What country is next?' Amnesty director warns inaction on Rohingya crisis could lead to wider abuse

Guests: Nahlah Ayed

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I don't want to stay here. I want to go back as soon as possible. No I appeal the world body to more and more pressure on Myanmar to stop genocide on our Rohingyas.

AMT: Well that is a Rohingya refugee Dil Mohamed speaking a year ago to CBC foreign correspondent Nahlah Ayed, calling for a stop to attacks on his people in Myanmar. He was in a refugee camp in the no man's land between Myanmar and Bangladesh, one of a thousand refugees stuck there at the time. That camp has grown since then, as have camps across the region. An estimated 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar since August of 2017. Those who escaped have told stories of being raped, of watching family members killed and seeing their villages burned to the ground. All of which the UN has said were part of a genocide led by Myanmar's military. A year after her first visit Nahlah Ayed has returned to the region. This time she was given a different view of what's been happening in Myanmar's Rakhine state. Nahlah Ayed is a CBC foreign correspondent, based in London, and that's where we've reached her today. Hi Nahlah.

NAHLAH AYED: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: This was a different trip one year later.

NA: Very different because this was our first time actually being inside Myanmar itself. It was a trip that was organized by the Ministry of Information of Myanmar. And it was our very first time being in the region where all the trouble began. So it was our first chance actually to finally see the places that we had heard so much about last year, when we were speaking to all those Rohingya Muslims who are on the Bangladesh side.

AMT: And so tell me more about how this trip was organized.

NA: We covered our own, all the costs. We covered our hotel, transport, translations, but the stops and the way the tour went, it was three days, was organized by the officials themselves. And they were quite clear about where we could go and where we couldn't. And the night before we went out actually, the leader of this effort told us what we were going to do and how long we were going to stay there. Here he is in our hotel lobby in Sittwe, which is the capital of Rakhine state. You can hear the crickets chirping in the background. He's answering questions through a translator from those of us who are pushing him on the kinds of places we can go visit.

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VOICE: The area, the villages that you are asking, you are requesting, some of them are very far from the area that we are visiting and some of them you have to cross a creek. You know, you need a boat. So that's why it is not OK, for this time.

AMT: So what did the government want you to see?

NA: Well it seemed clear from the beginning that the government wanted to highlight two main themes. One was that they were working to repatriate Rohingya Muslims and doing everything possible to attract them back to Rakhine state. On the other was also to show us that they were still welcome there. So they wanted to show us mixed village, a situation where Muslims were still actually thriving and living in the area. And they said they wanted us actually to interview one of them to ask that question. He said he wanted us simply to understand the situation on the ground and they were simply facilitating that and providing us security.

AMT: And as you went along Nahlah, what did you find most striking about what you were seeing?

NA: There were a couple of things. One was the amount of building that was going on. There were lots of new houses and road repair happening. But the most striking images that I saw were that of what looked like sticks coming out of the ground, but without any leaves on them. We were told that they were in fact coconut trees that had lost their tops in the fires that had consumed these villages. There were hundreds of those Anna Maria that hurtled past us as we sped a long while.

AMT: Wow. I know you stopped in one village that was in the news during the Rohingya crisis, what did you see there?

NA: Well we stopped at Inn Din and it seemed to me like an odd choice for a foreign press tour because as you might remember it made international headlines because of a massacre. It was an extrajudicial killing of 10 Rohingya Muslims and it was actually a rare instance when Myanmar's military acknowledged that there had been wrongdoing and seven soldiers were in prison. But as you might also remember, it made headlines because two Reuters journalists who investigated the story were also imprisoned for essentially doing their job. It is now a quiet place. It still has a mix of ethnicities including Rakhine Buddhists and Hindu, but the Muslim sections have been burned to the ground. There are no Muslims left and likely they're not coming back and people were not eager to talk about it. Eventually though walking around sort of the back side of the village, I did find a woman and her husband who invited us into their home. The husband started talking first telling us that they had been in Sittwe when all the violence broke out. But after sitting quietly for a little while, the woman broke in. She contradicted what her husband had just said and her name is Tenjin. Here's some of what she had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

Woman speaking in Burmese.

NA: Now she spoke to us through a translator, obviously our own translator. She gave a very nuanced explanation of the sentiments. She used to have a tea stall and she said some of the customers she had at the time were Muslim youth. They apparently warned her about an upcoming attack, that they had been admonished for supporting her business as a Rakhine Buddhist. But then she said, Rakhine Buddhists killing Muslims is just one out of 100, meaning it's not a common occurrence. She said a difference between Rakhine and Muslim is that Rakhine are kind people and they feel for others. She also used a derogatory term when she referred to Muslims.

AMT: So did you find others who didn't echo what sounds like they're echoing the government, she's echoing the government about the treatment of the Rohingya and the Rakhine state.

NA: Well you have to remember that a large part of Myanmar's population agrees with the government's position on what happened in Rakhine State. That there has been no genocide, no ethnic cleansing. That if there has been burning of villages, it was done by a militant Muslim group. That if people were driven out, it was also done by that militant Muslim group, the one that attacked in August late of last year. One of the border posts called Arsa. So that is consistent, whether it's among the government or the people. Furthermore, many people believe that Rohingya Muslims simply don't belong in Myanmar, even though they've been there for generations. There's a lot of hate directed at Rohingya on social media and especially in Rakhine state, where Rohingya lived in very large numbers. Now on this trip, there were people perhaps who weren't as prepped as they should be to achieve the government's aim for this tour. Our guides took us to a village called Chiweza, where people were gathered in a school house.

SOUNDCLIP

Sounds from a school house.

NA: Now it's a mixed village and in the school room, Muslims were sitting on one side, Buddhists on another. And remember this was being shown to us as an example of a place where people lived amicably together. So it was odd to see them sitting on two different sides of the room. And it also didn't take long for the fear and mistrust to appear. One person on the Buddhist side told me that there had been a killing just a few days earlier and that they were feeling nervous. That they might run away again if they felt they were threatened. On the Muslim side I spoke to a man who said, you know how can we be happy if they're not being treated equally, if we don't have citizenship. And so that fear and mistrust, very much alive there.

AMT: And by taking you to that schoolhouse, what specific message had your government handlers been trying to get out to the world?

NA: Well my understanding was that they wanted us to see that Muslims are still accepted as part of society here. That there had been no genocide. You know one official actually said it explicitly. He said that if Muslims still live there and if they're still welcoming them back, how can there have been a genocide? It's also a message we heard in Yangon from Dr. Aung Tun Thet. He's chief coordinator for the Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development. It's basically a public private group that's been put together to help Rakhine State get over this crisis. He's an economist and a former presidential adviser. And back in 2014 he was presented with an honorary professorship at the University of British Columbia.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: We now have changed somewhat the emphasis because as you know equal number of Muslim people are still remaining in Rakhine. They are living peacefully, I'm sure you've seen this, with the Hindus, the Rakhine. So the question is this is what I call mixed villages. What we would try to do is to promote livelihoods, ensure that there's more job opportunities, job creation for the people in the mixed villages, with the hope that this positive messages will be sent to Cox's Bazaar, which would probably provide incentive for them to come back. We will do our best from whatever we can humanly possibly can.

