The Wiki Man

History records many well conceived and apparently logical grand plans for the betterment of mankind. Sadly such ideas almost always fail. Why is this? One possibility is that they fail precisely because they are logical. The dictates of logic require the existence of universally applicable laws. But humans, unlike atoms, are not consistent enough in their affinities for such laws to hold very broadly. For example we are not remotely logical in whom we choose to help. Will wealthy Germans help poorer Germans? Yup. Greeks, however? No chance. Utilitarianism makes perfect sense — right up to the point you try to apply it. As Orwell said, ‘To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

In the shadow of the Shard, not far from Borough Market, is a £1 billion public artwork, an allegorical sculpture entitled ‘What is wrong with the world today’ by the reclusive wunderkind Netwór Krail. It was officially unveiled by the Duke of Cambridge earlier this month. The reason you may not have read about this monumental piece is that most of the press coverage failed to notice this structure was a landmark in experiential art. They mostly used its banal official name: the new London Bridge station. Next time you visit this ‘station’, I urge you to appreciate this installation for what it really is — a brilliant, scathing commentary on the modern age.

Nearly ten years ago, a lorry driver known only as ‘Michael Harry K’ adopted an extreme response to combating what he saw as declining standards on the autobahns: he started shooting at other vehicles. In a four-year spree he fired around 700 rounds at cars and trucks before his arrest in June 2013. What helped him evade justice for so long was the same thing that prevents us learning his full name: German privacy laws. Trucks pay tolls on autobahns, and so CCTV records the number plates of vehicles passing through toll booths. After the first 30 shootings, it could have been a routine procedure to identify the one vehicle in the right places at the right times. But the police were not allowed to see the data. It’s hard to imagine this happening in Britain.

When I was ten, the two things we all expected to enjoy by 2020 were flying cars and videotelephony. What never occurred to us was that we might successfully invent one of these things and then fail to use it. Yet that has largely been the case with video conferencing. Is its day still to come? Will there be some tipping point when we start to hold virtual meetings routinely? Or will video conferencing turn out to be one of those technologies whose promise is never fulfilled: something which ‘has a great future — and always will’. I don’t know. Certainly it suffered from being oversold too soon.

At the risk of sounding like Jean Baudrillard, I would like to suggest that the internet revolution has not yet taken place. So far, lots of very clever people have performed amazing feats of technical ingenuity. But for the most part our collective behaviour has so far failed to change enough to truly benefit us. Rather than making us freer, more relaxed and more efficient, in general everyone seems busier, more distracted and more tense. Unfortunately, technology is a bit like Hitler: it doesn’t know when to stop. No sooner has it annexed the Sudetenland than it starts invading Czechoslovakia. The world might be happier if Silicon Valley were put on a two-day week, to give us — and our social norms — time to catch up.

Nine years ago, before Cambridge Analytica existed, I caught wind of a research project at Cambridge involving the online measurement of the ‘big five’ personality dimensions. These are usually listed by the acronym OCEAN or CANOE: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness and Extraversion. I made a note to go to Cambridge to learn more but, being low on conscientiousness, I never got around to it. Perhaps I dodged a bullet by not getting involved. When people say ‘It’s the early bird that catches the worm’, I always reply, ‘Yes, but what about the early worm?’ Besides, does personality alone predict behaviour? Perhaps not as much as Cambridge Analytica promised.

The maximum amount you can save in an ISA for the tax year 2017-2018 is now £20,000. The maximum annual pension contribution is £40,000. Counterintuitively, these huge allowances are actually a disincentive for ordinary people to save. With a £5,000 ISA maximum, a modest saver had an impetus to save each year for fear of missing out; with an ISA ceiling of £20,000, anyone can postpone saving until next year. But you don’t have to be a Marxist to wonder why a household which can save £60,000-120,000 a year is in need of extra help from the state. Figures released this year by HM Revenue & Customs forecast that tax relief on pensions will cost £24.1 billion, with a further £16.

Every now and then I try to invent a new scientific unit. I’ll never come up with anything as good as the millihelen — a unit of beauty sufficient to launch one ship — or the Sheppey, which is a distance of approximately seven-eighths of a mile defined as ‘the minimum distance at which sheep remain picturesque’. But I do have hopes for the tedion, which measures the half-life of boredom: it denotes the time you must spend in a location to enjoy a 50 per cent chance of overhearing someone say something interesting or funny. On a train to Cardiff or Manchester, a tedion is probably around five to ten minutes. On a Home Counties commuter train it runs into days — or in London, the conversational nadir of the UK, weeks.

There may be a very simple evolutionary reason why water does not really taste of anything, as I learned from the psychophysicist Mark Changizi. Pure water has no taste because our taste buds have been calibrated, very sensibly, not to notice it. For a few million years, the most important contribution taste buds made to survival were to detect things in water that weren’t water: the very things, in short, which might indicate that the water wasn’t safe to drink. If we had evolved perception so that water tasted like Rioja or Dr Pepper, the sensory overload might have overpowered that hint of dead sheep from a rotting carcass 100 yards upstream: our taste buds are calibrated with water as the base line, the better to notice things which shouldn’t be in it.

There exist in the annals of salesmanship certain ideas that are both highly immoral and wickedly clever. Before P. T. Barnum attached his name to circuses, he ran Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan. From 1841 until its destruction by fire in 1865, this received more than 38 million visitors, each paying 25c. The entry fee entitled visitors to stay all day; congestion often prevented new paying visitors from being admitted, so to hasten traffic to the exits, Barnum placed signs throughout reading ‘To The Egress’ or, according to some reports, ‘The Great Egress’. Enticed by the prospect of seeing what they imagined was some exotic bird, less literate guests followed these signs through a door and promptly found themselves locked out on the street.

