Cautiously Approaching the Precautionary Approach

Following a post about the appalling Precautionary Principle, some folks said I was a bit harsh and that I had constructed an extreme version of it that it was never meant to be.

I’ve not been given an alternative definition, but all the same let’s have a look at a softer ‘Precautionary Approach’. In this case we’ll consider it in its fuzziest nicest: that we should not do dangerous things, and that if something might (but plausibly might) be dangerous, then the people who want to do it should prove it safe before they start.

All well and good it seems. This is the mellow, relaxed and comfortable “better safe than sorry” or “look before you leap”. It means people have to prove stuff is safe before they start doing it. And what can be wrong with that?

Well it’s wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong as follows:

• It considers only direct harm.
• It includes the potential for possible harm, even with little or no supporting evidence
• Proof lies with the advocates
• It makes the decision for you

It considers only direct harm

Most activities include quite definite harm. These are traded against the benefits of doing, or indeed the harms of not doing: if I am being chased by a veloceraptor, I am not going to pause and look to see what’s on the other side of the log I’m about to leap. There is a much higher certainty of danger in not doing, than in doing.

When it comes to more complicated activities, like building a factory or a hospital, we have definite harm: the land occupied will destroy wildlife, it will require energy, roads. On the other hand we will have the things the factory makes, the lives saved by the hospital, the employment. There are costs and benefits too from the houses, shops, recreation activities, schools, hospitals and factories needed by the workforce.

And the same effects will appear harmful to some and beneficial to others. Sheep grazing keeps the heather down. If you replace sheep with some other local industry, then the heather can run riot; this is good for the heather, but not so good for the moorland. Creatures that like living in heather will thrive, at the expense of those that like moorland. Are you a fan of heather or moorland?

Caution is not free. The continued ban on GM crops affects the wealthy very little, who can afford the warm, cuddly feeling of ‘protecting the environment’ at the expense of a little more wealth. That same ban, even if justified, is cold, heartless and cruel to those living on the edge of starvation, who die very young, who are always hungry, diseased and frail.

It includes the potential for risk of harm

Most activities carry some risks that they might cause harm. With the precautionary approach, we’re not only interested in the ‘known risks’, but the ‘unknown risks’.

There is no indication of quite how much possible risk is important; any “plausible” cause is sufficient. So for example the initial studies that drew a “link” between the MMR vaccine and autism are sufficient to “take precautions”. There was no actual evidence of risk of harm (the single study that started the scare had no significant value in the existing evidence), but there was enough to indicate the potential of such a risk.

And that’s enough. Being generally precautious provides no help in evaluating the possible risk of harm, and so it all rather depends on the emotions and enthusiasms of those applying the approach. If you are scared or highly reluctant to use modern medicine, then the above tenuous link between MMR vaccine and autism is enough to “take precautions”, and keep your children safe from such injections. This exposes your children to the harm of not taking the vaccine, but that’s not part of the consideration.

So we end up making decisions based on lack of evidence; based on ‘fantasy’ where we can dig out any possible plausible danger and use it as if it was actual danger. You might as well make decisions based on the plausible possibility that aliens live in clouds.

Proof lies with the advocate

This is not necessarily part of being generally precautious, but it seems to come with the Precautionary Principle: If you want something, you prove it’s completely safe.

Which has two problems:

(1) It’s rarely possible to prove that anything is completely safe. Lots of clever people have looked for links between the MMR vaccine and autism and found nothing, but maybe that’s just because they haven’t found the right thing yet. Maybe there are other dangers. And so anyone ‘being precautious’ can do do so for ever, happy in the knowledge that, because they’re using the important-sounding “Precautionary Principle”, they are doing the Right Thing.

(2) Expecting someone with a vested interest (who wants to build the factory, vaccinate children against MMR) to be fair about the evidence they present is a bit naive. Or rather, it’s a way of maintaing the Precaution, no matter what evidence is presented. Because you can’t trust it, obviously, it’s from the evil capitalists who want to build the factory, or evil drugs companies who want to make money from vaccine injections.

