The Norm Chronicles (51 page)

*
The fashion for data visualisation is an exception, where pictures of the numbers can be striking. See, for example, David McCandless’s
Information is Beautiful
.

*
On the National Archives you can watch the AIDS monolith film,
t
he peach and hammer (from 1976) and the hyenas.
¹

*
The simplest way to estimate the chance of pregnancy was by considering only cycles in which there had been only one act of intercourse: the peak chance was observed at three days before ovulation, in which 8 out of 29 (29 per cent) ‘coitions’ resulted in pregnancy. But this only used around a third of cycles in which there had been any sex, and so a more sophisticated mathematical model was applied to the full data: they estimated the peak at two days before ovulation, with a chance of around 25 per cent, which is similar to previous estimates. The chances drop fairly steeply away from this peak, with an average of 5 per cent over the whole monthly cycle.

*
Hans Rosling’s
Gapminder
depicts the trends vividly.
⁶

*
See, for example, David Nutt
¹
for a vivid description of different views on illegal and legal drugs.

*
A recent example of drug liberalisation is the Licensing Act of 2003, which relaxed the rules on the opening hours of licensed premises, even allowing continuous opening for some premises, in England and Wales in 2005 (similar changes were introduced in Scotland in 2006).

*
By big risks we mean those that affect lots of people, such as the climate, new diseases, natural disasters and so on.

†
‘Sharp decline in public’s belief in climate threat, British poll reveals,’
The Guardian
.
¹
‘Thirty one per cent said climate change was “definitely” happening, while 29% said “it’s looking like it could be a reality”, and another 31% said the problem was exaggerated, a category which rose by 50% compared to a year ago. Only 6% said climate change was not happening at all, and 3% said they did not know.’ About a year later, the paper reported that ‘Public belief in climate change weathers storm, poll shows’, with 14 per cent ‘saying global warming poses no threat’.

*
Kahan’s work here draws heavily on the cultural theory of risk. One of the most influential accounts of this is in
Risk and Culture
, by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsy, which describes arguments in the US about nuclear power and air pollution in terms of competing ways of life: on one side egalitarian collectivists who use fear of disaster to argue against the kind of free enterprise that they also believe brings inequality; on the other side hierarchical individualists who want to defend free enterprise from public interference.
⁵
Douglas argued that the various psychological ways of viewing risks that we look at elsewhere in this book are just tools people use to assert their cultural outlook, the means to an end. She was more interested in the ends. See p. 101 for Mary Douglas’s ideas about risk as social control in
Chapter 9
, on drugs.

See also
The Righteous Mind
, by Jonathan Haidt,
⁶
who argues that our views about subjects such as climate change – along with most other political issues – come from a small set of tribal, moral outlooks. These have much in common with Dan Kahan’s use of cultural theory. ‘Morality binds and blinds’, says Haidt, meaning that morality, rather than scientific evidence, is what keeps your side together and what makes the other side seem stupid.

*
For a nuanced account of what went wrong in L’Aquila and what the scientists were actually accused of, see the article in
Nature
by Stephen Hall
¹⁰
and the below-the-line discussion that follows.

*
Meaning she’s not had children before.

*
Accounts of childbirth in literature seem to have been mostly sanitised affairs until the 20th century, and mostly from a male point of view, like these from Kelvin and poor, befuddled Norm. Queen Victoria was unusually and famously forthright: ‘I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic’ (quoted by Helen Rappaport
¹
). But at some point women writers made the subject their own and the writing became more explicit: ‘the pain was no longer defined and separate from her but total, grasping, heating, bursting the whole of her, head, chest, wrought and pounded belly, so that animal sounds broke from it, grunts, incoherent grinding clamour, panting sighs’ (A. S. Byatt,
Still Life
²
). Or see Sylvia Plath, ‘Metaphors’ (1959): ‘I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.’

*
A helpful guide to terminology and statistics is given by patient.co.uk.
⁸

*
Guess the flaw in Norm’s plan. Then see the discussion in the second part of this chapter.

*
See, for example,
The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making
, by Peter Stone, which argues – with others – that the perceived problem with using lotteries for social decision-making is that they actively prevent reasons from playing a part in the decision, but that this very quality has a ‘sanitizing effect’.
²

*
Quetelet derived
l’homme moyen
from the mean values of measured variables, which generally followed a normal distribution.

*
Means and medians: for height, line up everyone from tallest to smallest and the median is the one in the middle; the mean is more like an equal share of all the height (i.e., what you get if you add up all the heights and divide the answer by the number of people).

†
Gould tells his own story in a short, remarkable essay: ‘The median is not the message’.
³
For a longer, easy discussion of averages see
The Tiger that Isn’t
, by Blastland and Dilnot,
⁴
or, in more detail,
The Flaw of Averages,
by Sam Savage.
⁵

*
The Underground Man, from whom Kevin nicks most of his speech, argues for the freedom to reject 2+2 =4. ‘I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.’
¹
Other Dostoevsky characters rebel in similar ways, in order to affirm their individuality.

