Oh forlorn college days,
of frustrating algorithm on silly Matlab,
Did the hard work really pay?
Bloomberg does it with a keyboard tab.
Author: Hafiz Noor Shams
For more about me, please read this.
The anti-Lynas camp organized a public forum at the Malaysian Parliament some time ago last year. There was a panel of several men and women highlighting the cost of allowing Lynas to operate its rare earth metals refinery plant in Pahang.
An expert took his turn to speak. He patiently explained the inverse-square law in the context of public health. The danger of harmful radioactive substance to a person correlates inversely to the distance between the two.
The shorter the distance, the more detrimental it is to the person’s health. It is not a linear relationship where a unit of distance closer means a unit increase of harm. Rather, the danger increases exponentially with each unit of distance shaved.
He went on to explain that the Lynas plant would be processing fine radioactive substance. If handled carelessly or by some unfortunate accident, the substance would be exposed to the air and permeated to the surrounding areas.
If inhaled, the distance between the radioactive material and human body would effectively be zero. Under the inverse-square law, the danger would be infinite. Radiation poisoning would be inevitable.
The person may be an expert in his field, but he spoke without the eloquence of a seasoned orator. There were short pauses as he thought through his next point slowly. As much as his thoughtfulness demanded respect, those pauses were distracting and even annoying. He lost the audience, if the mostly boring jargon-laced scientific presentation had not yet.
The next two speakers had sharper presentation styles and spoke in plain Malaysian English. The presentation slides were more colorful than the expert’s. One had a video running. They immediately took hold of the crowd, demanding attention with their exuberant confidence.
Yet, their field of expertise was unclear. The only obvious thing was that their speeches were a series of emotional appeals, and a series of exaggerations. One of them asserted that radioactive material from Lynas plant could pollute all palm oil produced in Malaysia, hence making it dangerous for consumption.
He talked as if the whole palm oil industry would be in danger of collapse. Others outside of the hall in the public sphere have equated the risks of running the plant to the meltdowns of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
They exaggerated either willfully or out of ignorance to garner support for their cause. Maybe out of desperation too because they care about the issue and they need support. They are the advocates. They may have succeeded judging by the reaction of the audience but not all were moved by the exaggeration. But most of the audience already had their minds made up before the presentations. The two were preaching to the choir.
For the unmoved minority with their minds yet to be made, the exaggeration discredited the speakers.
To be fair, the debates surrounding Lynas are full of exaggerations. Both the opposition and the proponents have exaggerated the benefits and the cost of the project.
The Lynas debate is obviously not the only one that suffers from exaggeration. The debate on the goods and services tax is another. As the exaggeration goes, inflation would go up through the roof and everybody’s tax bill would balloon.
The fact that the GST would only cause transient inflation was uninteresting to the anti-GST side. The fact that the GST can mimic the existing tax system without increasing a person’s total tax burden was discounted by the anti-GST camp.
On the proponent side, they exaggerated that Malaysia would go the Greek way if the GST was not implemented. The truth is that while it helps, the introduction of the GST is neither the only way nor the crucial piece to balance public finance up.
We know the Greek argument is exaggerated when the sides that use it are undisturbed by handouts given by the government that directly contribute to the current state of government finance. Even they are unworried.
When a side runs out of bullets, exaggeration is the water pistol masquerading as a real gun. An exaggerator armed with a water pistol may fool some people sometimes. But when it is time to pull the trigger, the exaggerator better prepare for a backlash or two.
Liberal Malaysians in general are happy to stress on the wisdom of the crowd. In a context where the government holds a condescending attitude towards the public and in times when information spreads faster before the government can act, it is an appealing point to subscribe to.
Travel around and try to talk politics among critical and liberal urbanites especially, and somebody in that circle will remind you that the public is not stupid. Whether it is an honest opinion or words tailored to appeal to the post-2008 crowd, even Prime Minister Najib Razak said the days of government knows best are over. That is an acknowledgement of the idea from the very institution that traditionally sits opposite of the liberal crowd in Malaysia.
In heated political discussions, it is easy to take the black-and-white approach and engage in hyperbole stating that the crowd or the public is always right. Put a liberal and a statist in the same room and the game is on.
The truth is more nuanced. The crowd can be brilliant at times, and utterly stupid at others. The validity of the idea depends on the situation at hand. The examples that strengthen and undermine the idea exist all around us if only we care to see.
The chaos at the KTM Komuter train station at KL Sentral on Thaipusam Day provides contradictory examples all at once.
The trains were late. The platform was full of impatient commuters. When the trains arrived 30 minutes late, those on the platform found the coaches were full. If that did not make things bad enough, everybody wanted to go Batu Caves. With the roads closed, the trains were the most convenient means of transportation for ordinary folks.