It makes the decision for you. Or not

Evidence and analysis inform our decisions, but should not make them. Sometimes the decision is obvious based on that information but sometimes it is not.

The precautionary approach provides a way of shortcutting all that palavar, and tells you not to do something if it might be dangerous. Yet it contradicts itself: it will tell you opposite things depending on how you apply it to the same problem.

For example: “Do I get up tomorrow?” The precautious approach tells you that because there are many possible (and known) harms in doing so, you should not. Yet “Do I stay in bed all day?” also has many possible (and known) harms in doing so and the precautious approach tells you that you should not.

Instead you have to choose when to use it, and choose which way to phrase your same question in order for it to ‘work’, and that’s the giveaway that it’s not a useful scientific approach. It’s a way of providing a pseudo-scientific cover over an emotional approach.

So if we look at opponents of wind farms, nuclear power, road bypasses, new shops, and so on, we sometimes see people who find just possibilities of potential harm, and seem to think that this by itself is enough to call a halt.

The Reckless Approach

Taking the same approach in the opposite direction exposes the lack of evidence, reason and analysis behind the Precautionary Approach.

The Reckless Approach says that “if there is any potential benefit to the action, we should act”.

And if we apply this approach to any ideas, we can quickly see that we’ll end up doing lots of really rather dangerous things.

Risk Analysis

The way we really – and sometimes even scientifically – decide whether to do something is to weigh up the costs against the benefits, including the uncertainties which are usually given as risks (potential costs or harms) and potential benefits.

This might be brief and scrappy – as we run from the veloceraptor, we have to make snap judgements made on very little, but often very important, information. This is a long running issue in the military (the snap judgements, not the veloceraptors) where life and death decisions need to be made on little and uncertain information.

For the more complicated issues involved in environmental impacts, impact assessments are well established, if not entirely straightforward.

Which is perhaps the problem; carrying out a proper assessment is complicated, and involves making difficult decisions in weighing the various effects against others. How do you weigh, for example, the many benefits of faster, cheaper travel provided by a bypass with the deaths to cute furry animals? To the permanent loss of certain habitats?

But doing anything else is insufficient. To pick and choose amongst the effects of an action and wave only those around, as if they force only one possible decision, is not rational, scientific or even moral.

(See also Risky Business, Adam Curtis on the Precautionary Principle, SIRC on Beware The Precautionary Principle, Precautionary Principle, Evidence Based Belief, EU Commission’s Communication on Precautionary Principle)

Deferring to Authority

“Deferring to Authority” is to claim someone’s opinion is valuable because they are an expert in the subject. “Arguing from Authority” is to claim that your opinion is valuable because you are an expert.

This is one in a series of posts about evidence and how it does or does not support a claim. Although this particular one is about opinion, not evidence…

There’s nothing very bad about using an expert’s opinion, but it can be seen as irrelevent in a controversial subject where the evidence is being discussed. If you are arguing about whether homeopathy can cure cancer then you want to look at the facts, not quote people who might have vested interests. Or others who might also have vested interests.

Workable Life

Few of us have the time, inclination, or expertise to carefully check every single thing that we decide. Using expert opinion is a perfectly sensible way to approach life.

There are just a few things to bear in mind:

• Authority might not be Authority
• Authority isn’t always expert
• Authority can be wrong.

Authority might not really be authority

Gillian McKeith is famous for handing out advice on diet, and claims to be an expert on the subject. She even uses the title ‘Dr’ – a title that is restricted in the UK to try and prevent people from claiming a qualification they don’t have. The advertising standards authority were notified, proceedings pursued, and she has been forced to (mostly) stop using it. She has no training, qualifications or authority for her opinions on poo, carrots or lard-fried chips.

But you’ll notice here I’ve not put any links; this is my opinion. It’s based on expertise gathered from far too many hours on Ben Goldacre’s BadScience web site, where the actions to stop her misuse of the title were first formed by some of the forum regulars. So I am an expert, but you should check it yourself, rather than believe me… Google is only a few clicks away…

Authority might not be an expert

Expertise is often quite narrow. People who work in the ‘environment’ industry are not experts in all of it; thus the opinions of neither David Bellamy nor David Attenborough on global warming are expert. It goes further than that; an expert in one particular field of climate cannot claim expertise in the whole subject.

