Can you Avoid Becoming a Victim of Irony?

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg, Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing the Ozymandias effect.

Speaker B: 00:00:25

was it: 2015

Speaker A: 00:02:46

Yeah well I mean just first off not build statues to yourself might be a good one but Chris you

Speaker C: 00:02:52

look like you want to jump in. Yeah well I mean it's there is an element of inevitability about it I think and you know it's the with this particular David Cameron incident the problem that somebody like David Cameron has is that you can't then look at the counterfactuals right so you can't sort of say okay we'll just go back in time and make Ed Miliband the prime minister and see what happens and you know it may have been even more chaotic at that point so there's there's this issue of you know counterfactuals there's also the issue of the benefit of hindsight right you know I mean you at the time you obviously aren't gifted with what what comes after you and so you know you're not aware that it's going to become ironic and I think it's worth sort of saying you know what kind of irony we're talking about here I mean irony generally or at least previously has been used to to refer to sort of more dramatic irony and its use in in you know poems like Ozymandias by Shelley where you're talking about a discrepancy between the the words as written or the words as said and the meaning interpreted by the the audience and that that play between them in this circumstance we're talking about situational irony where somebody's actions or somebody's words are given a different meaning by the passage of of history and events coming to pass and that's what you don't know at the time and you know quite aside from the I mean we talked at length previously about schadenfreude quite aside from the the satisfaction of seeing somebody get their comeuppance in this way there's there's something else at work here about how not to become the victim of of of what comes to pass after you

Speaker D: 00:05:04

after you act. Peter, I found a nice list of ironic quotes on wiki quotes that all many of which were to do with technology and many and most of them had this very similar format in that I can't imagine x so x must x will never happen so very much born from an availability bias it's sort of I can't I can't think of a way this could happen or I can't imagine how that's going to involve flight as well in one of your quotes so well yeah I don't know yes so there were things about flight there were things about space travel there were things about the internet

Speaker A: 00:05:47

things about computers maybe stuff about the beetles as well I don't know that there might

Speaker D: 00:05:51

have been a beetle one I didn't see that one but yeah lots of lots of sort of very bold statements by many of them were kind of leaders in their field but often born out of a sort of an argument from ignorance that just because I can't imagine it therefore it must be unlikely to happen I am

Speaker B: 00:06:10

gonna I'm gonna say there's a distinction here because yes there are lots of people who've made hilariously bad technology forecasts but I I think the key with the David Cameron situation and it's not unrelated with Ozymandias but is that the thing that happens that proves you wrong is in some way related to actions you took and I think that's that's what is separates the David Cameron thing he is trying to convince people to vote for him right the chaos and the and the the all the kind of yeah the chaos that that we have suffered happened in part because of him tweeting things about how life was going to be chaotic if Ed Miliband won so I so I think it's more this is this is more than just making incorrect predictions because that's easy to fix right you can you can get away from being wrong about things by simply not predicting anything or being or just being uncertain all the time but the key thing here is when you are trying to achieve something like Ozymandias was trying to show people how powerful he was and David Cameron is trying to convince people to to go with him and boxers when they do all the smack talk before about and then lose you know they're they're they're trying to have a psychological effect and that's why it works so well when it goes wrong yeah it's exact it's exactly that right

Speaker C: 00:07:30

people were going to think in: 2019

Speaker D: 00:09:03

rhetorical throwaway kind of political statement it's just it's just there's no informational value in it whatsoever but to David Cameron's credit he's never tried being an Egyptian pharaoh

Speaker A: 00:09:12

so he might be really good at that he might be great yeah um yeah okay well look I don't

Speaker C: 00:09:18

know what to say where do you want to go well I mean there's some interesting stuff on um on irony in general right so I mean um you know for example uh there's an irony within the poem itself is that um Shelley's poem helped to um sort of give rise to the um the the trend in in uh 19th century England for um Egyptology and you know led to um Ramesses being arguably led to Ramesses being more prominent than he had been previously and sort of being a bit rediscovered so um you know there are all sorts of unintended uh consequences and you know perhaps exploring that that issue of um decisions that we take statements that we make things we try and influence and subsequent unintended consequences of those um of those types of yeah I mean I because I think the

Speaker B: 00:10:24

the uh irony is one of these things that pedants like to pick up people on for you misusing but because I there's a bunch of definitions of different kinds of irony that don't seem superficially that related um you've got sort of uh your cosmic irony which I think is um when fate conspires to make uh unfortunate things happen um dramatic irony which is where the protagonists in a play don't know things that you know as the audience uh while you're watching events unfold um uh sort of romantic irony where you're where you're uh you're being self-effacing essentially you're saying you know it's kind of being self-critical um situational irony which again is similar to what we're talking about where there's disparity between intended and actual outcomes um and verbal irony which is what people mostly use it to mean which is where you say something but mean another there is a connection though between uh nearly all of these things which is precisely this issue of there being two meanings behind the thing whether that thing is a statement or an outcome you know where um you know the the situation means two different things depending on the audience so Fowler uh Fowler's in in the Fowler's dictionary of modern usage in English usage it says irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience and I think yeah so I mean it's it's it's obviously an interesting feature that people