NA: What he's saying is that they're encouraging Rohingya to come back from Cox's Bazaar, which is in Bangladesh, the area where all the camps are. Saying that they'll provide the materials to build homes and even pay them to do it if they come back.

AMT: It's really interesting to hear him, given the reporting around you know the other views of what's happened. Especially today, there's a report saying that a UN rights envoy is saying Myanmar is unable and unwilling to investigate its abuses against Rohingya Muslims and we hear there, we just hear him talking on almost like a disconnect. Do they believe him?

NA: It's a really good question. As far as we know, they don't. They don't have faith in the fact that Myanmar is genuine about sending people back. Only 171 people have actually made it back. The chief reason they say is that the process is too difficult and that the rights that they're after have not been addressed.

AMT: Well and of course just last week, Myanmar's leader Aung San Suu Kyi became the first person to be stripped of honorary Canadian citizenship, after unanimous votes in both the House and the Senate. And so we see that international view. What impact is that kind of pressure having Nahlah?

NA: Well people do bristle in Myanmar at the kind of international criticism that has been heard in the past year and certainly at let's say things like Canada's decision to strip her of honorary Canadian citizenship, which by the way happened while we were there on the ground. And also anyone talking about this including the UN's fact finding mission having been a genocide. They are quite protective of her and she's widely revered and Aung Tun Thet also had an answer for that question. He said that she is trying to balance international obligations with what he calls complex realities of life in Myanmar. Here he is again.

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VOICE: The International pressure is somewhat uneven, looking at only one dimension. It's very easy for them. But I think what they fail to realise the country that's undergoing democratic transition, which is very fragile. So I do hope that the international community could provide us a little more understanding, a little more compassion, a little more tolerance. That so far it's so black and white. It's better to appreciation of the difficulties the government is trying to address, you know both short term, medium term as well as long term.

NA: Now she does have a tall order. A country that's supposed to be in transition to democracy, but that transition is seriously stalling. She has strained relations with the military with whom she shares power and she's having to contend with an ultra nationalist Buddhist movement that is watching for any sign that Muslims or any other religious minorities are being treated favourably. And frankly she's also dealing with what I mentioned earlier, widespread hate towards Rohingya, but even those who acknowledge these challenges say, that's not an excuse for her silence.

AMT: What did you hear from people in Myanmar on how they feel about Aung San Suu Kyi?

NA: One man we spoke to the day after Canada made its decision for example, said he felt sorry for her. That she'd made so many sacrifices for the country that she essentially is being held hostage in this situation. As I say she's widely revered. Some young people we spoke to said that she perhaps isn't doing enough to advance democracy, rights, media freedoms, but generally speaking we're talking about international reaction, they're very much on her side.

AMT: The U.N. report in August said members of the country's military should be tried for genocide. And yet the Rakhine State Humanitarian Response Coordinator you spoke to is asking for compassion and tolerance from the international community. Is there any sense that there's a willingness to grant that?

NA: There seems to be less and less willingness to grant that. There has been I think patience among international community members. And of course it always depends on who's involved. China for example right now has been very understanding, continues to be very understanding and it's obviously on its own charm offensive with Myanmar for its own economic goals, along with Russia. It's blocked criticism on the U.N. Security Council, but from rights organizations and several countries, there's still a lot of pressure to act. Nicholas Bequelin is East Asia director at Amnesty International. I spoke to him in Bangkok.

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VOICE: This is a terrible historical precedence. You have a country with an ethnic minority that's the majority doesn't have an easy relation with and the state decides to just not only terrorize them and suppress them, but also to dump them on a third country. What country is next if the international system doesn't address this? It would be an open door for other countries to mirror this type of behaviour, which would create catastrophic threat for peace and security in the world.

AMT: You know I'm wondering as well about the Myanmar government encouraging Rohingya Muslims to go home. What are you hearing outside of Myanmar about that?

NA: Well it's been fairly consistent. The UNHCR actually has just done an assessment and they say the conditions do not yet exist for safe and dignified return. The UN's special report for Human Rights Council for Myanmar has just issued a report yesterday with exactly the same conclusion. And Amnesty International also has thoughts about this. Here's Nicholas Bequelin again, who says a lot would have to change before people come back.

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VOICE: I think the conundrum is the only conditions under which the return of refugees to Myanmar would be acceptable if it was safe, dignified and that they would not face discrimination back at home. So in effect that means that Myanmar would have to dismantle the a system of ethnic segregation, apartheids type and we are not seeing any of this at the moment. A lot of people want to come back, but they will not come back if they feel that the same thing that happened could reoccur. So how do you ensure that you create the best conditions for this situation that would be favourable to repatriation, which I cannot see at the moment. Well prosecuting for the crimes that have been committed would be a good start.

AMT: So on the ground did you see any evidence that Rohingya are returning?

NA: Well we were introduced to one family. The father met with us journalists one night.

SOUNDCLIP

[Burmese speech]

NA: He told the story of how his family and himself returned to Myanmar on foot and that they're now living with the support of the government. Now his story doesn't seem representative because as I mentioned ,only 171 people have crossed back since the reception centres were set up on the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh. And his tone was much more supportive of the Myanmar government than most of the Rohingya I've spoken to. For example he blames Arsa, the militant Rohingya group for others not following in his footsteps. It's also what the authorities say.

AMT: So where are all the other Rohingya Muslims who left Myanmar?

NA: They're largely still in Bangladesh, living in very difficult conditions. And even if returning was a real option, as Nicholas mentioned, citizenship, freedom of movement, these are all things they want as preconditions and they definitely want accountability. We heard all of that from the camp in the no man's land between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

AMT: And that's the camp in the no man's land where you met Dil Mohammed a year ago. The man we heard from at the beginning of this conversation. What does that place look like now?

NA: It's a chaotic mess. It's grown from 1000 to 5000 people and it was surreal to see that same camp from the other side of the fence and to see Dil Mohammed again who we met last year. He's become sort of the de facto spokesman and he came up to the fence to answer questions from all the journalists and here's some of what he had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Condition is hot, very hot. And rainy season in the inundate area. The hot time our children cannot stay there under the plastic. The situation very bad. Don't want, nobody wants to stay like this condition. But how we can do, inevitably, forcefully stay here. Our hope is depend on the international committee, want to go back our homeland. We are hopefully. Depend on also international committee, also Myanmar government also they have to show the good attitude sincerity. Myanmar government not show their sincerity.

NA: So he's saying the Myanmar government is not showing sincerity. The conditions are terrible, that they will not go back until he sees the government is sincere about guaranteeing the Rohingya Muslim rights and for them to be safe.

AMT: A different view of the view that the government wanted you to see?

NA: Very much.

AMT: Nahlah Ayed, thank you.

NA: You're welcome.

