Interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. All programs are available as podcasts. Hi, deborah. Hi. So nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. I enjoyed your book. Thank you. I want to start this interview with talking a little bit about you. I like the audience to hear the story, which, honestly, frankly, it really offended me which is in your introduction. You got a note from a professor claiming you would never be a political scientist. Can you explain a little bit about that. When i was in college, i struggled with what i wanted to major in. I was really torn between going into science and going into humanities and social science. I finally decided on social science because i found those questions much more interesting and engaging and urgent. Political science course we read all the great political philosophers from plato on up. They were all asking the questions, what is it just is, what is good government, how can you organize government and organize society to make life better for people in particular make justice. I ended up deciding to become a Political Science major. I already had kind of a lack of confidence in my skills as a humanist or social scientist. I did not get very good grades in those courses, but i got good grades in my science and math courses. It was kind of a dilemma. I took this course. I did not remember what the paper was on. You would never remember that stuff. Only remembering the nasty comments. This is a credible effort, but you will never be a political scientist. It really resonates, i remember myself, one of the reasons, a similar dilemma getting right to the action. One of the things that i realized in middle school, i believe, manifest destiny. We should believe. An objective of a native american but we slaughtered on our way to the country. This is not at all a reanable theory. Like when i approved something. I could be comfoable with that i felt the comfort somehow overwhelmed my interest. The interest was there. Somehow for you, i think it would be t opposite. Would you agree . I think that that is right. I had a discomfort with numbers. When i took my first economics course, putting up all of these graphs in the supply and demand curves, what a beautiful model the market was, just believed, people buy things depending on the price. Suppliers sell things. At the point where the price is right, a buyer wants to buy and the seller wants to sell. It makes everybody happy. Price is not the only thing that people think about when they decide whether to buy something or what they want to buy. That is true. If we make this a simplification, we can really get some powerful conclusions by snipping away all the stuff. You know, thank you for that story. By the way, i agree with you. It is just not mathematical enough. For exactly the same reason. Too many assumptions pure mathematics to what i was interested in at the time. Of what may seem that way. My first actual question which is, i have read the book, but ive been thinking through a lot one of your responses. When we count things, i am not going to repeat what you just said, but really count things, that is something that we teach our children to deal. Tell us a little bit about that classification. A number as a metaphor. That is the key point of my book. I think that we are taught in school that, and even by our parents, whoever teaches us to count, there is a right answer. You are just tagging numbers on two things. You have to decide what belongs in the group of things you are counting. Say a parent puts it down a bunch of oranges and apples in front of the kid and says count the apples. The kid has to know how to tell an apple from an orange. Before they can start to count. That is the simple one. They think it is easier to teach kids how to tell an apple from an orange. Go to something more interesting like counting ballots and elections. That is what we really want to do is count them for different candidates. What is a valid ballot . Does this meet the interest of mailin ballots . Fine and all the right places or whatever. Somebody is deciding who even gets to cast the ballot. Who is in and who is out. Those are made before anybody tallies up the number of votes on the ballot. Dwelling on this for a few minutes. It is a very pround point we think of teaching our children to count. Figuring out that too comes after 13 comes after two, et cetera. What yearbook has done is make me rethink that. That is the easy part. The hard part is the invisible part wheree are just asking them to categorize in the first place. You know. It provides me with one of my favorite conundrums that i came upith as a teenager. When you say hi to a piece of broccoli, is that the entire stock that says hi back with a little florets at the end that say hi back. I know it i a ridiculous example. What is an individual item of nature inhis conxt . That is what we are aays asking our sons and daughters to do, what belongs and what does not belong in this category . It is very important. Another example, again, ive been thinking about this a lot, my friend is an accountant. From his perspective, people think that the tax calculation is hard. The tax calculation is really easy. This does not count. You know. Get rid of this and have two admit your income. Once you have the income number, thtax calculation is really easy. What belgs and what does not belong. We are constantl doing that. I think that it is really important. Do you want to supply a couple more examples . Yeah, i do. I kind of came to this insight when i was leading dr. Seuss. I had been thinking about this number stuff for a long time. I want to go back. That moment when you get the insight about quantity. I remember, one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. It goes on and on with different kinds of fish. Then there is another verse that says fast fish slow fish, not one of them was like another. Go ask your mother. And then i thought, well, if one is like the other, how do you know