The bug in our thinking

“My worry is not that machines will become like people – an impossibility – but that people are already becoming more like machines."

https://www.pricevaluepartners.com/the-bug-in-our-thinking/

“To think too much is a disease.”

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

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On 24 March 2015 Andreas Lubitz flew a Germanwings Airbus 320 into a French mountainside and killed all 150 people on board. Lubitz was depressed and suicidal.

The prosecutor appointed by the French government asserted that doctors had told him that Lubitz should not have been piloting the plane, but medical confidentiality prevented them from making this information available to his employers.

Under German law, employers do not have access to the medical records of their staff, so employers are obliged to rely on their employees declaring that they are unfit to work.

Given that all commercial flights have a minimum of two pilots, why did co-pilot Captain Patrick Sondenheimer not stop Lubitz ? When Sondenheimer left the cockpit to go to the toilet, Lubitz locked the cockpit door. Sondenheimer couldn’t break back in because in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, aviation authorities had required that all cockpit doors be reinforced to prevent unauthorised entry.

Those 150 deaths were caused by a murder suicide.

As Hugh Willbourn makes painfully clear in his 2023 book ‘The Bug in our Thinking – and the way to fix it’, three policies helped to facilitate Lubitz’s fateful action:

“Medical confidentiality: Lubitz’s doctor was prevented from giving any warning to Germanwings by the policy of medical confidentiality.

“Legal prevention of access to the medical records of employees: Germanwings were unable to monitor Lubitz’s (or any other employee’s) mental health by the law (a legally enforced policy) preventing them from accessing their employees’ medical records.

“Impregnable cockpit doors: Mandated by aviation authorities worldwide post 9/11.”

Readers interested in learning more about Dr. Willbourn’s world view can listen to our interview with him on The State of the Markets podcast from November 2023.

Another anecdote from ‘The Bug in our Thinking’:

“In 2019 Harry Miller was told by the Humberside Police that some tweets he forwarded would be recorded as a ‘non-crime hate incident’. Harry realized that ‘recording a non-crime hate incident’ was an infringement of his rights. It was also an overreach of police powers, it had potential for unjust consequences, and it was a waste of time, money and police resources.”

Miller took the Humberside Police to the High Court and won. He then took on the College of Policing who had issued the original guidance and won against them in the Court of Appeal.

Harry Miller:

“Following my High Court victory I had a sit-down meeting with the Chief Constable of Humberside and I said to him, ‘Look, I kind of understand why an enthusiastic young officer came off a course and got it entirely wrong. What I don’t understand is why somebody up the chain of command didn’t apply some common sense.’

“..The Chief Constable looked me in the eye and said, ‘Harry, what you must understand is that common sense is not an appropriate tool for a police officer because it leads to unpredictable outcomes. What we need is more guidance.’”

There, in a nutshell, is why our world is in the mess it’s in. (We interviewed Harry Miller on The State of the Markets podcast in June 2022.)

We have recently written about Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 book ‘The Master and his Emissary’, and it strikes us that there is a discernible overlap between the arguments of McGilchrist and Willbourn. As a reminder of the McGilchrist thesis, each side of the brain has its own specific expertise.  The left hemisphere absorbs detail, data and statistics (the purely mechanical, rather than creative, side of science); it focuses on categorisation, predictability, and systems. The right hemisphere appreciates intangibles, humour, the sound of music, the flow of time, emotion, beauty, subtlety, nuance, language, syntax, expression, virtues, values, judgement, danger, experience and metaphor. As Antonia Filmer puts it, proper understanding and imagination requires both hemispheres to work together and to share their findings. Through the corpus callosum the right gives context and meaning to the left. But without both sides operating harmoniously together, McGilchrist suggests that Western society as we know it is at risk. He believes that at present we – and our institutions – are in thrall to the left hemisphere which has over-evolved and exaggerated itself, largely eclipsing the right. McGilchrist explains that the right hemisphere has first take on everything, it is attentive and vigilant to the world all around, while the left selects and focusses on the details. Reason and knowledge (“guidance”) are no substitute for wisdom and intuition (“common sense”). Thus, we suffer from an inability to see and understand the whole picture and to make strategies accordingly. Crucially, the left hemisphere is always overconfident; it can never admit to being wrong, about anything.