AMT: The CBC's Nahlah Ayed, she's a foreign correspondent based in London, England. Let us know what you think of what she had to say. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us, the news is next. And then, an elaborate and successful hoax sends shock waves through academia. We will explore what that says about the fields of gender and culture studies and the fallibility of peer review publishing. And coming up tomorrow.

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VOICE: I'm not a liar and I am not a gold digger and I did not do this because I'm starved for attention. I just wanted to stand up for myself and set the record straight and prove I wasn't lying. I think I've pretty effectively done that. The message is very clear, don't mess with me.

AMT: Well that is adult entertainment star, Stormy Daniels, speaking on 60 Minutes Australia this past weekend, talking about standing up to the president of the United States. She's going to be my guest tomorrow. Be sure to tune in and hear that conversation. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

[Music: Theme]

Elaborate hoax speaks to flaws in academic review process, says expert

Guests: Helen Pluckrose, Ronaldo Walcott, Deborah Poff

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: OK. How's this for a crazy story. A woman resuscitates a young boy when his heart stops, after a freak accident. Years later, the same boy, now a teenager, saves a choking woman who turns out to be the same woman who saved him years earlier. What are the odds? Well according to Jeffrey Rosenthal, not as long as you think. He's written a book called, "Knock On Wood: Luck, Chance and the Meaning of Everything." He'll join me to talk about all of that in half an hour. But first problems with peer review.

[Music]

AMT: Publish or perish in the competitive world of academia, that is often a way of life. So when academics receive word they've been published in a peer reviewed journal, the celebration is in order. But laughter?

SOUNDCLIP

Dear Dr. Helen Wilson, I've now closely considered the revisions of your manuscript, "Dog Park." [Laughter] And will recommend its publication in gender, race and culture. You've done very good work to address the issues that you have raised and clarified your arguments. Thank you for your contribution to gender, place and culture and I hope to be seeing your manuscript in print. Yours truly, [Bleep] PhD, managing editor. We have an accepted paper in the number one feminist geography channel.

AMT: Well if that sounds a little off, more than just that tinny sound there, that's because it is off. The scene is real. Three people with academic credentials, one of them a professor, receiving word their paper is about to be published in a prestigious journal. Their manuscript however is baloney. It's one of 20 papers fabricated by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, which they submitted to peer reviewed journals, mostly in the fields of gender and cultural studies. The articles all feature an outlandish premise and conclusions in an area of research they call grievance studies. That's their term for academia rooted in political concerns around racial and gender identity. Of 20 fake articles, they say seven were accepted, four were actually published before their hoax was discovered. Helen Pluckrose is one of the authors. She's an editor at Aereo magazine. We've reached her in Portland, Oregon. Hello.

HELEN PLUCKROSE: Hello. Good morning.

AMT: What point were trying to make with this experiment?

HP: Well really we were, we were looking at really quite worrying sort of epistemology, how we know what is true and and ethics that are coming out within studies around gender, race and sexuality. We do not have any objection at all to the study of gender, race and sexuality. This is very important. I myself study women's religious writing and always hoped to be a feminist historian, but we're looking at a kind of epistemology, which sees everything in terms of systems of power of culturally constructed knowledge by discourse and really draws some highly subjective interpretive and unwarranted conclusions from that.

AMT: You heard the clip we ran at the beginning. How surprised were you when you first got word that the study that that particular study had been accepted for publication?

HP: That one was rather a surprise. The Dog Park paper is undeniably our silliest.

AMT: So tell us about the premise and the conclusions of that paper.

HP: The Dog Park one it claimed that we can understand how society works by looking at dog culture. How dogs interact with each other, whether male dogs are oppressive to female dogs. Whether dogs of certain colours are more oppressive of other dogs of certain colours and whether there is unwanted humping and whether that is could be called heterosexual, homosexual. But then we also looked at how humans reacted to this and we made some claims that by looking at human reactions to dog humping incidents, we could see that acceptance of rape culture of homophobia was real in their reactions. So it's got some very ,very silly aspects in which we say we examined tactfully a thousand dogs genitals, whilst asking the owners tactfully about their sexuality, which really should have been picked up as ludicrous, but we suspected that if we could interpret something to posit men as aggressors and women as victims that this would be attractive to certain journals within grievance studies and it would be accepted. And in that case, we were right.

AMT: OK so you piled on the absurdity, but you used the language. The toxic masculinity and they bought it. They did. Yes.

AMT: Can you tell us who it was?

HP: That's Gender, Place and Culture that one I think, yes.

AMT: So these articles are accepted, as you point out, some enthusiastic writing back to maybe make them a little better, but you thought they might notice your methodology? You thought they might see through some of this? What does this tell you?

HP: We hoped that they would. We hoped that we'd get some significant responses back saying what this, where's the evidence for this? Does this argument work? What's your reasoning here? And almost never did we get that.

AMT: Did the three of you write these together? Was it a good time? Like did it take you a lot of time to do this?

HP: It took an enormous amount of time. Yes we dedicated a year to this and a lot of it obviously was spent researching the key text in every sort of field.

AMT: And why? Why that kind of time on this?

HP: Because it matters. We have spent years between us, addressing this very straightforwardly I have written article after article. Peter, he's a Socratic philosopher. He's spoken about the importance of epistemology in relation to religion, mostly in the past, but also in relation to these postmodern ideas. James is a mathematician, a liberal, a very firm empiricist and he has addressed this for years. We have criticized this problem. We have tried to break it down. We have tried to point it out for years and years and years. A lot of people are understanding what we're saying, but we're encountering a lot of resistance from left liberal academics like us who really don't want to believe that this ethical problem is happening and we decided in the end that OK we're going to go into it. We're going to explore it. We're going to produce stuff within it and show people that yes this really is happening. You can accept that this is happening without you know denying a need for scholarship on the basis of race, gender and sexuality. We can do this properly. We don't have to do it this way.

AMT: Is it possible that by pulling this elaborate hoax against this small and particular field of study, however that instead of going say doing this related to the faculty of business, that you might be affirming the kind of power imbalance and the so-called grievance studies are concerned with?

HP: We certainly have been concerned that our work could be used by you know sort of far right anti-intellectual aims or anti-equality items. And so we have been quite consistent throughout to say what we are criticising and what we are not criticizing. We've produced essays defending scholarship, defending universities, defending left-liberalism and we just do not think that the interests of minority groups are best furthered by weak epistemologies by biased epistemologies and by inconsistent liberal ethics and this is what we will continue to argue. And some people yes from the left will come back and say what you're feeding into the right wing rejection of equality. But anybody who looks at how work in more detail will see that we are absolutely not. We are trying to strengthen a vitally needed scholarship within those fields.

AMT: And so in the end the bigger picture, are you hoping this will start a conversation that continues or do you fear this will become another volley in the culture wars?

HP: Our hope is to appeal to liberal lefties who are kind of in denial of the problem. We don't really hope to get through to people who are committed to social constructivists who fully buy into the ideas that we're criticising. But we are much more hopeful of getting through to those on the left and on the centre right, who are empiricists, who are liberals, but who don't want to think that scholarship, which is supposed to help the most marginalised in society could be shoddy or unethical. We want them to accept that actually yes in some cases it can be. It doesn't need to be. There's good scholarship out there and we need to clean house.

