Coronavirus, Russian Roulette, Farquaad Sacrifice, Local Optima and other Threats to Humanity's Future

Threats to Humanity's future are not new, but the nature and dynamics of these threats are approaching the essence of what is to be human.

Let me be clear: the types of threats are changing. Our ancestral response of self-preservation might very well be the next huge threat we need to face.

The pandemic of Coronavirus (specifically the Covid-19) early in 2020 is highlighting the huge challenge for all of us: to think first of the impact of our actions on others and then on us.

Let's consider the dilemma:

(to read this diagram go from the tip of the arrow backward reading "in order to have (tip) I/we must have (base)". In this case: In order to have a great life, I must survive and thrive. In order to survive and thrive, I must prioritize myself. and so forth)

Basically this is capturing our everyday question: what should I give more attention, resources, etc to? To me or to others. There are obvious benefits to either side, but we behave under two very destructive biases:

1. The divide and conquer approach: to solve a (complex) problem the best plan is to break it down in smaller chunks. This is sometimes called analysis, and the problem is that seldom the parts are put back together, in other words, we rarely follow the analysis with synthesis.
2. Compromise ("split the difference"): many times we have limitations that prevent us from fulfilling the individual and collective needs fully. When this happens the patellar reflex is to do a little bit of both. In this case, we also know we are going to lean towards the individual side, mainly due to our evolutionary history. Larry David defines Compromise beautifully: “A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied”. In the dilemma above this means we will hurt both needs, the individual and the collective, by compromising. It is just a matter of how much.

Farquaad Sacrifice and Russian Roulette on others

In the movie Shrek (2001), the villain Lord Farquaad (beautifully played by John Lithgow) is quite aware of the consequences of his actions, in what is now called the Farquaad Sacrifice:

[In this quest] Some of you may die.

This is a sacrifice I am willing to make!

What may seem a sadistic, self-interested behavior can be observed nowadays with much more frequency. During the Covid-19 outbreak each time someone denies the severity of the situation or acts without caring about the effects on others this is the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette on strangers. Since you don't play yourself there is no problem, right?

The shift in the balance

In human evolution individual considerations always yielded the best results for individuals. Sure there is the "preserve the species" behavior, but when something threatens the individual, the species consideration goes flying out of the window.

It is wrong to attribute this to idiocy, this priority scheme served us well in the past. Now we are approaching a threshold. One that we are largely unprepared to deal with and have a strong reaction of denial stemming from it.

The threshold we are approaching is the one where the impact of social connections we have outweighs the impact of any decisions and actions we might take as individuals. Notice I am not saying that what we do does not matter, I am saying that, once we cross this threshold, our actions will impact others far more than they will impact us. In other words: the criterion we should use at this moment is not what this action will bring me, but what it will bring to others. And conversely what others do will bring me in return.

The Covid-19 pandemic is incredibly suited to highlight this: the infection is moderately lethal for the majority of our species, but one infected person can bring about many deaths and still uncharted long term consequences.

In a recent (virtual) discussion in a group of friends from college, I got really frustrated and borderline angry with people that I like and care about. This group (with varying degrees) reacted to my comment about the need to enact isolation measures and such as "panic" and "overreaction". After some thought, I understood it: individually these actions might be seen as "panic" and "overreaction", but the point that struck me hardest was: intelligent, well-educated people, with strong mathematical backgrounds, are still prey to the dilemma above and lean heavily toward the individual considerations even in the presence of evidence that the collective considerations are paramount here.

"People are not stupid"

This is a saying that guided me for a long time now. Not because I think it says something about the moral nature of all people, but because when I accept this phrase my behavior is transformed. From blaming and labeling people I shift towards seeking and understanding the causes of "stupid" behaviors: wrong ideas and assumptions.

So what is the wrong idea here? And I believe it must be a strong one, because many reputable scientists, doctors, etc. are trying really hard to have governments and the population to hear their admonishments, with limited success.

Am I exaggerating here? Let's check. One friend from the group I mentioned sent the link to this excellent Epidemic Simulator: https://gabgoh.github.io/COVID/index.html

I did a few scenarios to keep my own assumptions and ideas in check. I selected two, with data I am familiar with to illustrate this:

Let's take Brasil as an example, and see what consequences of the decision of the government announced circa March 13th to close down schools on March 23rd, instead of the following Monday (March 16th). We are looking here on the impact of delaying 7 days a decision considered good and necessary.