This specialisation can sometimes be quite surprising. Your General Practice doctor has quite a wide medical expertise, but when it comes to a road accident, you will probably be better off with a an amateur St John’s Ambulance volunteer.

Some authority qualifications are so broad as to be meaningless and offer no real authority at all. A “scientist” is generally just somebody who researches something and is no more intelligent for it than many other professions; a “government scientist” in particular is not an expert on everything, any more than you are or I am.

Scientists running in packs (or ‘committees’ as they are sometimes known) are similarly suspect. Pronouncements from Committees of Scientists on things outside their fields of expertise should be treated cautiously.

Authority might just be wrong

This is perhaps too obvious to bother mentioning, but in any controversial field we expect differences of opinions amongst experts; some of them must be wrong.

And sometimes great swathes of experts in a field can be quite spectacularly wrong.

So?

Expert opinion is a perfectly sensible thing to use. My GP’s expertise trumps pretty much anyone else I know on medical matters.

Just remember that sufficient evidence trumps opinion every time.

Further Reading

Argument From Authority (Wikipedia)

Deferring to Authority: Popular Science Communication as a language of control (PDF)

Do Aliens Live In Clouds? Evidence Based Belief

All day long we are told stuff: stuff that’s true, stuff that’s not, stuff that may be, stuff that’s ambiguous, stuff that’s incomprehensible, stuff that’s interesting, stuff that’s quickly forgotten. Stuff that might save your life. Stuff that might save your hair.

Sometimes it’s stuff that isn’t very important. Did you know, for example, that powdered fish scales are used to clear beer when it’s brewed? Unless you’re a beer-drinking vegan, you probably don’t really care if it’s true or not. Someone can tell you that in the pub and you can nod knowingly or look amazed or dispute it, whatever the social occasion, ego, company and number of beers consumed calls for, and sod the facts, And many of us enjoy aromatherapy or horoscopes without caring whether they really do what they say they will.

But if it’s stuff that’s important then such gossip, rumour and hearsay isn’t good enough. If it’s going to affect our job (is that really illegal?), or our relationships (is she really having an affair?) or our health (will bacon really give you a heart attack?) or our family (will vaccinations really hurt your children? Will not vaccinating them be worse?) or our future (will using fossil fuels really kill us all?) then we need better information.

This is the first in a series of how evidence can help tell us what to believe. It introduces the context and various principles in the paragraphs below, which link to more detailed explanations

So we might defer to authority; that is, we ask someone who is an expert on the subject and use their opinion.

This is a generally workable approach, but if we want more than opinion (expert or not), rumour and gossip then we need facts that are relevant: we need evidence. And we need enough evidence. Until then, it’s just a fantasy.

We need to be clear about what it is we’re trying to show, about whether in fact we can show it, and what that means to our idea.

We are rarely going to get “certain proof”, so we need to understand some ordinary things about uncertainty. It may be that some things are so uncertain that we shall just have to settle for not knowing.

Diversions are everywhere: If someone makes an extraordinary claim, it’s up to them to find evidence to support it, it’s not up to you to find evidence to disprove it. It’s not up to you to provide a workable alternative. And a rubbished alternative doesn’t make the original claim right.

As new evidence arrives, we need to understand how it supports (or contradicts) either a new link in a chain of reasoning, or confirms (or contradicts) existing evidence. We need to check that it is actually new; that it’s not just the same facts wearing a different face.

Most of all, throughout what can sometimes be an eye opening, invigorating and mind-blowing exploration of all this information, we must be careful not to introduce our own bias; that we don’t put our opinion before the evidence, and especially that we collect only the evidence that fits our initially ignorant opinion.

In the end, when someone tells us that “Aliens live in clouds!!”, and it’s important for you to know, then our response is not “That’s silly, because…” but:

“Oh yes? Show me!”

In the meantime, we don’t know if aliens live in clouds, but we have no reason to think so.