AMT: Okay, well thanks for talking to me today.

HP: Thank you for having me on.

AMT: Helen Pluckrose is the editor of Aereo magazine. She joined us from Portland, Oregon. Well we contacted the publications allegedly taken in by this hoax. We only heard back from one editor who confirmed he was duped, but he declined to take part in our conversation today. What Ms. Pluckrose and her fellow hoaxers referred to in the pejorative as grievance studies is a range of academic research familiar to my next guest. Ronaldo Walcott is a professor and director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He's also the editor of Topia, the Journal of Canadian cultural studies. He's in our Toronto studio. Hello.

RONALDO WALCOTT: Hello, Anna Maria.

AMT: You were listening in, what did you think?

RW: Well I thought that there was a lot of kind of disingenuous claims being made by Helen Pluckrose. The idea that she is committed to helping people within the areas that that she listed as grievance studies, be more ethical about what they're doing. Strikes at the core of what she did because what she and her colleagues did was deeply unethical.

AMT: And they call it grievance studies. What do you make of that moniker?

RW: Well again Helen Pluckrose claims that this is not a part of the culture wars and that they are not a part of the culture wars, but to call cultural studies, gender studies, women's studies, critical race studies, grievance studies is actually to mark yourself as a part of the culture wars. Indeed what we're seeing is that since 1968, in the establishment of black studies and ethnic studies, programs in the US, that they've been what I'm going to call traditional and conservative forces universities, hell bent on having these new disciplines, these subdisciplines and subfields, push back out of the university. And they're hell bent in doing that because these are the places where the university and the street meet. And they've been pretty successful over the last 30 years in changing the ways in which we talk to each other, in changing in the ways about what we imagine might live both in the university and outside the university.

AMT: You heard the description of the dog park study. Is it worrisome to you that a study like that could make it's way into a seemingly reputable academic journal?

RW: You know, there's a bunch of ways to think about what happened there. One is that by the time the article arrives at the journal for peer review, generally depends on the type of article it is. The study may have gone to the ethical review board at university. So peer review is dependent on a whole bunch of other things happening prior to an article arriving that at a particular journal. Of course in any system where there's a large volume of work, people will make mistakes. But to use those mistakes based on the fundamental fraud, a fundamental ethical practice, as an indictment of large fields, is deeply troubling and disconcerting.

AMT: She says she used this as an appeal to liberal lefties who are in denial of the problem. Is that you?

RW: And what is a liberal lefty? That's a phrase that just doesn't work for me. No, we're not in denial of a problem because there's no problem. In fact they had 20 articles that they spent over a year constructing and maybe about seven of of them or less made it into publication. So you know it's not a good standard. They had no control. So we don't know if they had submitted similar articles in other fields, like the hard sciences, biology or something. If they would've yield the same results. So again what we're seeing here is a real attempt to shame a set of disciplines that have really transformed what we think about human life.

AMT: And she also argues that she's trying to inoculate researchers against the criticisms of the populist right by pushing for more empirical rigor.

RW: Well empiricism like and positivism are areas that are on the deep discussion and debate in the academy. So what she's actually saying then is that the only form of knowledge that's useful to her is empiricism and positivism, but that is in fact what we do as academics. We debate method. We bring new methods to the table. We bring new insights. In fact journals and what we attempt to do in journals and the humanities and the human social sciences are rather about conversations and dialogue and debate and not about a kind of positive, hard proof of something existent as we think it is in a kind of natural world.

AMT: And you are a journal editor. How confident are you in the peer review process for your own journal?

RW: I'm pretty confident in the peer review process. Because I mean at our journal in particular, you know we go to our editorial board first. We're very familiar with them. We go to people who we've identified as working in the related fields and we're confident from the ways in which peer reviewers have worked with the material that we have submitted to us. That we are getting positive good reviews of colleagues work. The peer review system is also based upon a certain kind of honour, that the people who are submitting work or submitting work that they have really developed and thought about and put energy and effort into.

AMT: You know that there are people who look at what they did and say that just you know they use that to say aha, this is a problem with our universities. How do you fight that?

RW: Well you can't fight that. You can't fight it unless we recognize what's happening. That, as I said, since 1968 there's been a struggle in the university about what matters, about what should be there, who should be there and these are all of the ways in which some people are trying to push some of the newer subfields and disciplines back out of the university. And indeed what we know is that those newer subfields and disciplines have made a bunch of things possible. They made it possible for people to be able to imagine women as deans, women as presidents of universities and so on. They've made it possible for us to produce students that leave universities and come in to workplaces and demand different ways of thinking about gender and sexuality in the workplace. And so you know the newer disciplines have a symbiotic relationship between the university and the street. And because of that symbiotic relationship, they've been caught up in this culture war in which there is an attempt to kind of return us to something like you know the 1950's, if you will.

AMT: So you're actually making the argument that it's not really about the peer review process of journals at all, this is about an attempt to go after this whole area of study?

RW: Most definitely. Look since 68, we've seen the culture war, we've seen culture war happen at a number of different levels. This is one level, the free speech debate is another level, the attempt to defund the humanities in a whole range of ways is another level. And so these are different eruptions of ongoing cultural wars since 68 in which we sought a kind of democratization of knowledge.

AMT: You are unmoved.

RW: Yes I am unmoved.

AMT: Thanks for coming in Ronaldo Walcott.

RW: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Ronaldo Walcott, professor and the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He's the editor of Topia, the Journal of Canadian cultural studies and he joined me in our Toronto studio. Well my next guest helps build the ethical guardrails of academic publishing. Deborah Poff is the vice chair and chair elect of the Committee On Publication Ethics or COPE. Now its mission is to educate and support editors and publishers to move the culture of publishing toward one where ethical practices become the norm, according to its stated mission. Deborah Poff is the editor in chief of The Journal of Academic Ethics. She joins us from our Ottawa studio. Hi.

DEBORAH POFF: Good morning.

AMT: What was your reaction to this hoax?

DP: Well, ambivalence because I do see theoretically some merit in challenging assumptions about refereed publications, but there's nothing new in this at all. These kind of manipulations of the editorial and peer review process have been happening for a long time. In the 1970s and 80s there were a number of sociologists of science who were manipulating names, whether they were female names as a first author, male names in trying to show there was bias in review. We also know that peer review is fallible, although most academics and there's a study by Sense About Science that confirms this. Most academics think peer review is the gold standard and don't want to abandon it. But peer review is done on a volunteer basis, but as is editing generally speaking, editing aside from the big medicine and science journals is done by people with full time academic positions. They're teachers and they're scholars and they do this for a small honorarium and peer reviewers do it as service to the profession and they do it for free. And most of them do a very responsible job, but it is fallible and we have been promoting at COPE a number of interventions that will help check this kind of problem. And so if you look at what's going on in the sciences and in medical journals and in the social sciences to some extent, people are now, editors are now requesting or demanding that authors submit their raw data with their article for manuscript evaluation. So that there is a check on whether people make up data, fudged data or do something unethical with their data.