they are all fish . How do you count them all as fish . It made me realize, that is the problem of life. Everything is unique. As humans we need to group things in order to make sense. We think about things. When you think about things, language does the same thing. We teach them, for example, we teach them by pointing to my nose, daddys nose, you are a real puppy, more than my nose and babies nose dont look a whole lot alike, but there are certain similarities that are meaningful to us adults. I really think numbers and language, numbers are just another kind of language for categorizing things. That really is a great segue to my next series o questions. We also have this unbelievable power. You talk about that brilliantly with respect to scoring systems. I wanted you to talk a little bit about the system where the people are asked to measure their own pain and medical situations. What does it even means to measure ones pain on a scale of one10. Causing pain, on a scale one10, how bad is it . Sometimes they will say one is highly noticeable antennas just off the charts, i cannot stand it anymore, i want to jump out of a window. Most people are completely baffled by this question. We dont think about our pain, we experience it in a lot of different ways. We do not experience it like a thermometer, or with numbers. What i found really interesting, talking in this book, everybody says they find it really difficult to put their pain, to put a number on their pain. Yet, the medical systems keep using it. I think that it has some benefit. The pain is on communicable. No one else can feel your pain. It is just one of those experiences that is yours and yours alone. It is really impossible to communicate. Trying to do that with a number is at least a start. There is a canadian dr. Who came over a much better way of asking people to measure, get a handle on peoples pain. It is a system of words. He just listen to people talk about their pain and he came up with about 100 different words to characterize pain. Most of the medical professionals ive talked to say they think that their word system is much more helpful. Allowing patients to express what they feel and helping clinicians understand what they feel. Some, apparently, are just single words, a person says them in the clinician says, oh, thats the stomach ulcer. Im just making up that example. So, even though i think the pain scale is very problematic and it is very frustrating for people, one big advantages it is a language. It allows people to communicate a little bit. If you say that my pain was a 10 yesterday, but it is only a seven now, you are communicating that you feel that much better. The doctor giving you some pain meds and then you say, you know, you are still a 10. They know to try something else. It becomes a language lists communication. A couple of fascinating details. The last part about the pain numbers. The first one w despite of how well the contextual word language works, Insurance Companies prefer the numbers. Essentially, i think because they just want to know how much that they can charge. There is a rule. You shoul be treated for it. This responsibility i to give you a pain med. That is really interesting. In some regards, it becomes quanfied. It becomes more objective from the perspective of the insurance agency. The flipside of that which i found even more interesting is the patients themselves learning that and asserted control over their own treatment by deciding what to say. Can you talk a little bit about that flip of the patients to the system . I learned from a friend that has cancer. On some pretty serious pain meds. She said to me, they do not want you to be above a five. I scratch my head, what does that mean . She said, no, if you are above a five, they will want to do something about it. They will want to give you meds. So then i talked with more people. What people told me is it is kind of a cat and mouse game. You put down whatever the answer is. People who are experiencing a lot of pain often pick up a plate themselves because pain meds make you a zombie is the word that people usually use. You cant think clearly. They make you tired. People who have a lot of pain sometimes think i do not just want to be doped up on opioids. Several of my friends told me that they learned that they learn to use the scales to control what the nurse or dr. Would do. If they did not want more pain meds they would say a lower number. One of the things that i learned from the book was just how much the scoring system exhibited power and authority. If you are talking about a Public School teacher, getting their value out of another score so many teachers in that system, their natural reaction was to trust that number. We have our iq score. We are expected to trust these things. The trust is not always deserved it is fascinating to see that example that you just gave of the pain meds. The patient, the target of these is actually taking control, because it is so rare. Power over the target. That is a rare case where they take bac the power. Do you wt to talk a little bit abo the teachers and their scoring system . Lets talk about power first. The reason why they did not take control is becausehey are the os scoring themselves. That is unusual. Somebody elses scoring you. We all grow up in school being ored all the te. Being given different grades. We are use to being the weak and appeared. Thats true. Subject to somebody elses power. Unfortunately, kids learn early on. A grade wl make them doubt themselves. I doubted myself whe i told myself i got a b. I dont know w, its a long story on why it came around to it. Numbers have this aura in our culture. A lot of slogans nowadays to say we want to make evidence based decisions. We want to make database based decisions. What people mean nowadays by facts, evidence, they think that those are objective. They are squishy and subject to interpretation, which they are. [laughter] so, yeah, people use scoring systems and all kinds of organizations to make