And that’s alright.

(With thanks to the badscience discussion forums)

Cautions against the Precautionary Principle

The main thrust of the Precautionary Principle is that we should not do things with uncertain outcomes just in case it goes wrong. This ‘analysis’ is based on the worst case possible imagined outcome, and the burden of proof for complete safety lies with the do-er. It includes attempts to make “look before you leap” a legal requirement, where the look has to be thorough and complete with no counter evaluation of what the consequences are of not leaping.

The Wingspread Definition. PPrinciple.net

Essentially, we set up a question where we’re not sure about the outcome (and we’re rarely sure about the outcome of most things) such as “Should we release dihydrogen monoxide?” and build a little table like this:

	It does nothing	It’ll destroy the planet
Stop releasing it	Nothing happens	We’re saved
Release it	Fine	We all die

Then we add up the consequences of releasing it or not. And every time obviously the ‘doing it’ is dangerous (we might all die) and the ’stopping it’ is safer. Right now. Just in case. And so we get The Most Terrifying Video Ever and the like.

Which might sound fairly reasonable, as long as you don’t try thinking any further. It’s based around avoiding bad consequences and so, surely, makes the world a better place.

It’s a very ‘powerful’ idea amongst environmentalists (such as SEHN, JNCC and of course Greenpeace) because it requires taking action now, immediately (“we cannot wait until the evidence is in…”), to stop any unwanted activity, which gives crusaders a cause. It’s about imagining the worst, which is thrilling. It’s about applying fantasy rather than evidence, about emotion rather than evaluation.

Mostly, it’s about stopping people from doing things which might be bad; it makes you righteous and valuable. It’s an excuse to interfere from a hastily built moral high ground without any of the support that science would normally bring. And if no one looks too closely at the thin air it’s built on, the moral high ground is a good place to put your artillery:

Caroline Raffensperger, Andrew Kimbrell, SourceCode, UN rejects scientific evidence for decisions and the ever popular use the PP as a ‘reason’ to reject GM foods

Risk Analysis? No thankyou, it’s too hard.

But it’s just an oversimplified risk register, with the question carefully phrased and the outcomes carefully selected to get the required outcome, and it’s very very broken.

It’s far too simplistic. Not doing things is rarely free; not using pesticides makes food more expensive. Banning genetically modified crops denies farmers - including poor subsistance farmers – more productive yields. Not burning coal makes energy more expensive for all, with quite unpleasant knock-on effects through any economy. Locking up people because they might harm others is, I hope, fairly obviously bad. And demanding total safety – where there are no possible unpleasant effects – is impractical.

There are dangerous consequences to many of the things we do, and we have to deal with that. We have tools to analyse them – environmental impact assessments being a broad term for some of them. But these are complicated and tiresome, and the Precautionary Principle is very attractive to those who need a cause to fight without the hassle of working through detail or complexity.

It’s Broken. Obviously so.

Consider phrasing the question the opposite way around. Remember we’re not sure what the outcome is; so what if not releasing dihydrogen monoxide into the atmosphere has a bad effect? After all, it may be preventing something else:

	It does nothing	It’s preventing disaster
Stopping	Nothing happens	We all die
Release it	Fine	We’re saved

The burden of proof also lies with those who would stop an activity, if doing so has bad consequences.

“We cannot wait for all the evidence”; indeed, all the evidence is rarely available. But we may need to gather sufficient evidence before we make things worse.

Try applying it to whether you should get out of bed tomorrow morning: you shouldn’t, because all manner of bad things might happen if you do. It’s not clear what the risks are. But then apply it to whether you should stay in bed all day tomorrow: you shouldn’t, because all manner of bad things might happen if you do. It’s not clear what those risks are.

In fact, it’s so broken that if you apply it to itself it can, if phrased correctly, tell you not to:

	PP is useless	PP will give you the wrong answer
Use the PP	Nothing	Wrong answer!
Don’t use it	Fine, time saved	Nothing

The burden of proof that using the Precautionary Principle is safe, or even useful, has yet to be established, so you shouldn’t. Which is impressive irony.

