How faulty imagery protects unproductive frames and hides real evidence
Scurvy
Anyone who has read the Wide Wide Sea or The Wager will know that – until Captain James Cook was able to correctly apprehend that scurvy resulted from a lack of fruits and vegetables – this seafarer’s disease wreaked havoc on most long voyages.
A question to Chatbot GPT reveals:
Before the cause of scurvy was understood, people had various misconceptions about what led to the disease. Before the discovery of vitamin C’s role in preventing scurvy, theories about its cause were based on incorrect ideas about air quality, food spoilage, lack of exercise, or humoral imbalances. It wasn’t until the 18th century, with James Lind’s experiment on citrus fruits, that the connection between diet and scurvy was made clearer.
To the modern reader, the solution to preventing scurvy is cheap, easy and obvious but the speculation and imagery surrounding those suffering scurvy before the 1750’s was lurid, wild and imprecise. Few thought about the wild celery the shipwrecked seafarers scrounged in the fields of southern Chile as an important reason that the Wager’s passengers began to revive on land. And Captain Cook was the only long venturing sea captain never to lose a seafarer’s life to scurvy. He was the first Captain to deduce the proper frame of reference.
Hyponatremia
In 2016, I escorted my 93 year old mother to the emergency room of Michael Garron hospital in Toronto. She was in great distress. This was just one of 54 emergency room visits she made between 2010 and 2022.
Her symptoms on this visit were nausea and vomiting, headaches, fatigue, muscle cramps, confusion and disorientation, irritability, dizziness, loss of energy and what seemed to be mild seizures. In our minds, this was old age on steroids; no other explanation was needed or warranted.
She had gone to the emergency room before but a new doctor told us for the first time that what she was seeing was a sodium deficiency – an unusual diagnosis for someone who did not have specific known disorders leading to the deficiency.
I groaned in realization. Since my father had been restricted to a salt free diet following cardiac surgery, my mother had followed suit. She read labels. She avoided anything with salt with a vengeance. She totally changed her own diet. And she did it for a decade and a half.
None of us, her relatives and friends, made the sodium connection even though it was as glaringly obvious as the Chilean celery. Our frame of reference (our base rate or paradigm) was old age, not essential nutrients.
Once again the one solution for nonlethal sodium deficiency – a condition called hyponatremia – is cheap, easy and obvious: start sprinkling salt on your food.
But like the answer to scurvy, the lurid imagery of old age related physical failure held sway and with an improper frame of reference, the obvious evidence remained hidden.
Falling dominos
I also asked Chatbot GPT about flaws in the ‘falling domino’ theory of ‘spreading communism’, a fabulous example of an image of upending a domino ‘stood on its end’ close enough to set a cascade of falling dominos if they are aligned sufficiently close to one another.
The Domino Theory was a Cold War concept suggesting that if one country in a region fell to communism, neighboring countries would follow, much like a row of dominoes. While this theory influenced U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Southeast Asia, its flaws became evident over time for several key reasons.
It was flawed because it overestimated the appeal of communism, underestimated the importance of local factors, and misjudged the complexity of global politics. While it shaped U.S. foreign policy decisions—leading to costly interventions like the Vietnam War—it did not accurately predict how nations would respond to the spread of communism.
Example: Vietnam fought a long struggle for independence, first from France and then from the U.S., but its motivations were rooted in nationalism as much as communist ideology. After the war, Vietnam didn’t spark a wave of communist takeovers in Southeast Asia.
All the reasoned analysis in the world could not overcome the image and the analogy of the falling domino and the United States and its allies destroyed millions of lives in the pursuit of a destructive foreign policy in the 30 years following WWII.
The falling domino imagery stood in a long line of images responsible for a frame of reference capable of hiding evidence and ruining lives.
Two of the enduring theories that permeate welfare to work policies are the ‘make the leap’ and ‘bootstrap yourself up’ images of successfully moving from receipt of income assistance to employment.
Let’s take each in turn.
Making the leap
Making the leap is an image of someone quitting welfare around the same time as they get work or enter into some other self sustaining activity such as a paid course of study.
The frame of reference is that recipients are fully resourced to meet all their needs but are essentially sitting around engaged in unproductive activity.
There are plenty of examples of people making the leap. When they do, they have all the support they need from friends and family; they often have money waiting for them and most have superior educations and capacities including confidence, persuasiveness, good health, a clean record and history of good jobs.
They are just down on their luck but have the capacity to leap into self sufficiency.