AMT: OK. I have a clip I'd like you to hear. We got in touch with David Scheiber, he is a PhD candidate in sociology at UCLA. He was a peer reviewer in one of the hoax papers. It was called, Rubbing One Out: Defining Metasexual Violence of Objectification Through Nonconsensual Masturbation. That paper was submitted to the Journal of Sociology Theory. He recommended it be rejected. He only later found out it had been a hoax. Listen to what he says.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I was even more surprised when I came to see that comments I'd written about the paper were actually included in their article, especially because the comments seemed to be supporting the idea that I had been supportive of the article. I mean it was pretty embarrassing. It annoyed me that they kind of took advantage of my time, took advantage of my good intentions to try to help out the paper and I thought it was not completely truthful then to include just excerpts of my review. At the end of the day, it was a rejection and it was a three page single spaced review. So if they're going to kind of present these hoax papers as being representative of how accepting people are of certain ideologies in the field, then I think it would be more open if they included all of their reviews.

AMT: Deborah Poff, what comes to mind when you hear about his experience? Deborah Poff?

DP: That's a violation of one of the basic standards in peer review and it's been tested in the courts actually. Who owns peer review when you volunteer to write confidential comments for an author to hopefully constructively improve their work? It's been tested that the copyright, unless explicitly signed over, belongs to the reviewer. So in fact they violated confidentiality. They violated his good will and his integrity. I think it was highly unethical.

AMT: And they also faked underlying data in some cases. Should there be repercussions? Is this any kind of something that gets punished?

DP: Well.

AMT: You said something about courts.

DP: Yeah there's only one person that's actually, I think an academic has an academic pointman in this group.

AMT: That's right. He's at Portland State University.

DP: Yeah. I would think there's a number of violations of basic integrity in publishing that should be investigated by a disciplinary committee at his university because it's kind of gotcha research. Takes it uses so much energy of people with goodwill, who care about publication ethics and integrity, who are volunteering their time and they have full time jobs. They care as does COPE about the academic scholarly record and they are manipulating the process to show that it's fallible. Well these are all human beings writing and doing research. Of course, it's fallible. We do the best we can to be rigorous and have good methodology and now have an archive of the data so that we can explore it to make sure that it's a valid and legitimate. But yeah it's no big surprise and people were proving this a long time ago. I guess the other thing is they seem to want to take on standpoint theory, radical relativism, postmodernity, none of that is new stuff and it's been criticized for a long time. In fact radical relativism is an idea that's existed throughout the history of ideas. So and people have been in a dialogue, in a critique with standpoint theory at least since the beginning of the second wave feminist movement. So none of this is new. None of this is surprising to scholars who actually are informed about the literature. And the other thing I think that's really important to say is research is self-correcting.

AMT: OK. Well Deborah Poff, we have to leave it there, but thank you for weighing in.

DP: OK. Thank you.

AMT: Deborah Poff, vice chair and chair elect of the Committee On Publication Ethics. She's also the editor in chief of The Journal of Academic Ethics. She joined us from our Ottawa studio. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us, in our next half hour, have you ever had something crazy happen to you that leaves you wondering what are the chances of that? Well I'll speak with a statistician who says people's lives are full of those crazy little moments. They're not as crazy as you think they are. So much for destiny, coincidence, chance. We're going to burst your bubble. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

Is luck real? A probability expert untangles the difference between fate and chance

Guests: Jeffrey Rosenthal

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. You are listening to The Current. Well it's a story with a stroke of luck. First, almost fatally bad luck then head scratchingly good luck. Years ago, an 11 year old, Kevin Stephan was helping out as a bat boy at a baseball diamond in Buffalo, New York. One of the players accidentally hits him in the chest with a bat. It's a serious injury and for some terrifying moments his mother thinks he might die. And she tells her story on the History Channel's TV program, William Shatner's program, Weird or What.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I remember them rolling him over and just seeing his eyes like just wide open, fixed and dilated like just no response. It was horrifying, absolutely horrifying.

VOICE 2: Luckily Penny Brown, the mother of another boy and who was supposed to be at work was watching from the stands.

VOICE 3: He's not breathing call the ambulance.

VOICE 1: Penny is a nurse. So upon witnessing what happened to Kevin, she immediately knew what needed to be done to save him. She started to do CPR on him. That didn't work so she hit him twice in the chest really hard and restarted Kevin's heart.

AMT: So the nurse saves Kevin's life and then, well if the program doesn't give you a hint, it gets weird. Seven years later, Kevin is working part time at a diner, when a woman starts to choke and he runs over to help.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: He had to do two thrusts and the food was released and she was breathing again.

VOICE 2: Kevin's quick thinking and anti-choking maneuver, saved the woman's life. But there was something else. Something strange Lorraine began to notice.

VOICE 3: Then my mom said.

VOICE 1: Kevin do you realize who this is? Penny Brown saved your life a few years ago and now you've just saved hers.

VOICE 3: And I was absolutely in shock. I couldn't believe it.

VOICE 1: Well you got to wonder why Penny was at the baseball diamond at night. She wasn't supposed to be and you got to wonder why it was my son at work that afternoon when he wasn't supposed to be.

AMT: And I'm guessing that was a re-enactment, all that noise you heard, but there you go. Was it a coincidence? Was it fate? Was it plain luck that somehow intervened to bring them together, not once, but twice. Jeffrey Rosenthal explores notions of luck in his book. It's called, "Knock On Wood: Luck, Chance and the Meaning of Everything." He's a professor of statistics at the University of Toronto. He's an expert on probability and he's with me in Toronto. Hello.

JEFFREY ROSENTHAL: Hello.

AMT: That's a very, very dramatic playing of that scene. It's quite incredible. What are the chances that those two people would end up saving one another's lives?

JR: Yes, it's an amazing story and of course it has a lot of lessons. You know it says it's good to learn CPR or learn how to save people and it says you know somebody might save you, it's a wonderful story. But then a lot of people say well there must have been fate or destiny. There must have been some special meaning to it. So when I think about a story like that, I sort of think about it one way is in terms of probability, is as you say. So if you think of just those two people, what's the chance that one of them would save the other's life and then later the other one would save the first one's life. It's astronomical, it's one chance in billions of billions. But the way I would look at it is what I call the out of how many principle and in this case I would say there's so many different people out there and there's even more pairs of people out there. Just huge number of pairs of people out there. So then you say well what's the chance that at some point, some pair of people will have this incredible story that one saves the other's life and then the other saves its life. And I worked that out using some probabilities and I said the chance that at some point in my lifetime, some pair of people, somewhere in the world will have this incredible story, is something like one chance in three. That it's not that unlikely that at some point something will happen, not because it's not an amazing story, but because there's so many different opportunities for it to happen.

AMT: That's incredible, one chance in three. Now in fact William Shatner's Weird or What show asked you to do that math, right?

