what's WEIRDer than WEIRD?

the politics of very specialness

It’s a known problem in social sciences that a lot of stuff which would ideally be generalisable is actually only really established by studies on white, educated people in industrialised rich democracies. (WEIRD). It’s like the similar issue that behavioural economics is almost entirely a science of predicting the behaviour of graduate students and experimental psychology is increasingly the study of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.

But there’s a more subtle issue, I think, in policy making, which is that simply being in a position to influence policy means that you’ve had a very atypical life experience. I first noticed this at a conference a couple of years ago, where we had been discussing the future of artificial intelligence in the workplace. I made a joke (trying to do so politely, because it was a good conference and I was very grateful to the person who invited me, but, I worry, using up a substantial amount of that week’s being-a-dick tokens), along the lines of:

“Haven’t you made a big mistake by inviting all these intelligent people from high performing institutions? Of course they’re going to be optimistic. If you wanted to know what the future of AI in the workplace would really be like, you ought to be talking to mediocre people from slightly dysfunctional companies who haven't really thought about what they're doing. Because that’s going to be the majority of actual use cases!”

I thought I was joking, but ever since I said that it’s been hard to stop seeing it everywhere. Particularly, almost everyone in a position of power has had a completely unusual relationship with the education system. It’s not just a matter of not knowing the price of a pint of milk or whatnot, it’s reacting favourably to being offered training. Or enjoying having things explained to you. If you’ve ever looked at the disclosures attached to your investment statements and wondered “who the hell reads this crap”, the answer is “people who become financial regulators”.

Not an easy problem to solve though, because my joke was indeed a joke. If you invite a load of mediocre middle managers from bad institutions to your conference, you’re just really going to get some subjects for anthropological study. They are not going to be able to articulate where they’re going wrong, obviously. And they may not even really be able to describe what they’re trying to do, or notice what effect it’s actually having.

Similarly, poor people have lived experience of difficult interactions with the state, but that doesn’t mean that they understand how to fix them, and they might be quite likely to focus on things which are immediately irritating rather than actually causing the problems. User experience research is difficult and expensive, and is generally done by equally WEIRD and Very Special people.

Policy and business are for the most part run by The Very Special, and there is no getting away from that. So they will always, to a greater of lesser extent, reflect the kind of things that Very Special People experience and regard as important. The trick to stopping this becoming pathological is to remind yourself of the most atypical parts of the experience of Very Specialness (being praised, passing exams, etc), and take a regular quick check that the system isn’t developing excessive tendencies to self-soothe its creators or being optimised for precisely the people who don't need it.