For most people receiving assistance, they do not have these assets or life situation. For them, making the leap is like leaping into the Grand Canyon without a parachute. Here is what I gleaned from Chatbot GPT:
The image of people “making the leap off welfare” in welfare policymaking suggests a quick, dramatic transition from dependence on welfare to self-sufficiency. While this metaphor may be intended to evoke optimism, it carries several issues that can mislead or oversimplify the complexities of welfare and the paths to economic independence. Here’s what’s wrong with this image:
The image of “leaping off welfare” implies that transitioning from welfare dependency to self-sufficiency is a simple, quick act. In reality, for many people, the process is gradual and often fraught with challenges such as finding stable employment, overcoming health issues, or securing affordable housing.
The metaphor doesn’t recognize the role that ongoing support, such as job training, healthcare, and affordable housing, plays in helping people transition off welfare. Most people who leave welfare need these resources to sustain their independence. “Leaping” implies they no longer need assistance once they’re off welfare, which is often not true.
A “leap” suggests risk and uncertainty, as if people are jumping into the unknown without a safety net. This is particularly problematic in welfare policymaking, where the goal should be to ensure that individuals leaving welfare have a stable, supported transition rather than being pushed off prematurely into economic insecurity.
The image of people “making the leap off welfare” is flawed because it oversimplifies the complex, gradual, and often difficult process of transitioning off welfare. It suggests a sudden, risky change rather than a supported, sustainable path to independence and fails to account for the ongoing support that many individuals still need. Policymaking should instead focus on creating structures that help people transition safely, addressing root causes of poverty, and recognizing the diverse needs of recipients.
Bootstraps
Bootstrapping yourself up is similar to making the leap but adds the idea of pulling yourself together, recognizing your flaws, taking steps to overcome them and fighting all the barriers, slaying the dragon and emerging triumphant.
There are plenty of dragonslayers out there. The policy problem is that they remain a significant minority and their exceptionality in many ways defines their attraction to armchair policymakers.
Bootstrapping is a strong tonic. Here is what I found and edited from Chatbot GPT:
The idea of “bootstrapping yourself up” to get off welfare—suggesting that individuals should lift themselves out of poverty through personal effort alone—can be problematic for several reasons. While personal responsibility and effort are important, this concept overlooks the complex structural and systemic barriers that many people face. Here are some key issues with the bootstrapping idea in the context of welfare:
The idea implies that success is solely a matter of effort, overlooking the fact that not everyone has the same opportunities. Factors such as race, gender, disability, or geography can limit access to jobs, education, and social mobility, regardless of personal effort.
Bootstrapping doesn’t acknowledge the cycle of intergenerational poverty, where individuals born into poverty may lack the resources or social capital to escape it. Without access to quality education, healthcare, and economic opportunities, it is incredibly difficult for these individuals to lift themselves out of poverty, no matter how hard they try.
The idea of bootstrapping disregards the importance of support systems, like job training, education, healthcare, and housing assistance, that are often essential for people to transition out of welfare successfully. Without these supports, even the most motivated individuals may struggle to make progress.
The concept of bootstrapping yourself up to get off welfare is problematic because it oversimplifies the complexities of poverty, shifts blame onto individuals, and ignores the structural barriers that keep people in poverty. Real economic mobility requires not just personal effort but also access to education, healthcare, stable jobs, and social supports that allow people to thrive. Welfare policies should focus on providing these resources rather than promoting the unrealistic expectation that individuals can escape poverty through effort alone.
For welfare recipients, a simple basic income and basic services and supports to replace unbelievably complex programs should one day be seen as the alternatives to making the leap and bootstrapping.
An incorrect frame of reference obfuscates the evidence
Like the false imagery surrounding scurvy, sodium deficiency, and falling dominos, leaping and bootstrapping are powerful images that impede solutions.
But that’s not all that is going on. In each of the five examples provided, the evidence for either the right or best answer was plain to see if a superior frame of reference was available. When the frame of reference is incorrect or irrelevant, relevant evidence is hidden and even when obvious, is considered inconsequential.
- In the case of scurvy, the correct frame of reference is diet (not the sea environment) and the answer is Vitamin C.
- For hyponatremia, the correct frame of reference is nutrients (not old age related decline in this case) and the answer can be as simple as a salt shaker.
- In the case of communism, the relevant frame of reference is local factors and global politics (not the threat of nations choosing communism) and the answer can be to allow nations to pursue their own destinies.
- For welfare recipients, the relevant frame of reference is the alleviation of poverty (not leaving welfare) and the answer can be to provide the right supports, incentives and a minimum guarantee of income.
Ditching attractive and intuitive imagery is difficult as we grow overly attached to the frames of reference that poor imagery nourishes. But it’s important that we pay attention to developing frames of reference and paradigms that provide us with relevant and/or correct evidence.
Evidence-based decision making is a good thing but its important that we consider relevant evidence first.
Too often we don’t.