decisions that will affect other people. Hire them, fire them, promote them. Give them a pay raise. Talking about insurance. How much they are charging for the insurance. Whether to give them a bank loan. So, the example is that people in education wanted to make sure that teachers were qualified and producing results. They came up with a way to measure results which was testing students on reading and math. Pretty much those two subjects. When students spend years in a teachers classroom and they do well on those tests, the results are attributed to the quality of the teacher. Students do well. That is kind of a simple model of how that works. Trying to sort out exactly how much the student test score was due to the teachers teaching. What the kid had learned the year before and how good the teacher in the previous grade was. The teacher givg them credit if you did better than expected. That itself was a mathematical model. In addion to scoring people, scoring teachers, the systems also would award or penalize them on the basis of their score. They could get fired, schools would b shut down or taken over by emergency managers. Receivership and School Budget to be determined by how well these teachers were performing. It could be lifeanddeath consequences. Not literally,ut job losg consequences to g a bad score. It is the combination of the scoring system and the attachnt of awards and penalties. It leads to the consequens. The score ishat i talk about in this book. All of us he that education does so much more than teach people how to add and subtract and pass a reading comprehensive test or memorize grammar rules. Really good teacher. One who instills curiosity and the students and instills excitement about learning and confidence that they can learn. They want to learn and they can. Encourage their imagination and nurture their creativity. I want my kids to learn how to count and read and write. I want them to do so much more than that. And the problem is, these formulas for how much value a teacher adds to a students knowledge is so narrowly defined always these narrow parts of education that is such a small part of it. Yes. I often say the idea of over testing a teacher with test scores, and insufficient concept having to go through this, i guess that we did do that. I want to move onto it few things of what gets counted and what does not get counted. I have three examples here. I want you to choose one. The violence against women. What is counted . I want pple to realize that this boo has wonderful emples what is counted as credit production. For the nation or for other nations. Ofourse, the slaveholder is calculation as a human with rights. One of those that you would like to go through, just sort of lay down that point very strongly. Its really n about the counting. The counting is the easy part. Categorize appropriately so that we can count it later. Okay. I think that we can come back to other contexts. The un wanted to develop a way to measure gender violence in different countries. Having a whole bunch of committee meetings. Inviting people from different countries. What they wanted to do was set up some indicators. What counts as violence . Is it rape, is it murder . Is it kicking somebody . So, some women that were from north america and europe had a list of activities or actions that they would count. They would ultimately go around and ask and surveys in different countries. Male child. They would consider gender violence. And the committee that ultimately designed the survey with all the indicators didnt include any of those things so there you have a case where it is a question of who is in the room and we come back to the question of power. Who is in the room when these decisions are being made and what counts as violence they were not Strong Enough to get their definition of violence so when the survey gets done, that wont done. We dont have time f all the questions,o im going to move ahead. I would like you to because im always looking for positive stories about the numbers and power i would like to talk about the numbers and weaknesses in the context if you could. Before ialk about that i want to say a lot of people when ey hear my message they worry that im telling people never trust the numbers. They can be extremely helpful and i have wonrful examples so the flint michigan water crisis is one of them where the city switched its source of water from the detroit reservoir to the flint river i think it was called. And shortly after that, people started noticing the water smelled and tasted funny. Everybody knows i think it turned out there was a lot of lead in the water. Well, the numbers were critical and it turned out to the epa, the environmental Productions Agency had standards for the state levels of land and water and there shouldnt be. They said no one should be using lead pipes anymore. That was 1986. But all types are grandfathered in. Flint michigan had a a lot of stock and then the cdc uses numbers to say how much is the state level of blood in children or anybodys blood. No level is safe but above a certain level we should be concerned about. But we dont need to treat so what happened is the citizens of flint invited a water engineer to come and test the water and he figured out right away that there was probably lead in the water because of corrosion from old pipes so he tested the water and sure enough, there were high levels. By the way the Michigan Department of Environmental Affairs tested the water and claimed that it was safe, that there was no lead and the way they tested it it turne turned d this water engineer discovered was they told residents or sent inspectors so of course they got low ratings but this engineer came in and did his own test and got numbers that were very high and then a doctor, a pediatrician was hearing concerns from the mothers of her patients and he had access to the testing and compared the levels with kids before the switch to the new system of water to after and sure enough the levels went