Zero Sum Game

the ‘opinions of people like me’ changed opinions by just 6.2 per cent, while a general poll indicating that most people preferred one side or the other moved the needle by 8.1 per cent. LinkedIn works like this.

It’s not uncommon to hear during an interview, an economic prediction cited that not only fails to materialise but, upon closer inspection, owes very little to evidence other than a media talking head a/k/a “expert” injecting it into the news cycle. Take the now discredited modelling for COVID deaths posited by the likes of the Burnet Institute. Road transport companies and workers were pushed to the brink by predictive data which not only made their jobs less safe but proved wildly incongruent to the danger. Businesses, all the same, were shutdown. People movements were restricted. One public servant’s hangover could be spun, for someone downstream from it, as another in a long list of inconveniences of living with a pandemic.

Chekhov once said that an audience who saw a hunting gun above the mantel in the first act expected it to be fired by the last act.

Whether it was COVID or the Ukraine conflict, resolving to poke holes in the arguments of those repeating these Economist-tier talking points, too often invites caustic denunciation. Why? Because approved numbers have metastasised into kind of unilateral disarmament via “fact checking”. For every such crisis, the burden of proof is now put onto the critic who, for wanting cost benefit analysis of a policy rather than its ideological justification, must be content merely with the selfcongratulation that for decades, as Thomas Sowell points out, has formed the basis for social policy in the west.

Suppressing evidence to undermine conclusions that have no political utility, as the mounting scandal at Twitter reveals, is dangerous when NATO intervention, no-fly zones and nuclear counteroffensives are nudged into public discourse. A few months back Forbes exalted what it called the “digital transformation sweeping through every industry in 2023 and beyond” before it unconvincingly made the case for greater data governance through the introduction of laws designed to regulate personal and other types of data because it was happening already — like that was a good thing. No mention was made of the breaches of Census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Medibank, and major banks and telecommunications companies, all of whom work closely with the government. The good thing is many are now aware of this situation — truck drivers among them. Contrary to outdated public perception, drivers are uasually some of the most well-informed workers in their industry. Spending so much time alone provides many of them opportunities to dig deep into podcasts and audiobooks on all matter of subjects their senior management are not usually afforded. There is, after all, no point in being a decision-maker when those decisions have already long ago been made for you.