Let's assume that all measures were also delayed and synchronized with this one. And that the measures are successful to reduce the rate of infection (R 0) to something below 1 (this means the outbreak dies down in time). What is the death count in both scenarios?

Scenario 1 - schools closed March 23rd, all other measures taken. R0 = 0.73 afterwards.

The death count is on the lower left: 2,396. To make it more tangible this is more than double the deaths by Dengue fever in the last three years in the country. And this is only in the 200 days of the simulation, as you can see the fatalities line above does not reach not zero in day 200.

I am not sure the healthcare system will be able to handle the peak of 10,029 hospitalizations either.

Let's check the second scenario, one that the decisions would be carried on the following Monday:

Scenario 2 - schools closed March 16th, all other measures taken. R0 = 0.73 afterwards.

We see a marked drop in the death toll: 1,084 (less than half) and a much lower impact on the healthcare system: a peak of 4,469 hospitalizations

False logic and false hope

Some discussions go on about false logic and or false hope.

For instance: "Italy is being hit the most because it is an 'old' country". Here there is a problem in the logic:

It seems right, but the problem is in the conclusions. A high proportion does not mean high absolute numbers.

Example: Brasil has 9.5% of people with 65+ years. It seems It should be less affected, right? Wrong. Let's calculate actual people instead of percentages:

Italy has around 13.5 million people with 65+ years. Brasil (with its larger population) has 20.3 million in the same age group.

Now let's look at how the disease spreads: it uses humans as vectors. And younger people (64 and less) move around, possibly contaminating the high-risk group of 65+. So now the picture is different:

Obviously, there are some rough simplifications here (assuming the rate of transmission is the same, measures, etc.) but you see how we can be deceived by percentages and other "respectful" looking statistics.

The core problem - why?

After checking our own assumptions and concluding that we are not exaggerating, what should we do?

It is time to circle back and see what is the reason that leads people - almost always - to ignore effects on others when compared with effects on themselves. The problem lies with the thinking behind this:

When we look at part of the dilemma that states that the mandatory (or best) course of action to survive and thrive is to prioritize themselves we have a strange feeling.

This feeling comes from our minds noticing the widespread contradictions in this. If the best way to ensure our success is really prioritizing ourselves then we would not have organizations, companies, associations, clubs, countries, etc. All these are examples of groups of humans achieving more than the sum of individual contributions. The synergy present in all human endeavors is apparent and getting stronger by the day.

There are very few activities in our global society where several unconnected individuals outperform a group working together.

Now if we accept this argument then the conclusion is "everyone is stupid for not acting upon this knowledge!". Well, I cannot accept this (see reason above). So let's keep digging.

Why, even when faced with blatant examples of synergy superiority, people still act as if they were independent entities without links to others?

To synnergy or not to synnergy?

The problem here is: to understand a group of independent agents we can understand each one and add up the effects to see the whole. But to understand a group of connected agents we need to understand each and all the relationships among them. This is orders of magnitude more complex than understanding the independent ones.

But we, as a species, are quite clever, right? Yes, but not in the right way. The human brain does have several limitations, and some very clever people have tackled these. My personal favorite Herbert A. Simon and the Bounded Rationality theory. In essence, he states we have three major cognitive limitations and therefore we don't walk around trying to make optimal (meaning the best alternative always) decisions. We do walk around trying to do better decisions along time. Period. This is called "satisficing" by Simon.

This would not be a problem if our brains had not the habit of considering themselves (and us by extension) better than reality. This is not trivial: in many places in our history we needed this, and given certain links like the human immune system and our emotional state, it serves important purposes.

If you don't see this use this example: the eye has a spot in the retina where the blood vessels go through. The same spot has a massive number of neurons converging on the optic nerve.

This spot also has very few visual receptors and therefore is a blind spot.

Do you notice a dark disc in your field of vision? Even with just one eye open?

We don't see this spot because our brain "patches" up the image continuously. This serves us well in many occasions.

Except when we combine this "high self-opinion" with our cognitive limitations. This occurs mostly in complex situations. And the human web of interrelations is quite complex.

Now we understand the problem: we cannot deal with the raw complexity of the world we created, but we think we can! The result is that we employ lousy and ineffective strategies like divide and conquer. These strategies in practice ignore the relationships, that is the impact of our actions onto others and vice versa.