Recently the NHS postponed a large number of non-urgent operations to cope with what is known as the ‘annual winter crisis’. Naturally, this outcome was treated as a scandal in the press, and there were predictable calls for Jeremy Hunt to resign. But the fact that non-urgent operations are postponed is not by definition bad. It might be evidence that the NHS is working well. Or at least that it is doing what it is supposed to do, which is to deploy necessarily finite resources on the basis of patient need, rather than some other criterion — such as profitability or ability to pay. Making people wait for less urgent operations isn’t a bug of the NHS; it’s a feature.

One of the funniest passages of writing I have read in the past few years appears within the pages of Richard Thaler’s memoir Misbehaving. He describes what happens when the University of Chicago economics faculty moves to a new location. The economists simply have to agree among themselves who will occupy each office in the new building. Now in theory, at any rate, this should be a breeze. You have a group of people who should be among the most rational in the world; their discipline, economics, defines itself as dedicated to the study of the ‘allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity’: here is a problem tailor-made for economists to solve. It was, as you can imagine, a fiasco.

About 30 years ago, BT introduced a telephone handset with enormous keys. It was intended for people with serious visual impairment. Unexpectedly, it became their bestselling phone. There is a reason for this. The millions of people who wear spectacles or contact lenses typically remove them at night, making the normal tiny keys impossible to read on a bedside phone. Things designed specifically for people with disabilities often end up being valuable to many more people than originally planned. Most of us are effectively disabled some of the time. Wheelchair ramps at airports and stations are not only useful if you are in a wheelchair, they are also useful for wheeling heavy luggage.

At last. And just what you’ve been waiting for. The official Wiki Man guide to the best gadgets and gizmos for giving this Christmas. The Philips AirFryer, from £70-ish. Spectator readers may remember a craze for cooking things via a French method called sous-vide. Using this senseless technology, you could cook soggy food for days at low temperatures by warming it gently in a colostomy bag; handy if you fancied a couple of days off work with botulism, but frankly bugger all use for anything else. The AirFryer is the opposite of sous-vide: it isn’t French and is actually useful. It quickly makes food hot and crispy as God intended, not with fat but with superheated air. Everyone who buys one becomes an evangelist. Available from Amazon and some tax-compliant retailers.

One dietary fad that never made sense to me was the campaign against the consumption of eggs. Now call me an old Darwinist, but here we are having spent a few million years evolving into a bald monkey with prehensile thumbs, perfectly optimised as an egg-stealing machine, and yet the digestion of an omelette somehow came as a horrible shock to our cardiovascular system. What next, I wondered. Perhaps they’ll discover that 45 per cent of cows are allergic to grass, or that sharks are largely sea-food intolerant. And it seems that the opprobrium directed at eggs was mostly wrong. It was based on the assumption that, since some cholesterol is bad, and since eggs contain it, ergo the consumption of every single egg was a stepping-stone to the grave.

It took a spate of air disasters in the late 1970s, in particular the Portland crash of United Airlines Flight 173, for aviation experts to pay attention to something called Crew Resource Management. This is a set of procedures first conceived by Nasa with the aim of minimising human error in flight. UA173 — where the pilots had spent so long fixated with a dodgy landing wheel that they failed to notice they’d run out of fuel — was one of a growing number of incidents in which disaster arose from failures in crew interaction. As with the Tenerife airport disaster and the Air Florida crash in 1982, there was no shortage of experience on the flight deck. The root cause lay not in the behaviour of the individuals but in the interplay between them.

I hate to tell you this, but every time you watch television you are being duped. In fact there are only three accurate things you will ever see on television. These are the colours red, green and blue. Each pixel on a screen can transmit three colours only. If blue alone is illuminated, the screen is blue. And it really is blue. But TV yellow is a big fat lie. It looks yellow. But it isn’t really yellow. It’s a mixture of red and green light which hacks our optical perception so we think we are seeing yellow. That’s because humans, indeed all higher apes, are mostly trichromats. We have three different types of cones in the retina, each sensitive to a different part of the colour spectrum.

I love anything open late at night. Never mind ‘the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations’; even mundane activities like filling up with petrol become enjoyably Edward Hopperish after midnight. Often the places are so quiet you wonder why they bother opening at all. But it is a strange psychological fact that opening a shop 24 hours a day often pays, even if nobody ever buys anything between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. Somehow the knowledge that the shop never closes means people are far more likely to shop there at conventional times. This quirk also explains why the most successful coach firm between Oxford and London runs services all night: not because people really want to travel between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., but because they like to know that they can.

You can try to change people’s minds, but this is difficult. You can bribe people to change their behaviour, but it’s expensive. Far simpler is to make the new behaviour easy and enjoyable in and of itself. Recently, colleagues of mine were asked how to promote the habit of recycling domestic refuse. They explained there was no need to mention the environmental benefits at all. ‘Just make sure everyone has two pedal bins, not one.’ Regardless of people’s attitudes to the environment, what really matters, as Martin Luther King might have said, is not the colour of their politics but the contents of their kitchen. To encourage pension saving, the government spends more than £20 billion annually in tax rebates.

I expect you’ve already noticed it, but in case you’ve been living in a cave or an economics faculty for the past ten years, I’ll repeat it. Goods are not like people. Goods only move wherever they are needed. They don’t come laden with an attachment to a homeland or a social network. Your Bosch dishwasher doesn’t pine for its washing-machine mates back in Stuttgart. Your Ikea sofa doesn’t claim benefits. If you buy a Mercedes, you don’t suddenly find two Audis and a Volkswagen turning up on your drive claiming to be close relatives and demanding to live in your garage. So, looked at dispassionately, the principle that the free movement of goods is somehow linked with the free movement of people is quite an odd idea.