Here is Dr. Willbourn from a recent essay, ‘A vote for the Tories is a vote for Labour is a wasted vote’:

“I have never worried about climate change because I was sure that humans would do something irredeemably stupid long before any possible consequences of a small change in the atmosphere.  And Lo, here they are doing countless irredeemably stupid things all at once.  From a vast and expanding field of idiotic activities let us mention four forces, (why not call them … horsemen?) which are wreaking havoc in the UK.

“Horseman #1 is Net Zero destroying our economy and infrastructure.

“Horseman #2 is the mainstream media and its fact-checking handmaidens undermining intelligent debate and national integrity.

“Horseman #3 is the magnificent international vaccination campaign which has become inexplicably linked to coincidence fairies and a vast increase in disability and all-cause mortality.

“Horseman #4 is the DEI agenda propagated through HR training and the internet to destroy free discourse and local communities.

“But these gallant horsemen are saving us from fictitious enemies.  There is no hard evidence of climate emergency.   The force that is immediately destroying the environment and impoverishing the nation is the ideology of Net Zero. There is no army of far-right conspirators.   The force that is generating misinformation is the mainstream media. The great unacknowledged villain of the last three years was OFCOM. Covid was a threat to the elderly and infirm, not the bulk of the population.  The increase in heart disease, excess mortality and resurgent cancers is caused solely by coincidence fairies. The vast majority of people in the UK are neither racist nor prejudiced.   The forces that are creating division and resentment are wokery and DEI..

“If the current authorities are left in charge we are doomed.  Both Tory and Labour parties are obsessed with these fictional dangers and completely unwilling to confront our real problems.  They are both utterly useless.

“So the question arises, is there any remedy to our woes this side of a catastrophic collapse?”

“The rational assessment is pessimistic.  The problem is not just the ideologies of Westminster politicians, but the relentless tyranny of incompetent bureaucracy and maleficent billionaires. The most likely outcome is rapid impoverishment, chaotic rioting and a Government repressing its citizens ever more overtly. That is unlikely to end well.

“There are many organisations which are fighting against the four horsemen but, although attempts have been made, they have yet to come together. A united opposition requires co-operation, organisation and inspiration.

“Facing such an opposition are three monstrous enemies: grandiose billionaires, the supine, venal mass media and a huge blob of administrators and cronies who are doing very well indeed out of the current [mess]..

“To give one example, a huge problem throughout UK institutions is the refusal to trust professionals to do their job and hence the appointment of administrators to measure and hector them.   The locus classicus of this is the NHS.

“Hard data and appalling anecdotes reveal that the NHS is being managed into oblivion.   It has more money and lower productivity than ever.  A vast proportion of its  bureaucracy is composed of former clinical staff who opted for an easier, more lucrative career behind a desk.  A real solution must address that.  All  administrative personnel without a clinical training could be demoted or made redundant.  All administrative personnel with clinical training could be required to do a minimum one week of front line work per month, replacing the locum nurses and doctors who are costing the service a fortune.   This would save money and expose managers to the consequences of their impositions on frontline staff.  It would also result in more consistent staffing, less burn out and greater job satisfaction for everyone.

“The NHS is not atypical. Almost all large institutions, whether state or corporate, have become too big, too regulated and too self-interested. Citizens are no longer served by the state, and the customer is no longer king. The four horsemen are destroying the common good from John o’Groats to Land’s End.”

Now compare this view to that of McGilchrist, whom we recently cited in our commentary ‘Brain Storm’:

“Since the Industrial Revolution and particularly in the last 50 years we have created a world around us which in contrast to the natural world reflects the left hemisphere’s properties and its vision. What we see around us now looking out of the metaphorical window is rectilinear, man-made, utilitarian.. each thing ripped from the context in which it alone has meaning and for many the two-dimensional representations provided by TV screens and computers have come largely to supplant direct face-to-face experience of three-dimensional life in all its complexity..