The Solution: taming complexity and living for the social

How can we challenge the need to prioritize ourselves? If we can understand the effects of our actions on others and vice versa with the same effort as we understand the effects of our actin on ourselves then the problem is solved.

But this seems a flying pig. How can we have any hope in doing this when the complexity of our interconnected society keeps growing?

Scientists hold the key. It is a well-known fact that the more interconnected a system is the fewer degrees of freedom it has. Degrees of freedom determine how hard it is to model, predict and ultimately understand a system. The fewer degrees of freedom the less complicated the system is to understand.

Here we come to the real breakthrough: if we were to describe a complex, highly interconnected system, it would be hard and long work. But to understand how the same complex, highly interconnected system, works it is much easier!

In social systems the mechanics are the same, it is impossible to predict the individual behavior of each person, but great movements and the ranges of such movements are much easier.

Constraints and leverage points

The knowledge of how to simplify human-based systems is not new, but it is not widespread yet. One of the great thinkers in this arena is the late Eli Goldratt, the inventor of the Theory of Constraints and famous author.

Constraints are a cognitive trick to simplify complex systems. The standard example is a factory:

In this (overly simplified) example: to get to the finished good we must process the raw materials in sequential operations: A to D. Each with an average output capacity measured in units per hour. A quick inspection shows that the slowest operation is B at 7 units per hour.

Under the idea of divide-and-conquer, we might ask all four resources to work at 100% capacity. Then a few things will happen: A will produce a big pile of intermediate parts before B. While C and D will have to slow to the pace of B and eventually find good excuses as to why they are not going at 100%. The lead time (the time to go from raw materials to finished goods) will grow, attention will be spread thin and overall production will dip.

This bizarre, albeit very common, behavior ignores one simple fact: the pace of the whole factory is dictated by the pace of one resource: B. This is the constraint (sometimes called bottleneck, but they are not exactly the same) of the system.

Just by identifying the constraint of the system we are able to simplify it much easier. Without getting bogged down in the details we can evaluate all actions in each part of the system and the impacts of the same actions on the constraint. This is enough to tame the complexity and understand the global impact of local actions.

The constraints are also leverage points. If the factory in the example wastes the capacity of B then the whole system suffers, and if it is able to extract better value from B's capacity (i.e. producing higher-value products) then the whole system performs better.

Constraints and pandemics

Here we come to the case at hand: how can individuals, governments, and organizations react to the Covid-19 pandemic? It starts with identifying a suitable Constraint. In this case, we can envision two systems: the response system (hospitals, clinics, doctors, etc. responding to medical conditions) and prevention system (laboratories, research centers, etc. devising ways to prevent medical conditions).

In this article, I'll focus on the response system. This system is a flow of diagnostic - treatment - discharge steps. When we talk about acute symptoms and/or an epidemic (and pandemic) hospitals receive the majority of the caseload. Also as the Covid-19 leads to a significant number of hospitalizations, we can choose Hospital capacity as Constraint.

What actions help us get more out of the Hospital finite capacity? Most are already been discussed in the media: delay the spread by reducing interactions etc. But if you think of any other action now you can check its impact on the global system: just ask yourself: will this help use better the Hospital capacity or not? Notice that "use better" does not always mean more patients through the system, sometimes it may be patients in more dangerous condition first, etc. The same will go for day-to-day situations: if you decide to visit an older relative, will this impact Hospital capacity? Normally no, nowadays very likely.

Another example: an elder care facility: should it wait for government directions or forbid visitations right away. Knowing what we know about the environment and Covid-19 (ease of transmission, human vectors, the likelihood of human contact in visits, etc.) the conclusion is very clear: forbid visits now and then check recommendations later.

Main Danger and Challenges

What is then the main danger we have? Besides the current problems and toll of this Pandemic the greatest risk is to rever to local (individual-focused) thinking and forget how practical and effective it can be to understand and act knowing the global as well as the local impact of our actions.

As another example, the conditions that gave origin to the Covid-19 pandemic are part of our lives now. And the likelihood that we will have other pandemics like it is quite high. We must be prepared not only in the response system, but also in the prevention system.

Our challenge as a species is to apply this Global-oriented thinking in every aspect of our lives and benefit handsomely from it. If not we'll pay a steep price for each opportunity to learn this again and again.