up dramatically. So those numbers put together with a story that the water engineer made very convincing. Those numbers became the witnesses to condemn the cities where they changed and the lack of doing anything about the water. I still feel like the story, so often it is the case that you do find out the numbers are on your side and yet he lost. But i think the answer is there was good Media Coverage of this. I think that i even heard somehow those numbers like the lead water levels were somehow brought to the surface. The power somehow was overcome. Do you know how . Two things. Its pretty typical. There were a few citizens. One mom in particular who knew not to trust the numbers and insisted on she brought water samples in to the Government Agencies and contacted the Water Engineers but the citizens advocacy was one thing and eventually got them to test their water. The second ingredien for overcoming power is that if the citizens h allies who were in the agencies and governmentr science experts like the Water Engineers and doctors they became passionatabout the problem and worked with the citizens and the patients and the home owners and so on. I am skeptical. The little device you wear on your wrist people who where fitbit try to make themselves exercise more by counting their steps and they try to reach goals. The interesting thing about it, everyone i know that has one says that they walk more because it is counting them. It goes with them a bit longer than they otherwise would. I use that as a metaphor for the phenomenon that when you count something especially when you count yourself and you want to look good on the measure you will change your behavior to get a good count, to get a good number. So, to that effect. Here is where i will push back on it and i hope that you appreciate my point. I dont disagree with the fact of the impactful measuring for the behavior and i write about that myself and weapons of mass destruction that is certainly a very important factor but with respect to specifically, i found it that after a couple of months [inaudible] one of the things that is interesting you are listening [inaudible] so it is like a very narrow group of people the overwhelming story but there are a few people for whom it is what they really want and for them you hear what im saying . I do and its a fair enough point. Clearly only people who are motivated to change tir havior and once they are no longer motivated, but i think what i am saying theres still hope forhe short term. It doesnt change peoples behaviors for the longerm, but at the moment or during that time when they are infatuated with their new fitbit they probably do lose some weight at first they are more likely to be the super users but even those people who buy fitbits may not use them and theres been experiments where because they look so good on fitbit the Health Programs will buy one for everybody on their Health Policy and guess what they never even wanted one to begin with. And its like a complete disaster. So its very selfselected for a small slice where that effect actually happens but lets not dwell on that point. Its perfectly reasonable, can you talk a little bit about the racist polling to that effect. There are those that to understand the racist attitudes andhinking they do that by asking people svey questions and some of them when i started looking into this just appalled me that anyone could even ask this question. On a scale of one toeven where one is lazy and sen is how hardworking where doou think they fall and the same thing on inlligence, the same thing on violence. Theres lots of other survey questions. Do you think that immigrants are generally good for the country or bad for the country. Kind of a ridiculous question if you think about it. Stereotyping is legitimate and you could decide for every member of the racial group some degree of laziness or hardworking and thats a legitimate way to think. I think it reinforces for people that race is a real thing and a real category and people can be caterized easily and it reinforces the people that can makeudgments about a whole group and that political leaders that are waing to hear the political opinions. Its that self reinforcing aspect. This idea that you want to look good for the polling takers. Theres a lot of survey research where people called the social desirility of fact, people wanto give a desirab answer and appear smart. They want to appear not prejudice. In the racism asserons, people were qui willing to express prejudice, but in general, tha is a huge problem with the survey research. Sometimes survs are done facetoface and sometimes as television interviews. But people want a sound goodo someone interviewing them and i think half the time, people dont know what auestion means. They dont understand it, but they give an answer just so that they will not sound dumb. Late nighlatenight tv concet makes sense. They get people to answer them quite seriously. I want to talk about the census and the category because i find that to be a fascinating story in this section of the book, and also i think related to this if you do not mind mentioning that. Sure. The census first srted asking a question about is this person hispanic in the 1980s. Before 1970, the term hispanic wasnt even of much use in the united states. People, there we a lot of people from whose origins were in spanishspeaking countries particularly mexico,uba, puerto rico. They live together and tended to sequester together in certain areas of the uted states and they didnt think of themselves as hispanic. They thought of themselves as cuban or puert rican or mexican. But then in the late 60s and 70s,hen after the Civil Rights Act and equal opportuni act, the goverent wanted to get racial and ethnic classification to make sure they could enforce equal treatment and equal voting for example, so it wanted to collect the data and so to feel they really didnt know how they were going to get people to think of themselves as hispanic so they called a