At the beginning of WWI, French soldiers entered battle wearing red pants, carrying swords, and depending on rank, had plumes in their caps.
That attire suited previous wars where the technology and tactics used were more similar to the Battle of Waterloo a hundred years earlier than anything they were about to face in 1914.
A lot was to change in WWI, including the first mainstream uses of camouflage, airplanes, radio communication, long-range artillery, high-intensity shelling, submarines, tanks, poison gas, and more.
After WWI there was no return to what now seem like quaint military practices.
We make the same mistake when we look at some risks as being reversible when they are irreversible. How can we tell the difference?
Let’s look at a couple risks and how we could step through the assessments. I’ll start with one risk I’ve written about before: autonomous vehicles — and then look at a new one: voting in the upcoming US presidential election.
Reversible or Irreversible?
How do we know if something is reversible or irreversible?
Reversible. Something that is reversible can be returned to its original position. You can take an ordered stack of blocks, jumble them up, and then return them to their original places.
Reversible changes are not necessarily better than irreversible ones. There are some things we no longer want at all. But where there is intentional change, moving haphazardly into irreversible territory can be a problem.
I’ll add that when we’re involving people and not theoretical items in a thought experiment, there is always something that cannot be reversed. People change because of their different paths and lose or gain opportunities.
Irreversible. Something that is irreversible cannot be returned to its original position.
Scrambling an egg keeps the same stuff together in a bowl, but you can’t put the yolk and albumen back together anymore. Cook the egg and you can’t return it to being raw.
As I wrote about the history of finding the Dead Sea Scrolls in Incentives:
“The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls soon created a new market. However, the archaeologists who wanted the scrolls paid Bedouins, who had access to caves around the Dead Sea, by the piece.
“The natural outcome?
“In ‘the very first days, the Bedouin would tear the scrolls in pieces to get a higher price, because at that time they were being paid by the piece. Only later on de Vaux [one of the archaeologists] changed the rate of payment to the square centimeter price, in order to keep the Bedouin from tearing them up.'”
You can reassemble pieces after they are torn, but cannot make them whole again. The reversible and irreversible terms are also on a continuum rather than being binary. You may be able to reverse more or less of what you change.
Here’s another example related to Level 4 and Level 5 Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) that I wrote about in Autonomous Vehicles and Scaling Risk:
“As attractive as the benefits of AVs, let’s consider how they open up different risks than traditional vehicles. Here I’m talking about the opportunity for disturbing improved vehicle safety and optimization, at scale.
“Connected vehicles have had their performance hacked, controls hacked, and have been infected with ransomware. The Car Hacking Village is one of the most interesting things for me at a security conference. GPS navigation has been hacked. Collecting information (audio, video, location, and rider details) is possible while not disturbing the AVs movement. When AVs are mainstream and coordinating with each other, the potential for wide-ranging disruption grows along with the potential optimization gains. As shown from percolation theory, only a small percent of cars need to be hacked for major traffic disruptions. It’s something that becomes possible with system complexity and possibilities to scale the changes.”
Once AVs are mainstream you can’t easily return to human-driven cars. But from where we are today, there are years (probably decades) to figure things out. With a slower approach, we can consider multiple views and design a system carefully.
But what about the upcoming US presidential election? How might we look at the question of how to manage the vote with reversible and irreversible change in mind? I’m not talking about who you choose to vote for but rather how should the vote be run and monitored for accuracy and trust?
Let’s look at voting in this election through Robert Merton’s list of the causes of unintended consequences.
Merton’s List
To think through the reversible and irreversible approach, let’s return to Robert Merton’s five causes of unintended consequences: ignorance, basic values, short vs long-term interests, the self-defeating prophecy, and error.
How would each of these causes relate to the greater use of unsolicited absentee ballots in this election?
Ignorance
Absentee ballots have played a role in past elections but without much attention. Since we don’t have much past experience with challenges to their use, we might either downplay them or unreasonably fear them. But it’s not coming from a place of knowledge.
As I wrote in my article on ignorance:
“First-order effects of ignorance include incorrect decisions. Second-order effects include not understanding why the decisions are incorrect.”
The unsolicited absentee problem that Trump cited was that they would be a source of fraud, something that was rarely seen in the past. But a simple pushback on that claim is not wise. Just because something wasn’t a problem in the past doesn’t mean that it won’t be a problem in the future. Or, we shouldn’t just assess the likelihood of fraud alone, but rather the overall accuracy of ballots in general. Low vote count accuracy from other causes would lead to bad outcomes too.
