That is a Pavlovian reaction and it is not helpful

A conjunction of articles about the danger of trying to arrive at quick simple answers to complex issues whether it be climate change, diet, or public safety.

First up is this article, For decades, the government steered millions away from whole milk. Was that wrong? by Peter Whoriskey which highlights what has been know for a good while now - the government makes strong recommendations, constrains public choices, and creates policy incentives and disincentives when in fact they don't know what they are talking about.

Since the government first began making strong policy decisions around the public diet, our obesity rate has ballooned. Correlation is not causation but there is emerging evidence to suggest that government guidelines have been a material contributor to this epidemic. So now, still ignorant about the nature of the complex system of food, nutrition, diet and eating habits, we also have massive government programs to stem the obesity epidemic which government programs helped instigate.

Whoriskey is focusing on the situation with the government's recommendations regarding milk. There is now evidence indicating that the advice has not only been wrong but perhaps also harmful, increasing mortality rates of those who moved away from drinking whole milk to drinking skim milk.

To me, the interesting point is not so much that the government gives bad advice, as the basis on which that advice was mustered in the first place. We know that the human dietary and nutritional system is complex, varying over the course of a lifetime and subject to all sorts of externalities and confounding independent variables. We also know that human health systems are likewise complex. You can have people move on to a regimen of cholesterol drugs in order to reduce bad cholesterol and successfully achieve a decrease in deaths by heart attack while experiencing an increase in deaths from other causes. So you haven't changed your mortality rate, just the cause of death. That is not a success.

What we most want is for decisions to be evidence-based and with a clear articulation of the desired outcome in its whole context. The milk issue was originally surfaced out of a fear that drinking milk was correlated with heart disease. The goal was to reduce heart disease by drinking less whole milk. While parts of the causative relationship between milk consumption and heart disease were known, there were all sorts of missing links and there was little overall empirical evidence. No one ran a double blind test of milk consumption presumably because those take a lot of money and decades of time. Instead, based on correlation and theory and an overarching concern to do something about heart disease, the government issued its edicts. Edicts which turned out to be wrong and probably harmful.

Not only was the answer to the question "Does milk cause heart disease?" wrong but it was the wrong question in the first place. The real question they ought to have been asking, since diet and health are such complex multicausal systems, was "What role does milk play in health and mortality?" That broader question would have forced more research that might have saved a lot of time, money and perhaps lives.

Another example is this clip of Charles C.W. Cooke about gun-control. It's a great contrast in two visions of government. The journalist Mark Halperin is making the argument that passion compels us to do something in the face of gun tragedies and Charles Cooke is making the argument that passion has nothing to do with it, instead we should be asking "What are the actions that we can undertake which will have a positive reduction in gun crimes within the context of all other parameters such as civil rights, etc.?" He is making the additional point that this is a complex multicausal issue and that the one thing we do know is that most of the proffered policy changes will not reduce the problem. If the proposed policies won't solve the problem, then why do we keep making the same recommendations? Cooke by far has the best position in this argument, leaving poor old Halperin without a leg to stand on.

Simple, knee-jerk solutions to complex multicausal problems are rarely productive. Or, as Cooke so eloquently puts it, "That is a Pavlovian reaction and it is not helpful."

Climate change, income inequality, poverty, obesity, etc. They all fall into this category where the system is complex and multicausal. It is not that we should do nothing because they are complex and multicausal. The argument is that we should know enough about what we are doing to be confident that we will achieve the desired outcomes. The bar for confidence with regard to complex multicausal systems is very high. Too often we let our base emotional nature steer us towards glib answers that have nothing to do with the real root causes and end up making the problem worse rather than better.

Have some self-discipline and make considered decisions and avoid emotionally flailing about making a gesture towards a solution without solving the problem.