Opinion Shaming could be the best fix for Olympic doping By Cass R. Sunstein AT THE Olympics, we’re witnessing some serious cases of public shaming. Victorious competitors are publicly ostracizing those who once used performance-enhancing drugs. To take just one example, Australian Mack Horton, gold medalist in the 400-meter freestyle, pointedly refused even to acknowledge China’s silver medalist Sun Yang, who had been suspended for doping. “I don’t have time or respect for drug cheats,” Horton said later. Horton and others are aggressively asserting the social norm against drug use. By those who violate that norm, they’re giving some important clues about the functions of norms in general— and how they can be fortified. As the philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit has shown, many social norms have a specific function: deterring people from making self-interested decisions that end up harming the community as a whole. In that respect, norms operate a lot like laws; they operate as private enforcement mechanisms, preventing peo-
ple from acting to their mutual detriment. A small example: You probably won’t try to cut into a long line at the checkout counter at the local grocery store, because your neighbors would get upset with you, and because you’d probably feel ashamed. Long lines aren’t much fun, and for busy shoppers, it might be tempting to try to cut in. But all of us benefit from the norm against doing that: It prevents a free-for-all. In many places, there is a strong social norm against littering. Individuals might find it in their self-interest to litter, but if everyone does so, communities will be a lot dirtier. An anti-littering norm, enforced by social pressure (and far less frequently by law), solves a potentially big problem. The institution of private property itself is made possible not only by law but more fundamentally by norms, which lead most of us to respect other people’s holdings even if the police are unlikely to get involved. Turn in this light to the Olympics, where norms are essential to keep competition from get-
ting out of hand. Performanceenhancing drugs are a defining example. If Russian swimmers use drugs, then (all else being equal) other swimmers will feel pressure to use them as well to stay competitive. Before long, a lot of people will be doping. A ban on drug use prevents athletes from competing to their collective detriment. The challenge is that for the very reason that the ban is needed, it might be difficult to enforce. Athletes who want to win will be sorely tempted to violate it, and to do whatever they can get away with the violation. Maybe they’ll be caught—but maybe not. That’s where norms become so important. In international competitions, athletes get to know each other, and they often become friendly. If an athlete knows that doping will mean contempt or ostracization from her peers, deterrence will increase. In other words, nobody wants to be on the receiving end of the opprobrium directed at Yulia Efimova, a Russian suspended for doping in 2014. Booed by the audience and ignored by the triumphant gold medalist swimmer Lilly King, silver medalist
Efimova was nearly reduced to tears during a post-race news conference. King wasunmoved, saying, “I’m not a fan.” In sports as in daily life, shaming and prospect of ostracism can be great motivators. No athlete wants to be treated as a pariah, especially by her fellow competitors; their disapproval operates like a fine or a tax. If gold medal winners like Horton and King prominently show contempt for those who have used performance-enhancing drugs, both coaches and athletes may hesitate before doping in the future. Will it work? The challenge is that here, as elsewhere, people’s behavior is a product of numerous incentives, not just one. A spot in the Olympics, or a shot at gold, can be hard to resist; if a drug really would make the difference, some athletes will always be tempted. In these circumstances, it’s not entirely pleasant to see Olympic gold medalists acting as village elders or self-appointed drug police—but if we want a level playing field in the future, it’s probably a good idea. Bloomberg
Don’t expect instant gratification from new tech By Leonid Bershidsky ANOTHER Tesla has crashed because the driver thought its self-driving technology could actually drive the car. As we read all the stories about magical technology and then use the hyped-up products, we ought to keep in mind that the “magic” hits the market long before they live up to their promise, which in some cases they will never do. If it’s new, don’t expect it to work as advertised. The Tesla in Beijing, in Autopilot mode, hit the side of an illegally parked car and kept going until driver Luo Zhen—who had taken his hands off the steering wheel —manually stopped it. The $7,500 repair bill was probably a tough way for Luo to learn that when he read and heard about self-driving cars, or even when he watched Tesla’s Autopilot video (which tells drivers to grip the wheel at all times but shows the Model S changing lanes, taking curves and parking itself), he was essentially reading and watching sci-fi. I’m not going to accuse Tesla of false advertising, as many did after Autopilot led to a fatal crash. The technology can do what the video shows it doing, but it can’t do it in every situation, and that’s why the automaker’s warning about holding on to the wheel
