Tag: The Malaysian Insider

Categories
Economics Society

[2505] Limits to wisdom of the crowd

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.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on February 26 2012.

Categories
Politics & government

[2497] When the middle path is a waste of time

Amid opposing positions, political centrists have the tendency to stake the middle ground. It is a compromise that appears sensible on the surface. Sometimes, it can be sensible deep down in a substantial way. It can even be the best path forward.

Not always though. Not all compromises are sensible and it can be even outright nonsense. A chronic centrist would do so anyway, and then has the gall to call those who see a square peg in a round hole as extremists.

There is no guarantee that centrism equates sensibility. Sensibility depends on an entirely different consideration altogether. It might very well be the seemingly extreme position that is the most sensible and right.

A chronic centrist does not believe that. He is a person who works like a mindless average machine. Take any two diametrical positions, average it out and there you go: a solution. Move on to the next issue, take any two positions, average it out and then there you go again: another solution. It goes on and on forever.

They rarely make introspection of the averaged positions. There is no thinking behind it, except some kind of blind elementary arithmetic applied onto issues in the public sphere. The only real argument they have to offer is that the middle path is a compromise. A win-win some would say. And a compromise is always a virtue, so say the centrists, who are also probably self-proclaimed political moderates.

Of course there are compromises that need to be made on a case-by-case basis. We live in a society where give and take has to happen and where we end up treading along the middle path. It indeed happens every day.

A musician practicing his trade living next to a neighbor who likes a quiet evening would have to talk to each other so that both can live comfortably without too much bad blood, for instance. On a bigger more concrete scale, the relevant landowners in Kuala Lumpur, the developer of the Mass Rapid Transit system and the government have to compromise to get the project going.

Or maybe in election seat negotiations among parties which have a common interest to defeat yet another party by combining resources instead of fighting each other, it is in their best interest to reach an amicable solution and refrain from engaging in wasteful squabbling.

By contrast, there are principles and ideas that cannot be violated. If a thief steals an apple from a person, one does not cut the apple to give half of the fruit to the thief and the other half to the owner. That is injustice. If a racist proposes a policy and a liberal advocates the opposite view, one does not just write a compromised policy that is half racist, half liberal. That is confusion. There is nothing sensible about such an unjust confused judgment.

It is a half-measure that the mindless and the gutless would take. The mechanical, automatic centrist is mindless because he does not make sense. He is gutless because he takes no real position. The centrist is an automaton. Feed in the input. Average it out. There you go: a moderated position.

We do not need automatons to solve our problems. We especially do not need mindless, gutless, automatic centrists to do the thinking for us. They tell us nothing of value. We need thinking beings, ones who reason from some position of principle, inducing and deducing through tough propositions to reach well thought-out conclusions. This is stuff that is likely beyond the mental capability of these automatic, mechanical centrists.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on January 30 2012.

Categories
Education

[2488] Schooled in illiteracy

Ninety-three percent. The Malaysian literacy rate in 2009 was 93%, so says the United Nations Development Program in its latest Human Development Index report. But was it really?

I began to question the UNDP finding after reading a newspaper report that 8% of the National Service trainees are illiterate. It becomes worrying after one considers the context at which the eight percent is set in.

And the context is this. National Service trainees are chosen randomly from among 18-year-olds all across Malaysia. Assuming the 8% figure itself was derived through random means, it suggests that 8% of all 18-year-old Malaysians are illiterate.

One hopes that there was some significant non-random process at play. Maybe, the 8% came from a non-random sample. Maybe, these teenagers came from areas with notorious academic records and were overly represented in the sample. Although that would still be a problem, at least it would be a consolation. At least it would suggest the problem was not a systemic issue within the national system.

But if the process were random, then it would lead to the suspicion that the national literacy rate is lower than what has been reported.

This can be rationalized by understanding that the literacy rate tends to decrease as the age profile grows older for newly industrialized and industrializing countries. That includes Malaysia.

This is true simply because of secular trend. Access to primary education years ago was not as easy and widespread as it is today. That access has generally improved over the years. By implication, these 18-year-olds in general should have a higher literacy rate compared to their older counterparts.

If that is true, then it brings into question the Malaysian literacy rate itself. If the cohort study with arguably the best access to primary education has eight percent among them illiterate, one has to wonder about the credibility of the 93% literacy rate. With each older age profile having a similar or lower literacy rate, the national literacy rate might be lower than what has been estimated. At best, the standard used to measure literacy was too loose. Never mind the numeracy rate which is likely to be much worse than whatever the actual literacy rate is.