meeting of leaders of the different groups and asked them to promote the census to their communities and to encourage people to identify as hispanic. The leaders were all in favor of that because at that point they understood that there would be benefits from having these numbers. You may be look at more seats in congress and they would get more federal aid to the cities and places where more hispanic people live, so again, this measuring instrument cleared up the category and put the question out there and then quite actively recruited people to encourage people to answer the question, yes. So it was an interactive kind of effect where the category was there and people put themselves into it. What i like about that story, first of all i didnt know that by taking on that category actually it had an affect on peoples self regard and selfimage as the identity it was super interesting but it also reminds me going back to that top discussion that we had about people choosing the number of treatment they want. This is another example of somehow the targets of the accounting census, asserting control over their own agency by filling out the form. Sometimes again they were the master of their destiny by deeming their own ethnicity and race which is a whole different discussion about the race they might choose. Thank you for making that an analogy. I didnt see it quite in the same light but it is true that people get the chance to identify and give more categories and choices and you can write in some other race. What is interesting some other race with a third larger category than the census and it tells me people dont like to accept the categories that they are offered. And its a funny paradox is whatever you consider yourself but on the other hand the census people give categories except for the sum of the race they prided the categories for this hoine algorithm basically it is a child abuse hotline we talked about her work and some others. I have spent quite a bit of time talking to people who started at algorithm and i do feel like im not saying that its perfect. It is not perfect in fact they are laid out well in your boo poor people are much more likely to be gas lighted, color of people are more likely to be reported on. They are choosing the wrong prediction variables which mean they are creating their own reality by saying this kid is more likely to be taken. Theres all sorts of problems but let me make the following plea. First of all we didnt talk about power for this hour and a lot of the times i get frustrated because people are assuming the authority and power in an unreasonable way. They are trying to get away with something basically. That happens a lot and then you have no right to appeal but in the case of the social workers trying to deal with child abuse i would link them to have a little bit of cover if it works for them. They have so much responsibility to make the right call on these actual life or death matters. You see what i i am saying. In some ways i would love it if they had a machine that could actually help with their job and if it was wrong they could be like the machine was wrong but usually when someone says dont blame me, blame the machine, im like thats a copout. Take responsibility but in this case im like yeah i think you did your best. Its hard to make calls. And it really is. But i think the other thing that is more relevant, and again what matters is that because it is data and you are collecting data it is a very kind of this can be found in the system of hiring and managing by algorithms these are systems that once they are made algorithmic the good news is you could also make them work better because they are following the rules. The thing i point out on the hotline is that theres a false positive deciding whether to take a child from their home is there a risk of abuse and you could be taking kids from their home when they shouldnt be taken and you could leave kids in their home when they should be taken. Those are two mistakes that a system could make and they are different mistakes and they are not equal but its worse to leave a kid in abuse than to take a kid from a family. Anything we can do to help people and to get a better decision is a good thing and the good thing about the numbers is to come up with a system whether it is an algorithm or list of indicators. Its the exercise of trying to measure things and to think about what we care about and whats important. The point i want to leave people with is. In those systems and measurements we think of numbe as a language of talking abt the values and whas important and who is being hurt and who is being held than usi them wisely. If we think of them as this is thecore, thats the end, i right and you are wrong that isnt a recipe for progress. Im glad i had a chance to read this book and have this discussion today. Thank you very much. All after words programs can be viewed on the website on booktv. Org. Discussed his views on libertarianism and american politics. Here is a portion of the program. Every time you asked the government to do something, you are asking them to do this while the people are going to pay for the things government does. So i think that one should only ask oneself should i hold my mother at gunpoint in order to accomplish what ive asked the government to accomplish, so would i hold my mother at gunpoint to pay i think that is personally something that could be privately done without a danger to my mom, bless her heart she is no longer with us. But what i hold my mom to be overrun by nazis an, yes, i mig. This would be an extremely bad thing. But not to pay it if youve been with us in a previous session, welcome back and if you are joining for the first time, please welcome to the universitys 2020 military writers symposium on weaponize in implications. We would like to welcome you to our campus and vehicle state and the only regret we have is that you are not able to be with us here in person to enjoy vermonts beauty. I have the privilege and honor