Thursday, 20 August 2020
Wednesday, 19 August 2020
Algorithms have a nightmarish new power over our lives
The problems with this kind of decision-making are clear, yet such methods are increasingly used in opaque and frightening ways writes Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian
Living the nightmare ... A-level students protest outside the Department for Education in London this month. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters
Have you ever had a dream in which you are about to sit your final exams and you suddenly realise you did not do any prep and are going to fail? I have that anxiety dream a lot (it is always a maths exam), despite having left school a million years ago. And I am not the only one: it is a surprisingly common phenomenon.
While that dream is disturbing, it is nothing compared with the nightmare British students have just lived through. The pandemic meant school-leavers did not get to sit their Highers or A-levels; instead, algorithms determined their grades – and their futures. A lot of kids from poorer backgrounds had their final results dramatically downgraded from teachers’ predictions; pupils at private schools, meanwhile, were treated remarkably well by the algorithms. After enormous controversy, the Scottish and UK governments performed U-turns, saying exam results would be based on teacher-assessed grades.
This is not the first time the UK government has suffered embarrassment by algorithm. Earlier this year, the Home Office decided to scrap a “racist algorithm” for visa applicants that was accused of creating “speedy boarding for white people” while making things harder for everyone else. And a security thinktank warned last year that predictive policing algorithms could amplify human bias and make it more likely that young black men would get disproportionately stopped and searched compared with people from other demographics.
Mysterious algorithms control increasingly large parts of our lives. They recommend what we should watch next on YouTube; they help employers recruit staff; they decide if you deserve a loan; they help landlords calculate rent. You and I may have aged beyond school exams, but it does not matter how old you are – these days, it is almost guaranteed that an opaque algorithm is grading and influencing your every move. If that does not give you nightmares, I am not sure what will.
Have you ever had a dream in which you are about to sit your final exams and you suddenly realise you did not do any prep and are going to fail? I have that anxiety dream a lot (it is always a maths exam), despite having left school a million years ago. And I am not the only one: it is a surprisingly common phenomenon.
While that dream is disturbing, it is nothing compared with the nightmare British students have just lived through. The pandemic meant school-leavers did not get to sit their Highers or A-levels; instead, algorithms determined their grades – and their futures. A lot of kids from poorer backgrounds had their final results dramatically downgraded from teachers’ predictions; pupils at private schools, meanwhile, were treated remarkably well by the algorithms. After enormous controversy, the Scottish and UK governments performed U-turns, saying exam results would be based on teacher-assessed grades.
This is not the first time the UK government has suffered embarrassment by algorithm. Earlier this year, the Home Office decided to scrap a “racist algorithm” for visa applicants that was accused of creating “speedy boarding for white people” while making things harder for everyone else. And a security thinktank warned last year that predictive policing algorithms could amplify human bias and make it more likely that young black men would get disproportionately stopped and searched compared with people from other demographics.
Mysterious algorithms control increasingly large parts of our lives. They recommend what we should watch next on YouTube; they help employers recruit staff; they decide if you deserve a loan; they help landlords calculate rent. You and I may have aged beyond school exams, but it does not matter how old you are – these days, it is almost guaranteed that an opaque algorithm is grading and influencing your every move. If that does not give you nightmares, I am not sure what will.
I often have this dream - You’re at the final exam and never attended class
It’s an astonishingly common dream. Many of us have it, with numerous reruns throughout our lives writes Marlene Cimons in The Washington Post
“I never went to class. I never did the work. I never studied. Final is tomorrow. Terrible anxiety,” says Susie Drucker Hirshfield, 71, of Stockbridge, Mass., a friend from college. “Or, I’m a freshman. The campus is huge. I’m lost. I can’t find my classroom building. Seems like I walk around forever, and never find it. Or I find it, and the class is over.’’
Ben Goldberg, 28, a lawyer who was an A student of mine in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, has his own version. “I wake up the morning of a final and realize I am completely unprepared for the exam,” he says. “I spend the day frantically trying to learn the material, but still walk into the exam hopelessly unprepared. Or I wake on the day of the final and realize that I’ve cut the class all year.”