That in turn says a lot about the education system, notwithstanding its successes. It suggests that the education system is not as successful as it should be at imparting the most basic skills to schoolchildren: read, write and count. Not belief in god, not multiculturalism, not unity, not patriotism but read, write and count.

Other lofty and not-so-lofty agendas should take the backseat to these basic requirements. Without these basics, it will be really hard to acquire more complex higher-order skills and knowledge. Or they probably would not be able to use Google Translate at all, like somebody at the Ministry of Defense, apparently, can.

The biggest issue is that these 18-year-olds were allowed to graduate from school, if they actually even attended school. If they did attend school, then they must have had been pushed through the system regardless of their capability.

The way these students were pushed through the system is deplorable.

What instead should happen is that a student’s competency should be assessed each year. If the assessment is unsatisfactory, then students with normal learning capability should repeat the year until they are competent enough to go to the next level.

Of course, there should be a limit to how many times they can repeat but with almost everybody experiencing at least 11 years of schooling, surely there are enough years for the repeat to occur until these students can read. Any system that cannot ratify the problem within 11 years is a system unworthy of us.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on January 13 2012.

Categories
Conflict & disaster Society

[2473] A world without Iraq

I was almost late for my morning history class. I ran as fast as I could while trying to keep my balance on ice and snow. By the time I entered the classroom, I was gasping for air. For the not very athletic me, it was not easy to breathe hard during a cruel Michigan winter. As I settled in my seat thinking my heart was about to explode and my lungs collapsing, the instructor said, “Today will be about what ifs. What if you were early?”

The class burst into laughter at my expense.

After several minutes of friendly pokes, the instructor began to share his plan for the day. “But seriously, today will be about what ifs.” What if Venice and other cities had not monopolized the spice trade? What if old European powers were unsuccessful at colonizing Asia? What if Dien Bien Phu did not happen? What if the United States had not entered the Second World War? There were many more what ifs.

We were discussing colonialism in Asia and we were exploring the importance of certain events by trying to imagine an alternative history where those events did not occur. It required a broad understanding of history.

It also required all of us in the class to do our voluminous readings. A lot of us, being freshmen and still patting ourselves on our backs for getting into a storied school, did not finish our reading. We gave it a stab anyway. We had enough imagination to run wild.

That old memory reran in my mind as President Barack Obama finally, for better or for worse, fulfilled one of his election promises. The US is officially withdrawing from Iraq after more than eight years since the invasion that toppled the former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The withdrawal ceremony was being telecast ”live” on CNN. As I sat in my chair listening to Leon Panetta making his speech, my mind wandered to Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and the rest of the Arab world. Remembering my freshman lesson, I asked myself, ”What if the US had not invaded Iraq back in 2003?” Would Saddam Hussein’s regime have become a victim of the Arab Spring?

We will never know but nobody can say that would have been impossible. Whether a person is supportive of the war or vehemently rejects the invasion, he or she cannot deny that Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator.

That makes his removal desirable to some extent. If the 2003 invasion was legitimate in some ways, many in the anti-war camp would support or at least not reject the invasion. If Saddam Hussein was toppled organically by Iraqis just like how Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi and Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali were toppled, many more would support the regime change.

An Arab Spring for Iraq would have been ideal. It would have removed a dictator without causing bad blood among various sides. Yes, it would be eight years later but in a time of terrorism and religious extremism, a world without the 2003 invasion of Iraq could have spurred deeper co-operation between the US and those that mattered.

A world without the war would have the US possibly swamped with goodwill of the kind it received in the aftermath of the September 11 attack but soon after squandered in the run-up to the 2003 war.

It could be the case, or it could not. Just as Japan in the Second World War made the colonized natives realize that colonial European powers were not invincible, the US invasion also reminded the Arabs that their dictators were not gods.

Sure, the United States of the 2000s was not Japan of the 1900s that was seriously underestimated first by the Russians and then later all the colonial powers in South-east Asia. Still, what is possible is not always evident until somebody makes it a reality. The US with its unmatched military might removed Saddam Hussein. The US made possible a regime change.

Or — this might sound repulsive, especially for those in the anti-war camp but consider this — the Arab Spring might not have happened without the 2003 invasion.