Speaker C: 00:11:48

have focused on um and I think within sort of decisions um you know the interesting bit about irony is is where you get the discrepancy that that double meaning I suppose where you've got the decision that is made and the outcome that happens so the decision is made with a um an optimal goal in mind right you're trying to achieve a particular thing but it turns out differently in a way that only humans really can sort of determine when that is ironic so some some examples are um like you know um the the original um the reason gunpowder uh was discovered in in 7th century China they were trying to make medicine they were trying to make an elixir of life and they discovered this by-product which then goes on to be an elixir of death an elixir of death exactly and in fact it's you know it's it's um original Chinese name uh meant meant fire medicine um you know and there are other sort of um examples of that where so so for me irony and decision making and and sort of politics and in that context is about trying to trying to achieve one goal and having another outcome occur which is in some way ironic what you know we we know what that means but we can't quite exactly define it it's sort of amusing in some in some

Speaker A: 00:13:20

I mean look standing up for people like uh David Cameron and Ramesses um these are the people who were talking about because they tried to do something and you know it for whatever reason there was this this this other outcome that we're talking about and I guess it's similar to that um that phrase um uh that quote show me show me the man who never made a mistake and I'll show you the man who made nothing right so I guess that's sort of just sticking up yeah I think there's

Speaker B: 00:13:47

I think there is a um that that there is an interesting angle here about speech acts like where you are not just conveying information but you're intending to have an effect uh sort of what I was alluding to with with David Cameron trying to make people vote for him is that sometimes you in order to to enhance the success of something you're trying to do you have to beef it up with statements that are inherently going to look uh ironic when if you fail you know so so I feel like you know given that speech acts are a real thing and that you know sometimes you do need to say things you know if you like this is part of leadership yeah let's try and you know get people's morale up by saying hey we're really going to give these guys a good seeing to team you know and then you lose it's like what's his face in game of

Speaker A: 00:14:33

thrones giving a fantastic uh speech um what's his name the one who gets his balls cut off in the end um what not little finger no not little finger who's the who's the he's effectively a hostage um with the on Greyjoy yeah and when he gets betrayed by his own people um Greyjoys no no no no oh yeah it is actually yeah it's I think he's holding I'm so bad with all the names

Speaker B: 00:15:00

but this is not going to work on radio but you know the bit I mean no not really where he gives

Speaker A: 00:15:05

this I think he okay so first of all they've captured wherever it was that the Starks live what's that called Winterfell right so they and they want to hold on to it and there's about and they and he's done that through betrayal and he's only got about 20 soldiers and there's about 500 outside and he gives this wonderful stirring speech um and um at the end of it all his soldiers go hooray but it's all agreed one of them just bangs him on the head and and and they go it's a pity that we had to do that because that was a great speech um but um I digress so yeah

Speaker C: 00:15:41

well I mean it's not dissimilar to um uh to uh George Bush declaring victory in Iraq uh you know um highly prematurely uh and as Nick said you know it's about trying to trying to achieve an effect what so I mean one way you can guard against that is is by not speaking with certainty right by saying well you know it it looks like the worst of it's behind us but um you know but it could go badly wrong you know nobody wants to hear that right you know that's a good point because if

Speaker B: 00:16:14

you look at like Churchill's really good speeches they aren't triumphalist yeah they're the opposite of this where things are going to get worse before they get better you know if the Nazis had invaded yeah imagine how ridiculed I don't know because I mean actually a lot of them are you know we will fight them on the beach we'll never surrender blah blah blah I mean it would have been I suppose maybe if we'd have caved in and uh right and his piece of paper okay perfect so so there's a great

Speaker C: 00:16:37

you know ironic uh historically ironic statement so um so look where do we go from this there is

Speaker A: 00:16:43

something I want to ask about I don't think we have we finished with what we want to say about irony I'm not sure if we've quite got there yet we've well I I think I think the thing is right

Speaker C: 00:16:52

when you make a when you make a statement as a leader in these kind of circumstances there's always the chance that you're going to you're going you want to give clarity and you want to give certainty to people so you you you stretch the boundaries of of um of of probability that you would normally uh act on but you're trying to shift the probability of you being successful upwards by giving everybody else around you clarity and certainty right but there is obviously a chance that you will be proven wrong by history and once you're proven wrong once nobody's gonna buy David Cameron's stability and uh you know lack of chaos ever again right he's now widely ridiculed so it's kind of like a you know a one-shot trick right um but uh in order to to guard against that um I I guess you know you need to only use it it's it's kind of like the nuclear option you only use it in extremists and you use it when you've got a pretty damn good chance of succeeding I think those are probably the the two criteria so that you don't end up with uh historical leaders