It’s a dream that apparently spans the generations and usually involves high school or college, sometimes both. And, oddly, it seems to haunt us decades after we last sat in a classroom.
For most people, including me, it goes like this: We’ve signed up for a course that we never attend, or we forget we enrolled in it. When final-exam day approaches, we are panic-stricken because we never went to any of the lectures, never took notes and never did the readings or assignments. (In one bizarre twist, some people report that they show up on final exam day naked — perhaps feeling vulnerable?)
For some, the course is one in which we did poorly in real life. Others dream of a subject in which they actually did well but had worried about failing.
“I’ve had these dreams during and since college,” Hirshfield says. “I even have them when I am not anxious about anything. It’s one of those universal dreams. I think everybody has them.”
I think she’s right. But why is the dream so common? I couldn’t find any research on the topic — surprising, because the dream seems like natural fodder for psychologists. I talked to a few experts who also were unaware of studies examining this dream. In the absence of peer-reviewed findings, however, they were willing to offer a few thoughts, stressing that their ideas were nothing more than opinion and speculation.
“I think those who have it tend to be professional and were successful students,” says Judy Willis, a neurologist and teacher who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., and who wrote about the dream in a 2009 Psychology Today blog post. “These are people who have demanded a high performance from themselves. The recurrence of the dream correlates with times of stress and pressure, when people feel they have a challenge to achieve.’’
Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, an Austin psychoanalyst, agrees. The final exam, she says, “is likely representative of an occasion when the dreamer feels he or she will be tested or measured, and the anxiety is about not measuring up. The dreamer’s task in ‘awake life’ is to translate the final exam to a situation he or she is facing that stirs up concerns about potential failure.”
But why school? Why don’t we dream about current pressures — grant proposals that are due, impending legal briefs or oral arguments, or newspaper deadlines?
“Emotional memories and impressions made during high-stress experiences are particularly strong, and are further strengthened each time they are recalled and become the place the brain goes when the emotion is evoked,” Willis wrote in an email. “Since each new stress in the current day is ‘new,’ there is not a strong memory circuit that would hook to it in a dream. But there is that strong neural network of previous, similar ‘achievement’ stress. Since tests are the highest stressors. . . [it] makes sense as the ‘go-to’ memory when stressed about something equally high stakes in the ‘now.’ ’’
Ainslie theorizes that most of us have these dreams “as an attempt to disguise what it’s really about,” she says. “The part of yourself that is distressed wants to disguise it, and the easiest way to disguise it is to move backwards.”
Ainslie says the school dream is a common one, although it’s not the only one that reflects anxiety. “Another common one is being in a car and not being able to put the brakes on,” she says. “This one isn’t about not measuring up. It’s about not being in control, a matter of not being the driver in your life.”
Alma Bond, a retired New York psychoanalyst and writer, describes the school dream as a response to “an unconscious memory of an experience for which we were totally unprepared,” adding that it’s possible “we unconsciously remember a time when we did fail some test or other, and are afraid we will repeat the failure.”
My son, 26, is the only person I know who claims never to have had this dream, and he has a plausible explanation as to why. A serial class-cutter in high school, he says that “skipping classes has always seemed normal to me.”
But those of us who are Type A personalities — as well as anyone else with achievement-related stress — may be fated to have this anxiety-producing dream over and over.
Ed Hershey, 72, of Portland, Ore., who spent most of his career in academic communications, recently posted on Facebook of yet another “vividly familiar,” periodic, “I-won’t-graduate-from-high-school-on-time” anxiety dream. He noted that it struck just a few weeks before his 55th high school reunion.
Forty-seven “friends’’ responded, and a dozen of them posted examples of their own variations on the dream. “I guess they [the dreams] never stop, do they?” he says, adding: “At least I know I am not alone.”