Reversible or Irreversible? Probably irreversible in the context of the election. We can remove ignorance, or at least some of it, given enough time. I don’t know that there enough time to do so for this election.
Basic Values
This is a year that should see higher than normal voter participation because of a contentious election plus some states defaulting to mail-in rather than in-person voting. But this will likely also be a year where small differences lead to big outcomes. This is the issue with the Electoral College system. The candidate who wins most of a state’s vote gets all of the electoral votes from that state. It leads to “battleground states” getting more attention than they would otherwise.
The chance that not everyone’s vote will count is a grating outcome and against the basic values of why we vote.
Reversible or Irreversible? Irreversible in the context of this election unless the process seems fair.
Short vs Long-Term Interests
In a time of COVID-19, it it judged risky to bring huge numbers of people to the polls. If polls were the only option, many people would probably make their own decision to stay away.
But is the short-term interest to keep people safe contrary to the long-term interests to deliver an accurate election outcome? It shouldn’t be.
If COVID-19 had hit in 2021 instead of 2020 we might never need to discuss these alternatives. Unlike the 2020 election, the US presidential election of 1920 was after the generally accepted “end” of the 1918 “Spanish Flu” which killed tens of millions and also produced mask wearing and social distancing protocols. Had the timing of that pandemic been slightly different, we would have had a precedent to look to.
Reversible or Irreversible? Irreversible in the context of a time-bound election.
The Self-Defeating Prophecy
From my article on Self-Defeating Prophecies:
“Self-defeating predictions come from the belief that in the future X will happen, which leads to the opposite of X happening. The prediction itself leads to behavior change which in turn changes the outcome. This is a characteristic of what are sometimes called ‘level two chaotic systems.’
“Here there is a benefit to thinking that there is risk, taking action, and then not seeing the risk emerge. But if that happens, those who doubted the existence of the risk will doubt that we ever needed to take any precautions at all.”
Reversible or Irreversible? Reversible. By their nature, self-defeating prophecies are reversals. It’s better to state that you believe in a potential negative outcome occurring so that if it does you can claim unfair treatment. If the negative outcome doesn’t occur, you can claim that you fixed it.
However, unlike other self-defeating prophecies that are universally bad, someone’s belief that the election was unfair may be based on who is elected and what stories spread the most.
Reversible or Irreversible? Both?
Error
All large elections have errors. Collecting and counting a larger number of absentee ballots may introduce the risk of more error, for or against either candidate.
There will also be ballots that are inconclusive and disqualified. Think of the Bush – Gore election of 2000. Errors came from the layout of the “butterfly ballot,” used in parts of Florida, that confused some into voting for Pat Buchanan when they meant to vote for Al Gore.
Beyond confusion was the other issue of “hanging chads” on the punch-through paper ballots. When the hole was only partially punched-through, was it intentional or not? The case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Bush more than a month after the election.
The general criticism of bringing the process to the Supreme Court was that the ballot recount and electoral process should carry forward, however long it required. However, that was without an incumbent president running for reelection. Clinton was at the end of his second term. What would happen in a similar situation this year? Have Trump continue as the incumbent without knowing the election results?
Reversible or Irreversible? Irreversible. Changing the winner of an election after the outcome has been declared but before the inauguration is highly problematic and could lead to massive protests beyond anything we’ve seen so far. Further, if a review of votes takes a few months and is only available after the inauguration, that would be a constitutional crisis never seen.
Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election
I believe it should be in everyone voter’s interest that this election is run fairly, that the ballots are collected and counted as accurately as possible, and that there is trust in the process.
The bigger problem is probably not intentional fraud, but is instead unintentional errors in a changed system. Absentee ballots have been shown to confuse people who have no experience with them, resulting in rejected votes. A close election — still within the realm of possibility as this is the year 2020 — could be chaos.
These are possible outcomes of the election, setting aside where either candidate is in the polls at the moment.
- Biden or Trump win by a large margin. Setting aside your politics and focusing only on the electoral process, this outcome is safe. People accept the results and move on.
- Biden or Trump win by a thin margin. Protests from the losing side. Calls for recounts. A long, drawn-out process of checking the results. Conspiracy theories. Loss of trust in the overall process of voting. A bad outcome for all.
- Not possible to tell who wins. This is even worse than the point above especially as the inauguration will be just two months away by then. There is chaos for the next four years during the “stolen election” and that lost trust carries forward to future elections.
I think this deserves more attention, if only to guard against these potential unintended consequences.
Consider
- Pay attention to change in a critical and irreversible situation.
- The year 2020 should be a reminder that unintended consequences happen all the time.
- Whoever you’re voting for, you should want a fair process.