An alternative reality without the war would have taken away the realization of the possibility, and possibly affected the psyche of the Arabs. What was possible would have remained only one of the possibilities deep in the minds of ordinary men, never to surface to the real world.

A world without the war also would have taken away the anger against the US. The US in many parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa had close relationships with many Arab dictators. The relations were maintained in the name of stability and much to the detriment to the freedom agenda.

The ordinary man in the streets of the Arab world, already with a low opinion of the US, saw the relationship as a constant reminder of how much they disliked their own autocrats. This only added to local frustrations that had nothing to do with the US directly. All that anger and frustration, along with the cumulative effect of all those issues, created a momentum to push history to converge to a point that sparked the Arab Spring.

Without the war, part of the momentum would not have existed. The cumulative anger without the invasion might not have been enough to start the Arab Spring. That sans-Iraq anger might have been just a weak undercurrent, never to surface and threaten the dictators’ expensive boats, rocked gently by the pleasant waves.

There are a lot of other considerations as well. Maybe without the war, the US would have enough money to bail out Europe. Maybe, Obama would not have been elected as the president. Maybe, we would be still swimming in cheap oil. Maybe. Maybe. Who knows, really?

At least we know one part of history is ending. At least we know the next chapter is a whole new world, for whatever it is worth.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on December 18 2011.

Categories
Liberty Politics & government

[2467] Why the rush?

I had listened to Prime Minister Najib Razak’s Malaysia Day address with skepticism. Part of the skepticism came after noticing all the qualifications made by the prime minister in the same speech. The so-called Political Transformation Program does not look so bold if one reads the fine print.

As we have learned in recent days, the actual reform does not meet the high expectations set by the prime minister himself. The manner at which the Peaceful Assembly Bill 2011 was rushed through did little to alleviate the skepticism.

In these days of skepticism, only actions command confidence. The nearly six years of the Abdullah administration justifies that attitude. The bravado of Parti Keadilan Rakyat only adds to the justification of skepticism. Indeed, political skepticism against all sides is a sign of maturity of ordinary voters.

While the scent of skepticism was strong, not all shared it. Not all ordinary voters are seasoned political observers after all. Many young Malaysians celebrated the announced reforms as if reform had already happened. And then there are other not-so-young Malaysians who willingly assume things in good faith. Because of this, the Najib administration gained some immediate political capital.

That was about three months ago.

However significant the political capital was, time is eroding it. The power of words can last only so long. The longer it goes unsupported by action, the less credible it becomes. Words are cheap. In order to arrest the skepticism and to ensure that the liberalization exercise will translate into votes for Barisan Nasional, the promised changes will have to be instituted before the next federal election. Action is required, hence the rushing of the Bill.

Within a week, the Bill was read twice. Members of Parliament were expected to read the Bill thoroughly, consult experts as well as their constituents and then debate it intelligently within the span of a few days. That was nothing less than an ambush on the liberal camp.

The ungodly rush suggests something else as well: the federal election is coming sooner rather than later. It suggests the tentative election date has been set and all Bills need to be passed before that deadline. If that is indeed the case, then the election presents a perverse incentive for the government to act based on a misunderstanding of criticism against the previous illiberal laws.

It must be highlighted that the criticism is against the spirit of the previous laws, and not against the laws per se. With the Peaceful Assembly Bill retaining the old illiberal spirit, it is no different from the old laws. To cite another example relating back to the Malaysia Day speech, the replacement of the Internal Security Act will still grant the government the power to detain a person without trial. Yet, the main criticism against the ISA was exactly the detention without trial feature. So, what exactly will the substantive change be?

One gets the impression that the government thinks all that is wrong is the names and the initials of a certain set of laws. Change the names and the initials to something more cheery and they expect the criticism will go away. That is a gross misunderstanding.

Based on that, the government would think that rushing the Peaceful Assembly Bill and other related ones will win it votes. No, it will not.

A substantive-minded government would take a more measured pace by making the Bill and others to come go through a thorough deliberative process. That possibly means pushing the next election as far as possible into the future and holding it only after a much improved Bill is ready for passing.

The reverse — setting the election date first and then targeting to pass the Bills before that date — will result in farcical Bills.

A rushed farcical Bill benefits no one. The voters will see through the farce and BN will not win any extra votes from it. BN in fact would lose votes because new voters and those who assumed good faith would think the ruling coalition has taken them for fools. Meanwhile, Malaysians will not see any improvement in their civil liberties.

In the end, what was the point of rushing it?

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on December 2 2011.