Data obesity?

The prime minister recently launched a new policy on obesity to ‘beat coronavirus and protect the NHS’[1]. This policy is the latest of a dozen or so policies or white papers that have been announced on the topic since 1997 – a period in which the proportion of the population who are overweight or obese rose from 53% to 64%[2]. The common feature of previous reports was that the onus of responsibility sat firmly with the individual[3]. It appears that it has taken the Prime Minister’s own brush with death to realise that this is insufficient; we need to significantly change our ‘food environment’ too.

If one takes a (much) longer frame of reference it becomes obvious that the environment in which most of us now live makes it extremely challenging to maintain a healthy weight. As Daniel Lieberman and many others highlight, genetically we are all hunter gatherers[4]. As such, we are perfectly evolved to cope with scarcity. This scarcity applies to both food and information/data[5] – yet we now find ourselves in an environment in which both are abundant. This latest obesity policy seems to finally recognise that humans have not fundamentally changed in the last couple of decades, but the food environment has - and that collectively we are failing to cope. The data environment has changed too[6]; can we manage this data abundance any better than food abundance?

As inaugural Chief Executive of National Numeracy, I have been working on an underlying element of this issue for the past eight years. In that time, I have been consistently surprised by the stark contrast between policy makers’ perception of the capacity of adults to use numbers and data, and the reality[7]. I have become increasingly aware that this contrast has led to policies and practices across a wide range of domains – including financial wellbeing, public health, tax, pensions, employment & skills and mental health - that are built upon assumptions about the underlying (current) capacity of humans to use numbers and data that are often false[8].

To check your own perception of this ‘quantitative capacity’ issue, please have a look at the questions below and then estimate the percentage of those surveyed who managed to get the 5 questions right[9] (answer in endnote[i]).

When one overlays the current primary use of Artificial Intelligence – the awesome data mining and resultant behavioural marketing strategies brilliantly summarised in the recent ‘The Social Dilemma’ documentary[10] - onto this underlying lack of capacity, it could be argued that we are creating a data obesity crisis to mirror the physical one. The link between physical health and wellbeing is well-established, there is now an urgent need for research into the impact on wellbeing of a widespread underlying lack of capacity to process numbers and data combining with a ‘data overdose’[11].

The data in the endnote relating to the questions above is as unflattering as current obesity data. However, I am confident that both obesity crises can be addressed if we are prepared to recognise the urgent need to reshape our environment to work with, rather than against, our evolutionary inheritance. Along with our hunter gatherer ancestors we carry inside our heads the most complex object in the universe. Unlike our ancestors we now carry in our pockets more computing power than it took to get to the moon. This combination of AI+HI is working superbly well for the elite. We now have the potential to orientate AI+HI to improve human wellbeing for all - but only if we know where we’re starting from…

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-obesity-strategy-unveiled-as-country-urged-to-lose-weight-to-beat-coronavirus-covid-19-and-protect-the-nhs

[2] https://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main.CTRY2430A?lang=en

[3] For example: “There should be no doubt that maintaining a healthy weight must be the responsibility of individuals first - it is not the role of Government to tell people how to live their lives and nor would this work. Sustainable change will only come from individuals seeing the link between a healthy weight and a healthy life and so wanting to make changes to the way that they and their families live.” Prime Minister’s foreword to 2008 ‘Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives’ strategy

[4] The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease, Lieberman, D. 2014.

[5] See ’21 lessons for the 21st Century’ Y.N. Harari, 2018 p.233-6 summarised on p.3 ‘Humans think in stories rather than facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better’.

[6] ‘90% of world data has been created in the past 2 years’ is the oft- quoted line from an IBM evaluation e.g. here.

[7] See https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/sites/default/files/building_a_numerate_nation_report.pdf for example - business leaders underestimated the scale of the issue by a factor of 50.

[8] Daniel Kahneman’s concept of WYSIATI and Philip Tetlock’s ‘Tip of the nose view’ both go a long way to explaining this perception / reality mismatch – and also now perhaps the marked shift in policy to combat obesity.

[9] Policy Institute research here: https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/sites/default/files/national_numeracy_day_2019.pdf

[10] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81254224

[11] See ‘Competition overdose: How free market mythology transformed us from citizen kings to market servants’ Stucke and Ezrachi, 2020.

[i] 6% of the representative sample of the UK population answered all 5 questions correctly. (4/5 = 14%, 3/5 = 24%, 2/5 = 27%, 1/5 = 19%, 0/5 = 10%). This is broadly in line with the latest government -commissioned data on adult skills levels and also data on over 300,000 adults who have engaged with the National Numeracy Challenge.