cabrera
Now think of the mind as a distinction-making organ (even though it does more than that such as draw relationships, take points and views, and perceive part-whole structures, as argued by Derek Cabrera & Laura Cabrera, my systems thinking professors at Cornell). Still, the mind is prone to making grievous errors. Behavioral economics, to a large extent studies this limitation of the mind where it becomes prone to misperception (with present bias etc.).
Therein also lies the limitation of evidence-based policymaking. Evidence is a distinction. It is a tremendous enabler, but could it have limitations as well? Indeed, it does. For instance, the case of Malawi Circumcision Disaster is a case in point. Someone I knew had been the advisor to the Health Minister of Malawi and recalled the story with much regret. The advisor’s group had conducted many randomized control trials and found that circumcision reduces the instance of AIDS. They recommended therefore to the Health minister of Malawi that they should, go ahead with a circumcision program to reduce the incidence of AIDS in the country.
The advisor was not from Malawi and could not anticipate what the Health Minister argued. The Health Minister contested that with circumcision, men are likely to think that they have a “natural condom” and may indulge in even riskier sexual behavior which might increase the incidence of AIDS.
This is understandable because foreskin removal in circumcision is a minor surgery and among many population groups, including Indian rural population, patients have a perceived hierarchy of effectiveness – taking a tablet is more effective than a syrup, taking an injection (vaccine) is more effective than taking a tablet, getting on a drip is more effective than taking an injection, and undergoing a surgery is the most effective of all. I have heard anecdotal incidences from doctors who had their patients insist they give them an injected dose rather than a tablet. In many cases, they then receive a placebo. This is like the Dettol vs Savlon effect which a marketing professor once told me during a class – the reason why Dettol is considered more effective is because it hurts.
Now imagine that a group of people undergo a foreskin removal or circumcision surgery and they believe that they have somehow developed extra protection against AIDS, because, after all, they underwent surgery! How can a condom match something like that? They then engage into riskier sexual behavior and this is what happened in the trials in Malawi. The treatment group that underwent the circumcision operation actually had twice the number of cases if AIDS after a few months of the procedure than the control group. The randomized control trial conducted earlier, did not hold true for the context of Malawi. Yet the data received earlier was so convincing. The Health Minister, understood her cultural context much better than the RCT data collected previously in other countries. She was proven correct, but not without a cost to her citizens.
Another example in this regard is the shattered relationship between urbanization and growth. The typical belief, based of hard data and consistent evidence for most of the industrialized countries was that urbanization leads to growth (GDP growth). However, data collected between 1990 to 2017 for Burundi, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and Zimbabwe showed that as these “more urbanized, average incomes have fallen instead of risen.” Imagine the surprise that the policymakers bred in the school of thought that urbanization fuels growth, would have got when they did not see their dreams being realized. They surely made their policy recommendations based on data from other countries and years of research showing data that supports this notion. What they missed out on was perhaps that in countries like CAR, urbanization “happened because of “pull factors” such as better livelihoods in cities. Rather, it has happened because of “push factors”, where people have fled to cities to escape the violence in the countryside.” It never unleashed the productive factors typically associated with economic growth.
Despite this, guess what most policymakers in various countries would argue? That urbanization leads to growth. It is the same phenomenon as the mirage or the two circles. For some, the mind may be told that it is not water, but it looks like water to the eyes. Or that the two circles may not look equal in size to the eyes even if the person has been logically demonstrated that they are in fact of equal size. Some people adhere to the logical demonstrations, while most rely on the specious veracity of their sensory inputs. The same goes for data and evidence.
Just like the capacity of making visual distinctions that enables us to survive, but can also be lethally misleading; data and evidence is important for effective policymaking but can lead to misjudgements, mis-perceptions, and miscalculations if we rely on evidence uncritically.
More on this here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328717300472
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