Speaker A: 00:18:03

out there but no I think you you've maybe you've also got to do it when there's almost no chance of succeeding um thinking again back to Churchill and his wartime um speeches and his mother of all battles well yeah I mean you've kind of got to do it you've got it if it's the one thing that rhetoric might bring everyone along with you anyway um I just want to return to one thing we briefly touched upon which is counterfactual history um so um as we all know it is in fact um Brexit is Ed Miliband's fault right yeah because he stood against his brother in the internal leadership election for a Labour Party had he not done so um it's likely that his brother David Miliband would have won and David Miliband widely sort of viewed as a kind of credible politician would quite likely there's a very good chance he would have then gone on to win the general election

Speaker B: 00:18:59

but also he might have attracted more of those UKIP votes the people who defected from Labour to UKIP might have stayed with Labour and so David Cameron wouldn't have to worry so much about UKIP

Speaker A: 00:19:09

that he had to promise a referendum right there we go yeah um and and we wouldn't have ended up with Brexit or Trump or ISIS yes I want to talk about counterfactual history I want to talk about maybe we can each think of an example of of a counterfactualism yeah um the yeah that that

Speaker B: 00:19:28

tickles us a little bit uh well it is uh well I I blame the Mongols for for um uh for the modern world for for well for World War II particularly go for it well it's just if it weren't for the

Speaker A: 00:19:41

Mongols oh is this going to end up with First World War Second World War but anyway yeah we

Speaker B: 00:19:45

always end up there well if it's just if it weren't for them the Mongols basically totally devastated Asia and left this big vacuum that Russia expanded into that Russia being a power um is what meant that uh Germany couldn't win the First World War and Germany not winning the First World and all the other stuff that happened in the intervening like six six or seven hundred years um uh but in particular it meant that you know with Russia there that Germany couldn't easily win the First World War and that meant that uh you know we had the Second World War and then the Cold War so if it hadn't been for the Mongols we wouldn't have we wouldn't be worrying about Vladimir

Speaker A: 00:20:18

Putin bloody Mongols bloody Mongols yeah that's my one uh like it I like it uh Nick or not Nick

Speaker C: 00:20:27

um Chris or Peter so there are two two things I suppose one is um I you know the there are lots of counterfictual uh counterfactual um histories written about um the Nazis winning winning the yeah um and uh you know they they um always sort of uh involve you know Britain being being occupied in in some way uh and you know it being miserable uh in the country and um I think you know while that is true uh at least our trains would have run on time

Speaker A: 00:21:07

um yes there we go nice Peter okay you keep thinking um so one counterfactual that I haven't really sort of fully played out conclusion but let's see where it goes is there was a pope I forget which one he was um who divided the world into two because he was essentially being petitioned by the Spanish and the Portuguese who uh who were the preeminent powers at the time so I guess we're talking about 15th century something like that maybe a little bit later um and so he divided the world into two and and so the line of longitude everything to the west uh was for the Spanish everything to the east was for Portuguese and hence why you get Portuguese colonies in places where you wouldn't expect in in the Middle East and and in places like uh in India in Goa and in Macau and and in East Indies these sorts of places and why West why essentially South America is is Spanish speaking except for Brazil um and the reason why is and there's arguments that there's theories that actually the Portuguese knew about this that there was an island was discovered that happened that everyone was thought it was the east of this line but actually turned out to be a huge bloody great continent going to the west um and because of this line the Portuguese were able to keep this island and then country and then go even further and that place became Brazil no and if that hadn't happened I'm a big fan of football and one of the most beautiful things that yeah and actually not just football but culture but what Brazilian culture has brought to the world so in terms of its football its music its art none of that would have existed it all just been just usual kind of uh Spanish American kind of culture so so that's my favorite counterfactual I'm struggling to think

Speaker D: 00:22:51

of a tech example um because I kind of I generally with a lot of technical things like you could argue well if we hadn't had the tech mobile we wouldn't have had radar and therefore we wouldn't have had um microwave ovens but I think that people would generally have got there anyway because with tech it's often driven by the physics and the physics is explored just for curiosity's sake and so if it hadn't happened that way it would have happened another way well

Speaker C: 00:23:15

look at the um look at the Manhattan project you know I mean the the resources would never have

Speaker D: 00:23:21

been turned over but it might have taken longer but we would have got nuclear weapons and nuclear

Speaker B: 00:23:26

power eventually I think this is a whole different podcast technological determinism yes yeah okay

Speaker A: 00:23:33

we're gonna we're gonna stop there uh so thank you as always for listening to the cognitive engineering podcast I'm Fraser McGruer we've been here with Chris Wragg Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights until next time goodbye