The adjective convenient, is of course only used in superlative terms. There is nothing convenient about the service provided by KTM Komuter. For those who depend on the service daily, every day is a battle to be won in the scrappiest of all manner. The least painful way to go through the day is to embark and disembark as quickly as possible. This was what the crowd did exactly on Thaipusam day at KL Sentral.
The crowd did it by ignoring one unrealistic policy introduced by KTM and the government: the ladies’ coach. The ladies’ coach is meant to address complaints about sexual harassment that have happened before. The intention is good. Yet as with any policy, there will always be sacrifices that need to be made and the ladies’ coach policy sacrifices efficiency.
It just takes too much time to choose coaches to start with. For those who travel together, like families, friends or lovers, separation on the train is a hassle. And at least in theory, because the ladies’ coach is meant only for women and children while everybody is free to board the other coaches, the other coaches will be filled up quickly while the ladies’ coach will be relatively empty. Its inaccessibility effectively reduces the capacity of the train. All that means slower embarking, slower disembarking, and longer waiting time on a crowded platform.
With an already lamentable train service and a spike in ridership, something has to give. The crowd throughout the system implicitly and collectively decided to ignore the ladies’ coach policy and treat all coaches as the same. In doing so, they immediately improved the train efficiency by themselves without relying on good-hearted bureaucrats and politicians holding public office, whom by the way do not ride the KTM Komuter train and are essentially divorced from the reality on the platform.
That is one point for spontaneous order arising from the wisdom of the crowd. In the ladies’ coach, nobody minded men boarding it because it solved a big problem painlessly while the KTM policy, if adhered to, only exacerbated the issue at hand. All they wanted to do was to get on the train and get to Batu Caves either as tourists or Hindu devotees.
At the other end of the spectrum is a thoughtless mob of sheep.
The sun was strong but it was on its way down. The visitors were now tired and weary. They began to head to the Batu Caves station so that they could get back to the city. In the station, the crowd packed up a small compound. Even as there was no more space to stand, more came in.
With nowhere to go and too many standing too close together, restlessness set it. Some was pushing and shoving, struggling to get into the train, which was characteristically late. Some were shouting and others were panicking, making the scene surreal. Instead of spontaneously finding the solution, they were clueless until they made a danger out of nothing.
KTM officials and the police were there to monitor and eventually address the situation, albeit poorly. Nevertheless, they did prevent the situation from turning worse.
The fact that it did not turn worse when it easily could have, and the fact that the situation did not need to be like that if there had been proper crowd management, highlight the limit of what a crowd is capable of.
The same contradictory lessons from the very bottom of society can be applied nationally too. The majority knows what corruption is when they see it. Given a chance at the ballot box, they will possibly do the necessary to address it, as they had done in 2008.
On the other extreme, the majority is happy to receive handouts from the government but does not realize that somebody has to pay for those handouts. Either higher debts or higher taxation, it will come sooner or later. The separation between cause and effect in public finance is so great that they cannot see what these handouts mean on a wider scale.
With the folly of economic populism coupled with a magnified replication of what happened at the Batu Caves station, the wisdom of the crowd will be harder to argue for. The wise mob of Greece resorted to sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails wanting more when there is no more, with only the few to reason their way through with less.
This is a piece of advice to those liberals referred to in the beginning. They who overly emphasize the wisdom of the crowd need a more nuanced view of the argument.
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[2504] Wrongly freed, wrongly judged
This has to be a case of taking a dim view of justice, where the judgment is too stuck in technicality. The notorious Anson Wong was freed by the Appeal Court. The judges reasoned that the earlier harsh judgment of 5 years worth of imprisonment did not take into account Wong’s guilty plead, the fact that this was Wong’s first offense and the previous judges took into account irrelevant material.
Consider this. Back in 2000, Wong was arrested in the US and sentenced to 71 months of imprisonment for wildlife smuggling. So, first offense Mr. Judge? Really? Yes, first offense in Malaysia but definitely not the first offense if the judge had taken a wider view. Wong is really an unrepentant smuggler. Did the appeal judges take that into account?
As for the guilty plead, the incentive system is perverse. If you know the evidence are mounting against you, and you know that a guilty plead would lessen your sentence, what would be the best course of action? It does not take an economist specializing in game theory to answer that. I am sure Anson Wong knows this. Back in the US, he pleaded guilty exactly because he knew was in it for. Back in 2010 in Malaysia, he knew he was in it for Malaysia. Yet, the appeal judges decided that a 5-year jail sentence is excessive.
Finally, the appeal judges said the earlier harsh judgment took into account irrelevant evidence and sentiment. Did the appeal judges take into account the pillar that Wong is to the illegal wildlife trade industry? His notoriety? His suspicious good ties with wildlife authority in Malaysia?
Why did not the judges take that into account?
This is the Malaysian legal system. It is an outrageous system.
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[2503] A picture on Thaipusam