*
Though whether chance necessarily implies free will is a long argument. Some philosophers say that both chance and determinism are incompatible with free will, since they mean that life is either determined or accidental and neither leaves room for human choice. By linking chance and free will, Kevin is more like the American philosopher William James, who argued that chance upsets determinism to create the possibilities from which free will can choose. See also, for example, Chrysippus of Stoll, a Stoic philosopher born around 279
BC
.
²

*
‘If we insisted on the detailed description of the motion of individual molecules, the notions of probability which turn out to be so essential for our understanding of the irreversible character of physical events in nature would never enter. We should not have the great insight that we now do: namely, that the direction of change in the world is from the less probable to the more, from the more organised to the less, because all we would be talking about would be an incredible number of orbits and trajectories and collisions. It would be a great miracle to us that, out of equations of motion, which to every allowed motion permit a precisely opposite one, we could nevertheless emerge into a world in which there is a trend of change with time which is irreversible, unmistakable and familiar in all our physical experience’ – Robert Oppenheimer.
³

*
About which she was at least half-right, though whether Keynesian stimulus was the solution is not for us.

*
One of the best-known literary losses of nerve also comes in an account of war. Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
sees an exceptionally gruesome death and decides that the enemy is anyone trying to kill him, and this includes his own side. The world becomes more deadly even as it remains the same.

*
For the most jaw-dropping, eye-popping, vicarious risk-taking, watching wing-suit flying is hard to beat. Try this video.
¹

*
Although this is unusual. On the whole, if people like the benefits of risk-taking, they tend to think the risk is objectively lower, even if still high enough to be thrilling. See index for ‘affect heuristic’.

*
Life-expectancy for a man aged 22 in the UK is currently about 79, or a further 57 years, which is 3,418,560 minutes, or 20,800 days, or 500,000 hours, or 1 million half-hours. For a woman, life-expectancy is about 83, so her million half-hours start at 26. This will not be true for everyone, but short of clairvoyance it’ll do, roughly, more or less, overall.

*
Actually 85 grams, or about 3 oz.

†
The assumption is – in line with the Harvard study – that they have the same average weight, alcohol intake, exercise regime and family history of disease, but not necessarily quite the same income, education and standard of living. This is how the Harvard team analysed the risks, by trying to focus on the effect of the meat we eat without too many other factors in the way.

*
If we assume a hazard ratio
h
is kept up throughout their lives, then some rather elegant maths tells us the probability that Kelvin dies before Norm is precisely
h
/(1+
h
), which when
h
= 1.13, = a 53 per cent chance Kelvin dies first, rather than 50:50 if they eat the same red meat.

*
If he carries on smoking, he is only expected to live another 30 years or 11,000 days, so he is on average losing 7.2 hours per day (14 MicroLives): we can imagine him speeding recklessly towards his death at 31 hours a day. During these 30 years he might smoke 325,000 cigarettes (assuming the higher consumption of 30 a day in the 1950s and 1960s). This works out at 15 minutes lost per cigarette smoked.

*
The study gives an estimated hazard ratio of 1.29 for all-cause mortality per 5 kg/m2 increase in body mass index (BMI) over the optimum of 22.5 to 25 kg/m
²
. For a man/woman of average height (1.75m/1.62m), this corresponds to a hazard ratio of around 1.09 per 5 kg overweight, translating to one MicroLife per day.

*
Kelvin? Il ne regrette rien.

*
The media have a field day, even with the very word ‘radiation’, although heat, light and radio waves are forms of radiation too. So it’s important to distinguish between these ‘non-ionising’ types, which nobody much cares about (except those who feel they are being harmed by mobile phone masts), and the ‘ionising’ sort, which potentially has sufficient energy to cause changes to atoms and which concerns us here. Ionising radiation can damage cells, which is why radiotherapy is used against cancer, although it is still not clear whether very low doses are harmful. Very high doses can cause acute radiation sickness, while the late effects of radiation exposure can increase the risk of cancers by causing cell mutation.

*
An Angolan man fell from a plane onto a residential street in Mortlake, London, in September 2012.
¹

*
Contemplating human fate while staring at the cosmos has a funny effect on people’s prose. See Carl Sagan, who manages proper lyricism in
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
.
²

*
This analysis assumes that people don’t occupy any space. The odds go up a bit if we allow for the width of a body.

*
The hazard ratios in each direction are proportions of different numbers: that is, the employed are a much larger stock than the unemployed, so a 1 per cent chance of losing a job equals more people than a 1 per cent chance of leaving unemployment. Even so, not finding a job accounts for more of the rise in unemployment. We have also simplified the flows by not going into detail about those around inactivity, which we don’t think affect the main point of the analysis.