Monday, 17 August 2020
Soon there won't be anyone left for this government to blame
As their troubles mount, bungling ministers will point the finger at minorities, migrants, teachers … anyone but themselves writes Nesrine Malik in The Guardian
‘A source “close to Gavin Williamson” has said that teachers were “not to be trusted on grading”.’ Students protest in London on Saturday. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/Rex/Shutterstock
As a second peak of Covid-19 infections looms, one thing is certain: the Conservative party is dedicating itself to what it does best – crafting a narrative that blames everyone else for its mistakes.
Brace for it. After six months of catastrophic mismanagement, from delaying lockdown to the A-level marking fiasco, this autumn is sure to bring even more diversion, distraction and brazen victim-blaming.
Led by a shallow prime minister, populated by careerists and directed by a grandiose and sophomoric special adviser, the government at present is fashioned towards ruling – not governing. But it’s not lack of qualification alone that has produced its incompetence. The defining feature of today’s Conservative party is indifference to the outcomes of its failed policies – none of which it has been seriously punished for.
These aren’t new tactics. The poor were blamed for borrowing beyond their means in the wake of the financial crisis
The gutting of the state, the impoverishment and deaths caused by austerity, the chaos of Brexit and the global embarrassment that has been its pandemic response are failures that should have brought an end to its tenure. But the party has developed one skill: avoiding consequences by way of constructing false enemies – immigrants, welfare scroungers, the European Union. It has achieved this herd impunity with the help of a credulous and oftentimes knowingly complicit media.
When faced with the actual task of governing during a real crisis, not a confected one, the government has flailed, U-turned and contradicted itself. Throughout it has stuck competently and consistently to its one principle – never apologise, never explain, always blame someone else.
The political and cultural infrastructure that makes it so easy for the powerful to shift responsibility on to others while refusing to show humility or acknowledge mistakes encourages a limited range of public responses to political crises. When an issue arises, the government launches into dramatic displays of action for the benefit of the watching public, and the media follows its cue, inflating the scale of the problem. Any legitimate demands for rational analysis of a situation are trivialised as liberal hand-wringing. Calls for accountability are dismissed as a “politicising” of events, as Boris Johnson has repeatedly characterised Labour questions about its handling of the pandemic, or the result of media “agendas”, such as when journalists sought answers about Dominic Cummings defying lockdown rules.
When immigrants are spotted crossing the Channel, we are presented with the grossly disproportionate response of appointing a chillingly named “clandestine Channel threat commander”. The journalists ignoring the distress of a man in a dinghy bailing out water with a plastic bucket are likely not doing so out of a studied xenophobia, but this callous way of reporting is so entrenched that it’s become habit.
And everything is about to get worse. What lies ahead is the diversionary plan to make the British public accountable for the government’s failures. The seeds for this deception were planted during the pandemic’s first act. We were to “stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives”, and then later “stay alert, control the virus and save lives”. Cabinet ministers rolled out these staccato orders to us whenever they were cornered on the detail of their policies, as if the entire success or failure of the pandemic response hinged only on public observance and not the government’s decisions.
The seeds are flourishing. The Conservatives want us to believe that their efforts were thwarted by a mass exercise in national sabotage by irresponsible individuals, by black and ethnic minority communities allegedly not observing its rules, by badly run old people’s homes, even by the poor advice of its own scientists.
At crucial junctures the Tories will anticipate public anger and earmark a convenient target to be subjected to public scrutiny. As A-level students saw their futures dissolve, a source “close to Gavin Williamson”, the education secretary, was mobilised to the Daily Telegraph to say that teachers were “not to be trusted on grading”, and it was they who gave students an unreasonable expectation of their results.
Round two of the fight between teachers’ unions and local governments is brewing, as they object to schools re-opening in September without a robust test, track and trace system. Perpetually locked in a fight with professional bodies and their own civil service, ministers bully people whose sense of vocational duty will not allow them to warp reality to suit government propaganda.
These aren’t new tactics. The poor were blamed for borrowing beyond their means in the wake of the financial crisis, and the bankers got away with it. Immigrants, not government austerity, were blamed for the shrinking of the welfare state. After a decade of gutting public services and growing its media patronage, the Conservative party has become very good at making people fight for the scraps of resources it leaves behind. Its efforts will add one more test to the trials facing the British public in the autumn – will we turn against the government, or each other?