It’s broken for every do/don’t decision for wifi, MMR jabs, mobile phone masts. It’s broken for everyday activities like getting out of bed or going to work or sitting in the pub or eating food or staying in bed. It’s broken for thought experiments like whether aliens in clouds. It’s broken for real but low risks like asteroid strikes. It’s broken for itself.

It only ‘works’ if you apply it to something you already believe is true. And it’s only ‘useful’ when you don’t have any real evidence, or you wouldn’t be able to phrase it that simply.

Risks are part of our everyday lives; we need to understand them, how to mitigate them, how to plan for them. Applying the Precautionary Principle to eliminate them entirely means you have to spend the rest of your life in bed. Or not.

(See also Risky Business, Adam Curtis on the Precautionary Principle, SIRC on Beware The Precautionary Principle, Old BadScience Discussion)

Discussion here

I’m a skeptic, you’re a denier

The mechanisms of debate overcome the subject at times, offering a whole new rabbit hole to disappear down. So when you’re discussing the pros and cons of hedge funds in modern global commerce, and your ‘opposition’* quotes an expert, you can accuse him of ‘arguing from authority’. This handily undermines his reputation as he’s only quoting an authority because he’s no expertise of his own. And so you can continue on that vein rather than consider the words the ‘expert’ used.

Similarly, if anyone is not convinced by your belief – of evolution, creationism, man-made global warming, natural climate change, aromatherapy, capitalism, communism, jainism, USA-sponsored terrorism, Luxembourg-sponsored terrorism – you can call them a ‘denier’, which is a shortcut way of saying that you have lots of evidence and they’re ignoring it. This handily bypasses actually presenting any evidence or the reasoning that goes with it.

These distractions from reason – both in presenting and arguing – is all part of the rich tapestry of the general playground that is t’interweb. There’s more at Dr T’s Five As of Empty Arguments, and the perhaps too comprehensive set at Don Lindsay’s.

The next step is not to just accuse your opponent* of using one of these at some point, but to accuse anyone on the opposing side* to generally use many of these most of the time. So there’s the denialistators who lump together anyone who won’t conform to nicely simplified views, or Martin Robbin’s article on extreme skepticism, or mine on Evidence-Free Evangelising.

The problem with that kind of aggregation is that those involved invariably step afoul of their own rules. So here’s a guide to help you label your and your stupid opponents* behaviour correctly:

1. It’s rarely possible to provide solid evidence or proof for most modern subjects because of their breadth and complexity. But you’ll find when they can’t provide any decent proof for their crazy ideas, they’ll try and wriggle out of it with some meaningless excuses about there never being solid proof.

2. When you list a set of reasons, they divert the argument by concentrating on tiny aspects as if they were important. They, however, produce reams of meaningless irrelevent twaddle extrapolated from some tiny detail that you have to ferret out to show why they’re wrong.

3. If these idiots can’t produce any peer reviewed evidence for each of their claims, how can they expect to be taken seriously? It’s not as if they’re talking about obvious facts, like yours.

4. You raise important controversial subjects that are interesting to debate. They troll.

5. They cherry pick. You provide examples.

6. You provide expert and experienced knowledge. They argue from authority.

7. They keep moving the goal posts. You simply demand sufficient evidence.

8. You are a rational scientist, presenting a controversial but well supported argument. They are crackpot crusadors.

9. You are checking the supporting evidence. They are hiding their ignorant refusal to believe by ‘just asking questions’.

10. They are rightly scorned. You are unfairly persecuted.

11. You are a skeptic on this issue and they are blind evangelists. But whey you rationally present an important issue with its roots in solid data, they are denialists.

12. You have widespread consensus support; they are one of the fooled masses.

13. They are ‘manufacturing uncertainty’ where there isn’t really any. You are showing great gaping holes in their arguments.

14. You are blunt. They are rude.

…and so on. More, no doubt, to come.

* Because in any debate you must have opponents and supporters and some people win and some people lose. We won’t have any of your free discussions and partial consensus around here thank you very much.