JR: That's right, exactly. William Shatner, who I admire from Captain Kirk on Star Trek. I was all excited and he asked me and so that was my perspective and of course also people including on this show, they would sort of think well this must be this supernatural force, there must have been some reason for it. But I also look at it in terms of sort of a biased observation, in the sense that we all remember this incredible story, but there's lots of other people who had heart problems and there wasn't somebody in the stands who came and saved them or people who choked in a restaurant and there wasn't somebody and even those who were saved, well it probably wasn't the same person who saved them. So there's all these different ones that didn't happen this way. So my thinking is if there really was some cosmic force that made it all happen, well then this should happen more often, it shouldn't be so rare.

AMT: So they were just lucky?

JR: Well yeah I would say I mean it's a combination of course. Some of it was good preparation because both of them were trained in CPR and but then yeah they were absolutely lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

AMT: You make a distinction between that kind of random luck and another kind of meaningful luck. Can you explain that?

JR: Yeah, so I mean it comes down to when these random things happen to us, which happen all the time, you know is there some special meaning or force that creates it. You know is there some purpose, some destiny or is it just kind of random? And I think a lot of things out there really are just kind of random, but people want to believe that there's a force involved. So I talk about you know the idea of a forceful luck, you know this fate or destiny or these magical powers. And I think a lot of these things can be explained just by randomness, once you think about what is called the luck traps, the reasons that you might think something is more special and meaningful than it really is.

AMT: OK. Well before you get to the luck trap, give me an example of random luck, coincidence.

JR: Well let's see. Random luck could be for example say the weather. You know there's an amazing story from World War II that after they dropped an atomic bomb in Hiroshima, then the second bomb was not supposed to be dropped on Nagasaki, it was supposed to be dropped on another city in Japan called Kokura. But by the time the planes got ready and moved in, clouds had moved in and it had gotten too cloudy and they said, we'd better go to a secondary target and the closest one is Nagasaki. So that's a hugely impactful event and all changed involving tens of thousands of lives because the clouds had moved in. So I'd say that's kind of random luck.

AMT: Random luck or bad luck depending on what city you're in.

JR: Yeah well bad luck for one of them, good luck for the other city. Yeah.

AMT: What about a more meaningful or fateful luck? Give me an example of that.

JR: Well, that's a good question because a lot of things that people say are faithful luck you know I might not agree with. So you know if we imagine let's say you go to a job interview and you know there's some amount of it involves your actual preparation. If you're well prepared for the job, if you studied about the company, if you've practiced your techniques at doing an interview and so on, but then some of it might be the randomness of who else applied for the job or what the company is really looking for. So I try to distinguish between the things that you maybe can have an effect on like the probabilities because you're well-prepared and the things that you can't like whether other people have applied.

AMT: So or whether the person they really wanted to choose choked in a restaurant and no one was there to save her.

JR: Well yeah, absolutely. I mean when you think about all the coincidences, which had to happen for us to be here. You know our parents had to meet at some party or whatever and they had to get together and then we had to be born in the right place at the right time is sort of amazing how many random coincidences there are which brought all of us here.

AMT: You also tell stories about long lost reunions and cheating death, that sort of thing. How do most people think about in trying to make sense of that kind of thing?

JR: Yeah well that's right. There's a lot of amazing stories. Another one is this story of these two half brothers who never met and then one of them happens to go to a beach in Hawaii and offers to take a picture for the family of this other this family that's on the beach and they recognized that the accent sounds similar and they start talking and it turns out they're half brothers, even though they've never met. And so you know again, I would say that well out of all the different pairs of people who could have met and it could have been meaningful, this one could have happened just by random chance, but a lot of people would believe that there's this you know fate or this force and you know that he was compelled to go to the beach that day.

AMT: Why are people so keen to believe that something might be written in the stars or meant to be or be a divine intervention?

JR: Yeah well it seems that people have a real need for events that happened to have some sort of a meaning. And you know it goes back to the old days, if there was a big storm, well that meant the Gods were angry. It didn't just mean that you know the water molecules were moving in a certain way. So I think people have a need to explain things in terms of stories, in terms of meaning, in terms of morality, sometimes right and wrong. And I understand the need for that, certainly you see that all the time in fiction, you know in rom-coms the couple has to get together because they were meant for each other or you know if there's sort of a bad guy, well in the end the bad guy has to lose because what they were doing was evil. So people have a real need for that. It's in the stories that we tell and in real life, even if there really isn't such a force, people have a real need to make such a story and sometimes to see it the way they want to. And of course it's not always for positive, you know sometimes like there's a very sad story of a teenager who got cancer and his parents came up to me and they wanted me to sign a copy of my book for them, sure. But they wanted me to make it out to their son. Oh sure, but their son was dead and they said our son died from cancer. And gosh, you know I never made out a book to someone who died before, but they said you know he took great comfort as he was dying they read to him from my book and they'd said you know he realised that it was all random and the fact that he had this terrible bad luck of getting cancer, it wasn't because he'd done something wrong. It wasn't because he deserved it. It wasn't because he was bad, it was just because of the horrible randomness of cancer and you know it's a very sad story, it's kind of emotional, but at the same time there is a certain comfort in randomness that is saying that everything happens for a reason and everything has meaning, isn't always so good, if the stuff that happens is bad.

AMT: So if there's one thing where luck plays a part, it's the lottery. How do our attitudes to lotteries reflect our overall attitudes about luck?

JR: Lotteries are interesting. In fact the single thing I get asked about the most when I talk about probabilities, well what about winning the lottery jackpot? You know what are my chances? And I try to tell people you know the chance of winning the lottery jackpot is so small you know if you drive to the store to buy your ticket then you're more likely to die in a car crash on the way than you are to win the jackpot. But a lot of people buy tickets anyway and sometimes that's just for fun because you can dream about how you might win, but a lot of people really feel, no this is my day. Why because I'm feeling lucky or because I chose my lucky numbers or I have a system. You know someone told me they have a system where you look at the spaces between the numbers on the lottery ticket and that somehow tells you and you know of course there really can't be any such system because the numbers are chosen randomly and there's really no way to beat that. But people do have a feeling you know maybe their horoscope tells them or some reason that they think they're going to win. And you know I don't want to necessarily disabuse over that because you know if they're enjoying playing it's OK, but they should understand just how unlikely it is and how you really can't do anything to beat that, that's random luck.

AMT: Is there any scientific way at all that people can improve lottery chances?

JR: Well there's really not that much you can do. Although when people press me, I say there is one thing you can do, which is that if you do win the jackpot, you'd rather not have to share it with other people. So since every collection of numbers has the same chance of winning the jackpot, it's smarter to choose numbers which are probably not going to be picked very much by other people and for example a lot of people take numbers based on birthdays and so on. So for example if some of your numbers are more than 31, then they won't correspond that much to birthdays so there's things you can do to not follow an obvious pattern that lots of people might follow. So the one smart thing you can do if you want to play lottery is pick numbers that you don't think lots of other people are going to play.

AMT: Or save your lottery money and invest it.

JR: Well that's what I do. I don't think that, but you know if you're have fun and just spend a little then that's OK.