As a second peak of Covid-19 infections looms, one thing is certain: the Conservative party is dedicating itself to what it does best – crafting a narrative that blames everyone else for its mistakes.
Brace for it. After six months of catastrophic mismanagement, from delaying lockdown to the A-level marking fiasco, this autumn is sure to bring even more diversion, distraction and brazen victim-blaming.
Led by a shallow prime minister, populated by careerists and directed by a grandiose and sophomoric special adviser, the government at present is fashioned towards ruling – not governing. But it’s not lack of qualification alone that has produced its incompetence. The defining feature of today’s Conservative party is indifference to the outcomes of its failed policies – none of which it has been seriously punished for.
These aren’t new tactics. The poor were blamed for borrowing beyond their means in the wake of the financial crisis
The gutting of the state, the impoverishment and deaths caused by austerity, the chaos of Brexit and the global embarrassment that has been its pandemic response are failures that should have brought an end to its tenure. But the party has developed one skill: avoiding consequences by way of constructing false enemies – immigrants, welfare scroungers, the European Union. It has achieved this herd impunity with the help of a credulous and oftentimes knowingly complicit media.
When faced with the actual task of governing during a real crisis, not a confected one, the government has flailed, U-turned and contradicted itself. Throughout it has stuck competently and consistently to its one principle – never apologise, never explain, always blame someone else.
The political and cultural infrastructure that makes it so easy for the powerful to shift responsibility on to others while refusing to show humility or acknowledge mistakes encourages a limited range of public responses to political crises. When an issue arises, the government launches into dramatic displays of action for the benefit of the watching public, and the media follows its cue, inflating the scale of the problem. Any legitimate demands for rational analysis of a situation are trivialised as liberal hand-wringing. Calls for accountability are dismissed as a “politicising” of events, as Boris Johnson has repeatedly characterised Labour questions about its handling of the pandemic, or the result of media “agendas”, such as when journalists sought answers about Dominic Cummings defying lockdown rules.
When immigrants are spotted crossing the Channel, we are presented with the grossly disproportionate response of appointing a chillingly named “clandestine Channel threat commander”. The journalists ignoring the distress of a man in a dinghy bailing out water with a plastic bucket are likely not doing so out of a studied xenophobia, but this callous way of reporting is so entrenched that it’s become habit.
And everything is about to get worse. What lies ahead is the diversionary plan to make the British public accountable for the government’s failures. The seeds for this deception were planted during the pandemic’s first act. We were to “stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives”, and then later “stay alert, control the virus and save lives”. Cabinet ministers rolled out these staccato orders to us whenever they were cornered on the detail of their policies, as if the entire success or failure of the pandemic response hinged only on public observance and not the government’s decisions.
The seeds are flourishing. The Conservatives want us to believe that their efforts were thwarted by a mass exercise in national sabotage by irresponsible individuals, by black and ethnic minority communities allegedly not observing its rules, by badly run old people’s homes, even by the poor advice of its own scientists.
At crucial junctures the Tories will anticipate public anger and earmark a convenient target to be subjected to public scrutiny. As A-level students saw their futures dissolve, a source “close to Gavin Williamson”, the education secretary, was mobilised to the Daily Telegraph to say that teachers were “not to be trusted on grading”, and it was they who gave students an unreasonable expectation of their results.
Round two of the fight between teachers’ unions and local governments is brewing, as they object to schools re-opening in September without a robust test, track and trace system. Perpetually locked in a fight with professional bodies and their own civil service, ministers bully people whose sense of vocational duty will not allow them to warp reality to suit government propaganda.
These aren’t new tactics. The poor were blamed for borrowing beyond their means in the wake of the financial crisis, and the bankers got away with it. Immigrants, not government austerity, were blamed for the shrinking of the welfare state. After a decade of gutting public services and growing its media patronage, the Conservative party has become very good at making people fight for the scraps of resources it leaves behind. Its efforts will add one more test to the trials facing the British public in the autumn – will we turn against the government, or each other?
Sunday, 16 August 2020
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