Imagine yourself as a weary traveller in the 18th Century arriving, after a long and hard day’s journey, at your inn for the night. What could be more welcome than a decent piece of roast beef or pork? As the inn keeper you would of course want to offer this to your guests but roasting large hunks of meet in those days was hard work. It all needed to be spit-roasted over an open fire, turned throughout the cooking process to ensure an even result.
What can we rely on if not the evidence of our own senses? Seeing is believing, is it not? Vision feels like something concrete and immutable and colour perception in particular seems like something that should beyond outside influence. My own understanding of colour perception was that it was a more or less a passive thing. Light hits at object, the object reflects certain wavelengths of that light into our eye and the brain recognises those wavelengths as colours.
But this, in fact, is wrong.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a psychological phenomenon where people with a little knowledge on a topic massively overestimate their knowledge or competence in that subject. This results in an over-inflated self-assessment of their abilities and strong, but misplaced convictions relating to it. In essence, they don’t know enough to know where the gaps in their knowledge lie. Without knowing what they don’t know, they are convinced that what they do know is absolutely right and correct.
When David Davis said to Boris Johnson, ‘In the name of God, go,’ I think he was articulating what many of us were thinking. Regardless of the outcome of the civil service investigation, it seems hard to see how Boris can survive the partygate scandal. Even if he is found not to have broken any laws, hearing a Prime Minister say that he didn’t know that a garden full of people drinking wine and eating cheese was as a party, makes him seem so absurd that it would be grounds on its own to consider him unfit for his job.
Few would argue against the fact that young people throughout the Western world are experiencing a mental health crisis. From my vantage point in general practice, levels of unhappiness, anxiety and self-harm in this age group seem to be sky rocketing. Secondary care services for mental health in children and teenagers are completely overwhelmed and this is despite the fact that they only deal with the sickest tip of a very big iceberg.
The World Health Organisation has just published a study looking at the health effects of working long hours and concluded that in 2016 745,000 extra people worldwide died from heart disease or strokes as a result of long working hours. The risk of stroke was 35% higher amongst those who had habitually worked 55 hours or more per week compared to those with a working week of between 35 to 40 hours.
The fact that lower intelligence equates with belief in conspiracy theories intuitively makes sense. The world is incredibly complex and is difficult to understand. It is however much easier to understand if you boil everything down to the belief that some arch-villain is orchestrating all the bad things.
The NHS is under enormous pressure. We knew this would be the case from the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. For this reason, one of the first steps we took was to inform the public that there was no treatment for covid-19 and they would have to look after themselves at home.
It is remarkable how quickly the British public took this message on board. Tens of thousands of people simply stayed at home - coughing, feverish and breathless - and looked after themselves with a potentially fatal illness. This was achieved in a matter of weeks despite the fact that this was an entirely new and entirely terrifying illness.
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