is clearly articulated. Nor was Microsoft really misleading customers about the ability of its Skype Translator to livetranslate between Mandarin and English. It can do that when you speak slowly and clearly, avoiding complicated subjects and sentence structures, the way people do in the promotional videos. But a Tesla cannot drive itself better than an experienced human driver can drive it. Skype Translator cannot really handle normal conversation the way even a middling simultaneous translator could. Nor can “big data” predict election outcomes or real-world economic phenomena better than traditional tools. And Pokemon Go isn’t quite augmented reality. It’s sad but true, whatever you think you’re hearing from starry-eyed tech writers, Silicon Valley marketers or even chief executives. For example, when Apple boss Tim Cook said during the latest earnings call that “machine learning enables Siri to understand words as well as the intent behind them,” it was a forward-looking statement, not a promise to tomorrow’s iPhone buyers; 98 percent of iPhone users have tried Siri, but only about 30 percent use it with any regularity—precisely because they expected more from it before it could match those expectations, and that’s the way it’s going to stay for
A comedy... From A4 to miss Noynoy Aquino. You may not agree with PNoy’s policy and some of the things he said in public but at least you cannot fault him for being vulgar and using language laced with expletives. The foot-in-mouth disease must be contagious. Comes now presidential legal counsel Salvador Panelo who said “Filipinos have no right to question President Duterte.” He was defending the right of the President to decide that former President Ferdinand Marcos should be buried at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani, adding that those who voted Duterte in power gave him that mandate. It is not whether Marcos should be buried or not at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani. I, for one, believe he’s entitled to a hero’s burial, being a former soldier and president. It is Panelo’s distorted view that Filipinos have no right to question Duterte’s action because
some time. Two years ago, when muchhyped 3-D printing was proving a bit kludgier than neophytes drawn by the promise of magic expected, its inventor, Charles Hull, said this in an interview: “Most of the stuff they talk about will happen someday -- eventually. But there’s the here-and-now and the near-term future, where a lot of that stuff is definitely hype and won’t happen.” “Most of the stuff” and “eventually” are the keywords. We don’t know for sure whether, let alone when, autonomousdriving technology will fully replace humans, or whether machine translation will work as well as the human kind. We often pay to serve as testers for technology that is going exciting places for the engineers who develop it. And we expect instant gratification, though intuitively, we should understand there’s no such thing in engineering. They don’t really deceive us: The warnings are always there for those who are willing to listen, and the makers and the hypers are rarely the same people. It’s difficult for laymen to resist the hype. We want to believe in miracles, and we often don’t admit to ourselves that the tech we buy into isn’t quite miraculous, that despite being extremely advanced and unimaginable just a decade or two
they gave him an overwhelming mandate in the last elections. Every Filipino citizen has a right to question the President’s decision. And this President has made some public utterances that certainly raise questions. That Sal Panelo has been shifted from presidential spokesperson to legal counsel speaks volumes of his inadequacy to speak for the President. But in appointing Panelo as chief legal counsel, Duterte might have erred in choosing him to interpret the law. Any high school student knows the legal and constitutional right of every citizen to question the action of the country’s leadership. Only Panelo apparently does not know that. Something we have been warning the people about has been validated by President Duterte. He has raised the red flag about the presence of Islamist State agents in the country after receiving a report from the Bureau of Immigration about the entry of some Middle Eastern men traveling to Mindanao.
ago, the gap between it and pure magic is often bigger than the distance already covered. For those who need a reality check, though, there’s a convenient tool: the “Hype Cycle,” developed by tech research firm Gartner. Technologies aren’t brought to market when they can fully deliver on their promise but when they are at what Gartner calls the “Peak of Inflated Expectations.” Almost exactly a year ago, the company released its 2015 Hype Curve. At the top: autonomous vehicles, speechto-speech translation and machine learning. Marketers figure the top of that cycle is the best time to offer tech to the masses. People who expect magic get disappointed, and the technology falls into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” But the good news is that at least some of the technologies then make it up the “Slope of Enlightenment” to the “Plateau of Productivity.” Enterprise 3-D printing was halfway to the plateau from the trough a year ago, according to Gartner. Virtual reality was just climbing out of the trough. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t buy new tech when it’s being overhyped. But it does mean that we shouldn’t expect much from it. I feel privileged to play with the early implementations of big dreams, even if they never come to fruition. Bloomberg
Although the military has still refused to confirm the presence of IS suspects, there’s a strong possibility they have linked up with Muslim militants in Mindanao. What is more worrisome is if IS brings its urban terrorism into Metro Manila, particularly in the crowded shopping malls. Thailand, the first Asian country to suffer terror bombings followed the series of IS attacks in France, Belgium, Germany and Turkey. Could the Philippines, a Christian country, be next? The government, nonetheless is working at passing the Bangsamoro Basic Law, meeting with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Malaysia. The BBL is being eyed to fit into a proposed federal form of government if the Charter is amended and approved in a plebiscite. It would be Duterte’s legacy if he can bring peace and prosperity to Mindanao as the first President to come from this region. We wish him well and success in this endeavor.
MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 2016
A5
mstdaydesk@gmail.com
SO I SEE LITO BANAYO
‘Tapang at malasakit’ BOUND for Cebu to attend the milestone of our friend Mike Dino’s dad, Norman Fulgencio (the Duterte-Cayetano campaign manager for Malabon and Navotas) got to discussing the first 45 days of the new presidency. “Parang ang tagal nang presidente ni mayor, ano?” he quipped. To which I said, “ngayon nga lang magkakaroon ng first 50-day report para sa isang presidente.” Norman, whose self-financed efforts in his area resulted in an astounding victory for Duterte in Liberal Party-controlled Malabon (PNoy’s first cousin, Len-len Oreta is the mayor) and even topping Binay in Navotas by more than 2,000 votes (this fishing capital is the fiefdom of Jojo’s loyalist, Toby Tiangco), then stated: “Kasi naman ang dami nang nagawa in so short a period. Every day that passes there’s a major news event”. The common observation got both of us reminiscing about how a year ago, in 2015, most everyone we approached to support a Mindanaoan’s candidacy was met by snickers and jeers. “Saling-pusa lang ‘yan.” “Pumu-porma lang ‘yang si Duterte, baka magsi-senador, at most ‘yan vice-president.” These were samples of common reactions, not only in Luzon, but even in the Visayas. Then, cobbling together a few million pesos, mostly from friends who believed like us that a significant public was tired enough of the same traditional politics and the same old faces, the Duterte pre-campaign was able to fund a three-week, medium-frequency national TV ad, which ran from the last week of May to mid-June 2015. Putting together what was loose It’s always change for the other major candidates (Roxas, Binay and Poe) was so natural, difficult that our national in-character, ad didn’t even have the necessary traction for the never second-quarter publicly contrived. released surveys of Pulse and SWS. Prior to that, there were low-budget efforts by Duterte’s Davao friends, such as some introductory regional ads that ran in March, plus a memorable “langaw” advertorial that could afford only a once or twice nightly TV exposure for a week or so. But it was “different” enough to catch public attention. Sometime in April of 2015, we got in touch with the top brass of a “disruptive” creative agency which was used by Sen. Manny Villar in 2009-2010. In previous campaigns, I normally worked with veteran adman Greg Garcia, but then Greg was working for his “anak,” Alan Peter Cayetano, who was at the time still assiduous on a presidential run. I was always impressed by the quality of Villar’s infomercials even when I was working on the campaign of his main opponent, Noynoy Aquino, whose father Ninoy and Tito Doy Laurel introduced me 35 years ago to the world of politics. Providentially, although strangely weird, it was Sen. Cynthia Villar, through a common friend, who introduced us to the “disruption” creative group. On the first meeting, they agreed to draw up a TV commercial based on the concept of a “courage and compassion” candidate. For months since I volunteered to help Duterte, I kept talking to rather skeptical publics that “character” and “compassion” would differentiate my reluctant dream candidate from the maddening crowd of would-be presidents. Through several presidential campaigns of which I was a part of the strategy team, I maintained that national leaders must “sell” their persona based on three C’s: competence, character and compassion. Getting the voters to identify your candidate as having all three, or at least two of these qualifiers, would be essential to victory. The “disruptors” and I agreed to define Duterte in terms of character and compassion, with competence already a “given” to a significant number of voters. Davao City, after all, was one of the best-run and best-governed cities in the country. Duterte’s outstanding character was to be defined in terms of his courage. But there is an underlying and all-encompassing raison d’etre for the “tapang,” and that is an inherent “malasakit” for the public he serves. Besides, the competition (especially the then-leading candidate, Binay), had a compelling narrative in his 2010 VP run, thanks to my friend Greg’s “Ganito kami sa Makati, sana ganito rin sa buong bansa.” Mar Roxas, on the other hand, scored well on the “Mr. Clean” image, which predictably, his party and the president embraced as the be-all and end-all quality of a leader. Thus was “Tapang at Malasakit,” the Duterte campaign theme, born. Later, when Duterte and Cayetano teamed up, Greg Garcia came on board, so that essentially we had two creative groups reinforcing through succeeding permutations, the “tapang at malasakit” narrative. “Matapang na solusyon, mabilis na aksyon.” “Change is coming.” “Tinud-anay nga kausaban” for the Bisaya publics. “Kayo ang lakas ko” as finale, with massive crowds and the Philippine flag as compelling visuals. The rest is campaign history. The beautiful thing about the campaign story is that we never, and the candidate himself, never, ever, strayed from the truth about his character and persona. The compelling narrative and all the sub-stories thereafter were authentic. What you see is what you will get. The people believed. They applauded this “enigma” they entrusted their future in. Winning is the first part. Succeeding is the more difficult part, and Duterte never had any illusions about the odds he would encounter. But examine his actions in the first 50 days, beginning from his short but stirring inaugural address he himself wrote. And throughout, see “tapang at malasakit” in full play. And always naturally, in-character, never contrived.