AMT: All those tickets add up. Yeah.

JR: Yeah.

AMT: So The CBC's Fifth Estate investigated a lottery story and brought you in for your expertise. A man named Bob Edmonds had bought a lottery ticket in his hometown of Coboconk, Ontario. Let's hear what happened.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Everyone's friendly here. So when Bob went into Colby variety and asked the clerk to scan his tickets, he had no reason not to trust him. Not even when he heard the lottery machine chime twice. Normally that means you've won twice, but the clerk told Bob he had just one win. A free ticket. He went home a little confused.

VOICE 2: When you win a ticket, the machine plays a tune and I heard the tune twice.

VOICE 1: What Bob didn't know was that while he puzzled, the clerk, Phyllis LaPlante, was on her way to the OLG's head office in Toronto with Bob Edmonds' ticket for a quarter of a million dollars in her hand. Phyllis wanted the money.

AMT: So the store clerk was trying to keep the lottery windfall for herself. She didn't succeed, but it took him, Bob Edmonds, years to get what was rightfully his amid a lot of stonewalling from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. When the Fifth Estate discovered the story, they got you involved. What did they want you to do?

JR: Yeah that's right. So Bob Edmonds was of course at first nobody believed him because you know who doesn't go out there and say Oh I think I should have won that lottery instead. But he had enough evidence in terms of the numbers he normally played and so on that eventually he convinced people, but the lottery company tried to keep it hush hush. And why was that, well they were worried there might be other cases out there and it would look really bad for them and so when the Fifth Estate started investigating, that was their angle. They said wait a minute, was this just the one time that there had been a problem with someone who worked at the lottery store keeping the ticket that should have belonged to the customer or is this something which had happened before. So they were able to obtain through some freedom of information requests, some information about how many of the major lottery prizes had been won by people who actually worked in the lottery stores. And then we had to sort of compare that to well how many people do work in lottery stores and how many lottery tickets do they tend to buy. Maybe they buy a little more than the average person, but when I put it all together, so that's why they brought me in to look at the statistics of this. I said OK well of course we'd expect those people to win some of the big prizes, but not as many as they are winning. And they say well they could have gotten a bit lucky, but I said yeah, but to get this lucky and win this many prizes was astronomically unlikely. So I said it's virtually impossible that they would have won all these prizes just by buying tickets in the ordinary way. There must have been something more going on and it seemed like what was going on was that they were sometimes managing to keep the winning ticket that should've belonged to the customer.

AMT: What was the fallout from that story?

JR: So it was huge and you know I didn't really expect it. I thought this was one more story about lottery probabilities, but man it was the front page of every paper. It was the lead story on every news item and people were really angry and I think it's because a lot of people played lotteries and they feel like they could have been ripped off and they took it very personally. So there was huge outrage and it ended up leading to you know debates in the provincial legislature about how the lottery company was being run. The CEO of the lottery company got fired and perhaps most interestingly the police started investigating some of these specific claims and they eventually determined that some of them were fraudulent and a few people who claimed these prizes were actually arrested for fraud and in some cases millions of dollars were actually paid back to the people who should've won in the first place.

AMT: It's amazing what statistics can tell you and where they can lead. OK so you mentioned luck traps, let's get to that. What do you mean when you talk about a luck trap?

JR: So there's a lot of different things and one is that people will tend to notice say one example where something does back up their belief or their superstition or whatever and they'll think that it's a pattern and they won't notice the times when maybe it didn't work out that way. So this is an unlucky day because this one bad thing happened, but yeah but what about the good things that happened that day or what about the bad things that happened a different day, but people will only tend to notice or remember or focus on the ones that confirm them. So it's sort of a confirmation bias or we call it like a biased observation and it's saying well yeah, but you're not taking into account all the different observations, just the ones which show your story.

AMT: And how vulnerable are we generally as vulnerable people on that front?

JR: Well hugely. I mean for example, one example is dreams and dreams are actually fascinating, but in particular people will sometimes think I got a message from the dream. You know someone told me they they'd lost their bracelet and they couldn't find it anywhere and then they had a dream that the bracelet was in the dumpster behind the house and they went back and sure enough they found it. And they say that proves that you know their dreams had some special insights and they say well yeah maybe, but of course we only remember the dreams that tell us something amazing and if you had that dream and then she'd gone out and the bracelet wasn't there, she would have forgotten it immediately or if it wasn't a dream that was somehow important to her, she would have forgotten it. So we tend to remember the ones which proves these patterns and that's why we sometimes see patterns even when they're not there.

AMT: You target the media a little bit for falling for luck traps. How so?

JR: Well yeah I guess one thing is what I sometimes call a headline bias that is you know the media will only report on the things which are dramatic or interesting, which is what you know the media has to do. But for example with crimes, you know there's lots of headlines if you know somebody was murdered or if a child is kidnapped and so on and people might get the impression that this is happening all the time, but then again you could think well you could think in terms of out of how many as I mentioned, you say OK there was one horrible murder, but out of how many people who live in the city or how many people who live in the country. So it's actually not so bad, but the media of course isn't going to put up any headlines saying hey there were no murders today. Hey there was no one who died of a heart attack today. Hey everything was fine today.

AMT: Yeah, town sleeps well for a week. Yeah OK this just in yeah.

JR: Yeah, which of course is what the media has to do, but that's a form of bias and a form of a luck trap.

AMT: Some people may be discouraged to hear that you debunked the idea that there are not people who are somehow inherently luckier than others. Is there an upside to that?

JR: Yeah well it's funny how people will believe because of course as with many things with luck, there's different ways to interpret it. And one is to say how lucky have you been in the past? So you know like in my case, I have a good job, I have pretty good health, I have a nice family, I have good friends, I get to be on your show, so everything's going lucky for me, but.

AMT: You're living the life.

JR: I'm living the life, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm intrinsically lucky and that what happens next week is going to necessarily be good. And similarly some people might have gone through some rough times and it doesn't mean that everything is going to be rough. There's an old movie called, "The Cooler" where there's a casino in Vegas, I think where they hired this guy played by William H. Macy because he's so unlucky, he's such a loser that if he just stands next to other people who are gambling then they have bad luck and they always lose. So like he's got this you know power of unlucky and in real life it's just hard to see how that could be possible and in fact there's no real evidence for it. Some people will have good or bad luck, but that doesn't mean that in the future it's going to continue.

AMT: You know, I've been to Vegas once and I started, I was literally on a roll and I don't know how to play, like I'm no good at this, but I was like winning. And there were two guys who stood next to me and started actually like gambling like because of me. And then of course and then it all went south very fast and they moved away and it's like get away from us. But they thought I was lucky for a brief moment in time.

JR: Well it is funny the way people will again look for trends and for example at a casino if someone's winning a lot then some people think oh yeah they're lucky, they're going to keep playing, so they'll bet with them. Other people will think well the luck has to balance out in the long run. So if they just won, maybe next time they have to lose so I'm going to bet against them, but in reality you can't think either way because every new time you gamble at the casino, that's an independent trial.

AMT: Maya Young also studies luck. She's an associate professor of organization and management at the University of California Irvine. She looks at how people's beliefs affect their behaviour and she's done some research about beliefs about luck in particular. Listen to her.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Some people think of luck as a trait that follows them around like they consider themselves to be a lucky person and they don't think about luck as just a random thing. Those people who think about luck as a stable trait are more likely to feel empowered and to feel a sense of personal control, which leads them to have achievement motivation, which means they want to take on challenging tasks and they see themselves as persisting when they trip up. Believing in your own luck, not just luck. Believing in yourself as lucky, can actually have an empowering effect on people and a positive effect because it changes their behaviours. I don't parse it as an irrational belief, it might not be true, but if you think of yourself as lucky, you might approach a task with an extra sense of ease or you might not judge yourself at every single turn. And that might amount to more resilience. That might amount to more persistence.

AMT: Jeffrey Rosenthal what about that idea that just believing that you're a lucky person can be beneficial?

JR: Yeah well absolutely I mean it gets into the whole psychology of you know how we think about things and how we think about ourselves and it's related to what's called the placebo effect, as you probably know, if someone's given a medicine, but it's not really a medicine. But you tell them it's going to make them better that can help. One of the most striking examples of that of which there's many was a study where they had people run a 200 yard dash, but then the second time they ran it, they gave them a drink and it was really just sugar water, but half of them they said oh this is a special energy drink that's going to give you extra energy. And then they all ran the 200 meters as fast as they could and the ones who'd been told that the energy drink was going to give them a special energy they were on average about two seconds faster, which is a lot than the ones who weren't told that. So it's the amazing psychology of the human brain and absolutely having just sort of a self-confidence or you know feeling like things are going to go your way can be a huge boost and I guess the flip side is if you feel like no it's not going to work out, I'm going to screw up then that's going to hurt you. And you know it's the same reason that parents should tell their children nice things that they're growing up about how wonderful they are and shouldn't criticize them too much because the more that you feel that you're a good person, that you have the ability to do things, you're going to do well. So that's certainly true and it's maybe not always important if it's true or not like with the energy drink. Well maybe it's not an energy drink, but if you believe it, it's going to help you.

AMT: So what do you think of the idea that we make our own luck?

JR: Yeah I mean I've sometimes used that phrase myself and as with a lot of things, it depends what you mean by luck. For example if you're well-prepared, you know and you've gotten a good education and you've learned your job well then you're probably going to do better. Even the things that come up you know something you didn't expect, but that's OK because you have all your training and so on, you're going to handle it well. Whereas if you don't have the proper preparation and maybe the proper attitude and so on, then you won't. So It's a case where there's going to be randomness that you can't control, but how it affects you and how you deal with it could depend on the decisions you've made and the training you've made and the attitude that you had. So there's a lot of ways in which we do make our own luck, even though there are some things we cannot control.

AMT: You know there's a political and ideological issue questions running through all of this. I have a clip I want you to hear. This is the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who gave a speech to his son's private prep school as his son was graduating from grade 9 last year. Listen to part of his message.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that and I'll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. I wish you bad luck again from time to time, so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either.

AMT: Okay well that's a little bit of tough love there, what do you think of that?

JR: Yeah actually I thought that was an amazing speech and I thought that you know very enlightened of him to say that. Now oftentimes people who are you know rich and successful and powerful, might not remember that a lot of their success might have been due to luck and I try to remember that myself. You know I have a pretty good life and I try to remember that certainly if I had been born into a different family or if I grew up in a different country or if I hadn't had the educational opportunities I had, then I might well have had much less success. It was not that I deserve it and it's not that I completely earned it, it's some combination of what I did and what happened to be randomly just by luck.

AMT: You know others argue there is a system of privilege that does create luck for privileged kids. How do ideology and politics fit into that discussion?

JR: Well it's possible that people how they perceive that might also affect their political beliefs. If you think in terms of say the role of government, whether the role of government is to kind of help out everyone and take care of everyone. Then you might think because you know some people might be having a rough time, but that's not their fault, they've had bad luck and so on, whereas if you believe that everyone's already gotten exactly what they deserve and the universe gives to the people who deserve it and not those who don't then you might think why should the government help out people who aren't doing well. I certainly tend towards the first of those. I want the government to help people out because and I guess one reason is because if somebody didn't do well, it's not necessarily their fault. I also think even if it was their fault, the government should help them, but nonetheless you know some of us do better than others just based on all sorts of random factors and based on our upbringing and so on.

AMT: Now that you have done all this thinking and researching into luck, how often do you end up thinking there might be something more than chance at work and events in your life?

JR: Yeah well I mean when writing the book I tried to keep an open mind because my background is pretty much you know the scientific person who you know knows the rules of probability and chance and doesn't believe in all these superstitions and destiny and so on. But I did recognize more and more that first of all, in fiction it's always exciting when there is you know special powers, but then it does spill over to our real lives. In fact I tell the story in the book of how just before the election of Donald Trump, ended up making a bet with a political science professor, just sort of for fun and we made a little bet, but he wanted to take the side that Clinton was going to win. But I also thought Clinton was going to win so I wanted that side too, but he said he'll give me two to one odds so I said OK fine. So I took the bet that if Trump won, I was going to win two dollars, but if Clinton won, he was going to win one dollar. And sure enough, incredibly to everyone's surprise including mine, you know Trump won and we were all kind of shocked and everything and I went to bed late and you couldn't really believe it. And then in my half asleep state I somehow got this idea that it was my fault because I made this bet and I bet that Trump was going to win and that had somehow had this mystical power that caused Trump to win. And of course when I thought about it rationally the next day, there was absolutely no way that the bet could possibly have influenced even one vote, but nonetheless you know I really had this strong feeling in the middle of the night and I have to appreciate that people will have these feelings. People do want there to be stories and meaning and you know whether it's a good or bad thing, people want there to be a reason, not just this randomness or not things that are completely out of our control. People want to build these stories.

AMT: OK so it wasn't your quest for one looney that or the tooney.

JR: I got the tooney. I still have it, but yeah I mean that's the thing I would have been happy to give it back.

AMT: So interesting. So even you, who should know better has your moments.

JR: That's right. Yeah I have a section in the book about that because you know I'm trying to be fair and you know I like to, oh I'm this scientific rational person. But we do have this need for these things and absolutely it happens sometimes to me and to my colleagues, you know people who are very highly educated, but they'll have certain superstitions and so on.

AMT: Well thank you for coming in.

JR: OK thank you.

AMT: Jeffrey Rosenthal, professor of statistics at the University of Toronto. His new book is called, "Knock On Wood: Luck, Chance and the Meaning of Everything." That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Former Journey front man Steve Perry talks to Tom Power about "Traces," his first album of new music in 24 years. Join me tomorrow, Stormy Daniels is my guest. Remember you can always take The Current with you on the CBC Radio app, free from the App Store or Google Play. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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The Current Transcript for October 9, 2018

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Prologue

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Is luck real? A probability expert untangles the difference between fate and chance

Oct. 9, 2018 episode transcript

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