Multiplicity
Richard Smith
Friend of Alessandro
Italianophile
Former editor, BMJ

Multiplicity: Alessandro

Cochrane Colloquium, Rome, 1999

Czeslaw Milosz, John Donne, W H
Auden, Robert Frost

Marina Basmanova

• Your voice, your body, your name
mean nothing to me now. No one
destroyed them.
It's just that, in order to forget one life, a
person needs to live
at least one other life. And I have served
that portion.

Brodsky
• Are you an American or a Russian?
• I am Jewish – a Russian poet and an
English essayist

A great tool for those who love
multiplicity created by multiplicity

A great tool for those who love
multiplicity created by multiplicity

Pietro Aretino
• “Journalist cum press baron, master of
aphorism and hyperbole; pornographer,
flatterer and blackmailer; playwright, satirist,
versifier, bisexual libertine, connoisseur of
art; self-styled political seer, 'fifth evangelist,'
'censor of the world', as well as its 'secretary'
(meaning depository of its secrets); 'one
whose letters are answered even by
emperors and kings.'”
• Who can match that today?

Francis Galton
• Francis Galton (16 February 1822 – 17
January 1911), cousin of Charles Darwin,
was an English Victorian polymath,
anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical
explorer, geographer, inventor,
meteorologist, proto-geneticist,
psychometrician, and statistician.

Francis Galton
• In 1906 Galton visited a livestock fair and
stumbled upon an contest.
• An ox was on display, and the villagers
were invited to guess the animal's weight
after it was slaughtered and dressed.

Francis Galton
• Galton disliked the idea of democracy and
wanted to use the competition to show the
problems of allowing large groups of
people to vote on a topic.

Francis Galton
• 787 people guessed the weight of the ox, some
were experts, farmers and butchers, others
knew little about livestock. Some guessed very
high, others very low, many guessed fairly
sensibly.
• Galton collected the guesses after the
competition was over

Francis Galton
• The average guess was 1,197 pounds
• The correct weight was 1,198 pounds

Wisdom of Crowds
• What Dalton discovered was that in
actuality crowds of people can make
surprisingly good decisions IN THE
AGGREGATE, even if they have imperfect
information.

A crucial lesson for me

And so to the start of my talk

Another of the fruits of multiplicity
(Un altro dei frutti della molteplicità)

Italo Calvino: the theme of my
lecture
• “The contemporary novel is an
encyclopaedia, a method of knowledge,
and above all a connection between the
events, the people, and the things of the
world.”

Carlo Emilio Gadda

• “Unforeseen catastrophes are never the
consequence ..... of a cause singular; but
they are rather like a whirlpool ... towards
which a whole multitude of converging
causes have contributed.”
• “Replace cause with causes.”

.

"To know is to insert something into what is
real, and hence to distort reality"
"To know is to insert something into what is real, and hence to distort reality"

Two polarities
• Exactitude: mathematics, pure spirit, the
military mentality
• Soul: irrationality, humanity, chaos

System one

System 2
• 27 x 93

Ten defects in our thinking
• 1. Availability bias: giving to much weight to
information most available
• 2. Hindsight bias
• 3. The problem of induction: building general
rules with too little information
• 4. The fallacy of conjunction: overstimating that
7 events with 90% probability will all occur and
underestimating that one will occur
• 5. Confirmation bias: seeing confirming but not
falsifying evidence

Ten defects in our thinking
• 6. Contamination effects: irrelevant but
proximate information overinfluences us
• 7. Affect heuristic: preconceived value
judgements interfere with cost benefit analyses
• 8. Scope neglect: prevents us proportionately
adjusting what we would be willing to sacrifice to
avoid harms of different order of magnitude
• 9. Overconfidence in calibration
• 10. Bystander apathy

Italo Calvino
• “Over ambitious projects may be
objectionable in many fields but not in
literature. Literature remains alive only if
we set ourselves goals far beyond all hope
of achievement.”
• Cochrane?

Comorbidity: US data
65

Multimorbidity in Scotland

Conclusions

There is power in the many

Everything is connected to
everything

Last thoughts

An opposite view
• NietzscheQuotes @
• When a hundred men stand together,
each of them loses his mind and gets
another one