“My worry is not that machines will become like people – an impossibility – but that people are already becoming more like machines.

“I believe it is the left hemispheric view of the world intellectually and morally bankrupt as it is that has resulted in what has been called The Meta Crisis: not just the odd crisis here and there but the despoliation of the natural world; the decline of species on a colossal scale.. the destruction of the way of life of indigenous people; the fragmentation and polarization of a once civilized society with escalating not diminishing resentments on all sides; an escalating not diminishing gap between rich and poor; a surge in mental illness, not the promised increase in happiness; a proliferation of laws but a rise in crime; the abandonment of civil discourse; a betrayal of standards in our major institutions – Government, the BBC, the police, our hospitals, schools and universities, once rightly admired all over the world – which have all become vastly overweighted with bureaucracy, inflexible and obsessed with enforcement of a world view that is in flat contradiction to reality and isn’t their job to enforce, and the looming menace of totalitarian control through AI..

“As so many have predicted since the time of Goethe, we cannot say we were not warned. Even physics now teaches us that the mechanical model of the universe is mistaken but because of our success in making machines we still imagine that the machine is the best model for understanding everything we come across. We ourselves, our brains and minds, our society and the living world are now supposed to be explained by the metaphor of the machine yet only the tiniest handful of things in the entire known universe are at all like a machine – namely the machines we made in the last few hundred years..

“We neglect the importance of context. We believe we are right and that one size fits all justifying the imposition of vast global bureaucratic structures not to say wars so as to impose our thinking on cultures far different from our own. Equally we arrogantly critique our ancestors for not sharing the idiosyncratic view of the world we’ve generated in the last 20 years and which we believe must now be forced on all, whatever their reasonable misgivings; and we treat people not as unique living beings but as exemplars of a category.

“One aspect of this is the virtual machine known as bureaucracy. Famously Hannah Ahrendt referred to the “banality of evil”. One of the most disquieting aspects of the Nazi regime was its chilling bureaucracy. Mind-numbing evil was committed by people who were for the most part not conventional monsters but were simply following the ordained procedures. Real people and real life had been almost wholly obscured by pieces of paper and the recording of numbers..

“Once the integrity founded in an intuitive moral sense is lost, a society becomes like a building that has lost its integrity and needs to be shored up with ever more scaffolding. Now there has to be a law for everything, yet crime escalates..

“I see widespread evidence of.. ‘sustained incoherence’ in corporations; governments; health systems and education – everywhere that management culture holds sway..”

Focusing solely on the world of financial markets and investments, there are two ways of escaping from the dismal benighted culture of ‘process’, ‘guidance’, narrative error and overconfidence.

One is to avoid altogether financial instruments that derive such value as they have only from a desperately overloaded political superstructure. That is to say, we avoid overmuch fiat currency risk, and exposure to a debt market experiencing what we suspect may be terminal decline. In plainer English, we avoid paper currency, paper promises, bonds and thereby politicians’ hubris. The antidote to political hubris is an instrument like gold, which offers no credit or counterparty risk. In the current ‘left hemisphere dominated’ environment, we feel obligated to seek protection from concentrated political hubris in the form of inflation – an insidious force that, in the timeless words of economist Jacques Rueff, “consists of subsidising expenditures that give no returns with money that does not exist”.

The other is to focus on the one universal characteristic of a tradeable instrument that is non-negotiable, that cannot be distorted by a subjective narrative or by an overconfident assessment of macro-economic themes; that characteristic is price. We therefore make a meaningful allocation within our discretionary portfolios to systematic trend-following funds that have no meaningful correlation to stock or bond markets (because they are so highly diversified across multiple asset classes), and which offer meaningful protection against market crises (because they can just as easily ‘go short’ markets as buy them). We note that year-to-date, trend followers are outperforming traditional global stock and bond indices, and that the SG Trend Index has just experienced its second-best first-quarter performance on record.

In Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’, Cassius famously observes that “The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves”. We believe that at such a challenging time culturally, economically and politically, it makes sense to have an investment philosophy that acknowledges and respects basic human weaknesses, rather than one that pretends that they do not even exist.

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As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:

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Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.

Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks.