September 2021 – #RemoteAccessBar

Two decades on from a terrible day, I can’t help remembering – alongside the sick horror – a feeling of professional pride and challenge. Does that make me a monster? I don’t think so.

Oh, fuck.

Thinking back 20 years, to a sunny September afternoon in West London, I’m pretty sure that’s what I thought. And probably for the first and last time in my life, I was sharing a crystal clear thought, in a specific moment, with millions of others.

I was a BBC reporter. I’d been one for two months, working for what was then called BBC News Online – a wonderful little enclave of print hacks feeding copy into the BBC’s news website. I’d been hired following my insistence that there were business stories to be told about white collar crime. In practice, I’d had trouble getting a lot of interest, or traction. It was a little annoying.

And then there I was, sitting in front of one big CRT monitor (yes, it’s that long ago) and two tiny CRT TVs tuned to BBC News 24 and (probably) CNN.

I don’t think I was paying much attention when the first aircraft hit the first tower. I must have seen it. But I was busy. A passing empathetic thought for all those whose lives had been lost in what – I assumed, with so many others – to be an awful accident. (Remember: we were several years past the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Terrorism wasn’t front of mind. The bins may even have been back on the train platforms. What a sweet, brief time that was.) And then back to work.

And then the second plane hit. That terrible sequence that anyone alive that day with access to a TV can instantly remember. I remember it in slow motion: probably the effect of too many playbacks overwriting what, in any case, would have been largely seen in my peripheral vision on those two tiny TVs.

And I, and millions of others, swore. Out loud.

And then the newsroom – Room 4220 in TV Centre, the BBC’s main economics and business newsroom, normally embroiled in the racket of a hundred hacks on deadline – went silent.

Only for a few seconds. But it was deathly quiet.

And then, of course, it was uproar.

Because I, and probably everyone else in the room, knew this wasn’t an accident any more. Someone had done this unthinkable deed. On purpose. And, as for every other reporter whose beat intersected even vaguely with the attack, I knew it was game on.

That this was the time when I found out whether, in fact, I was any good or not.

I read that now, and I feel slightly sick. More than 3,000 people died that day. Some through impact. Some were crushed. Some were burnt alive. Some (and here it’s the stills I remember) threw themselves from the windows dozens of stories up, because – appallingly – that may have seemed better than the alternative.

And here I am, talking about it like it was a test of professional pride.

Here’s the thing. There are some jobs where you spend your time up to the elbows in others’ trauma. Doctors. Coppers. And, of course hacks of both kinds, reporters and barristers. We see people at their worst and most vulnerable moments. The times when life has kicked them in the teeth, and the horrifying truth is dawning that it can still, somehow, get worse.

I don’t know what it says about me that I started my working life in one such trade, and now – after an 11-year detour through regulation and banking – I’ve ended up in another.

But this I know. I don’t feel sick about what I just wrote because I was wrong. I wasn’t – either to write it now, or to feel it then. I feel sick because I recognise that for some people it will be the proof that these jobs (perhaps not the cops and quacks, but certainly the hacks) are indeed monsters. Preying on human frailty for profit.

And yes: some do. More the journalists than the barristers, I like to think. Still, some, of each, certainly.

But not most of us. Police officers I’ve known sometimes talk about the core distinction between them and everyone without a warrant card is they run towards the scream, not away from it. Because it’s the job. Because you get your hands a bit grubby. Because someone has to. And if you’re a halfway decent person, better it’s you than some people you know.

Same for us hacks, of both kinds (although thankfully, usually at least, without the intense physical risks). People get into trouble. Sometimes all by themselves; sometimes because someone’s done it to them. Ignoring it is a lovely privilege for many.

But someone has to notice. To write about it. Or fight it out in the courts, if it gets there. To be their voice.

Not without heart, not without feeling. You have to have those. You have to empathise, or else you really are a monster.

But then you have to get on with the job. Work at it. Try to keep getting better.

And find out, again and again, if you’re really any good or not. Every day.

It’s a bloody privilege.

Might as well be me.

(If you’d like to read more like this, and would prefer it simply to land in your inbox, please go ahead and subscribe at https://remoteaccessbar.substack.com/.)

Anyone can lie with statistics. But buried in the numbers backing up the BS, the truth that rebuts it can often be found. And fashioning that into a compelling story can be shockingly effective.

One of the great things about numbers is not that they can be used to lie, although they can.

It’s that even when they’re (mis-)used that way, sometimes the truth still lurks within.

I’m no great mathematician, although my daughter tells me that I light up when I’m working through problems with her to help her study. And it’s a sadness that when I studied maths in school, we focused on mechanics at the expense of statistics and probability.

I’ve picked up a bit of each since, although I’m still very rule-of-thumb. And every so often something comes up that simply delights me.

Benford’s Law was one such. I encountered it as a counter-fraud tool many years ago. For large number sets, it observes, the leading digit – that is, the lefthand-most one, denoting (say) the thousands in a four-digit number or the millions in a seven-digit one – is rarely an even distribution. No: a leading “1” is by far the commonest number, with a sharp drop to “2” and then a logarithmic curve flattening thereafter all the way to “9”.

Why is this useful in counter-fraud? Well, to make a fraud work, you often need to cook the books – to alter financial records. What are financial records but numbers? And when you make up numbers, or generate them randomly, you may well fail to make the statistical distribution of those numbers look right.

So if you’re looking at a data-set whose leading digits are evenly distributed – instead of, as Benford’s Law predicts, having as much as 30% of them start with a “1” – you ought to start getting suspicious.

I mention this having been pointed (by the ever-wonderful Charles Arthur) to a recent takedown of a seminal piece of counter-fraud research. The research, from 2012, posited that a measurable decrease in dishonesty could result from a simple change in how people sign declarations of honesty in documents. You know how at the bottom of a tax return, or form providing details for (say) insurance, you sign to say you’ve given accurate information? The research suggested that simply by putting the declaration at the top – that is, before you provide the information instead of afterwards – people would be significantly more likely to tell the truth.

Classic “nudge” theory at work, you might think.

Unfortunately, the authors themselves tried and failed to replicate their findings in 2020. They found anomalies in one of their key data sets, which they attributed to a “randomisation failure”.

No: as the new (and really smart and thoughtful) analysis says – conclusively, to my mind – the data in question was simply faked.

I won’t provide too much detail. The analysis is short, clear, and absolutely worth reading in full. To give just one example, it noted that the data (from a motor insurer) included two sets of mileage figures, both supposedly provided by drivers. But while the first set showed notable spikes in frequency for numbers ending either in “000” or “500” (that is: people roughly rounding their mileage to the nearest half-thousand, as you might well expect them to do), the second set was absolutely flat – as the graph reproduced below shows.

In other words: the same people were rough-guessing their mileage first time round, but giving it accurate to a single mile thereafter. Consistently. Everyone. Every time.

You’ve met humans. You tell me how plausible that sounds.

If anything, the analysis gets still more fascinating thereafter.

To their credit, all four of the 2012 authors recognise the problem, and have now retracted the 2012 paper. There’s no reason to think any of them were party to what now appears to have been an essentially made-up data set.

More importantly, they also agree with a core emergent finding of the writers of the new analysis. Research which doesn’t expose its underlying data (unless it’s absolutely impossible, say for personal privacy or safety purposes, to share it), isn’t to be trusted. Because it can’t be checked.

And given the reproducibility crisis, that just isn’t good enough.

I recognise that I seem to be straying a long way from the law, here – my usual stamping grounds.

But this is, to me, objectively interesting. There’s a beauty in the idea that those who lie with statistics may ultimately be found out by them too.

And I think there’s at least a small legal application – or at least a litigation one.

Numbers can be made to lie, sure. But equally, underneath the lying explanation there may be a true story begging to come out.

And – as we’ve discussed ad nauseam – advocacy is about story-telling. Don’t ignore the opportunity you have to use numbers to tell stories. If you can take a wall of impenetrable numbers, and – as the writers here have so lucidly done – use them to fashion a compelling, even shocking, narrative, which grabs the attention and answers the key questions, don’t waste it.

Not all of us advocates are numerate. Not all of us “get” statistics and probability. Some of us even misuse them – by accident or by design. But more of us should get it, and get it right. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but the Inns of Court College of Advocates guide, created with the help of the Royal Statistical Society, is a pretty good way to start.

(If you’d like to read more like this, and would prefer it simply to land in your inbox, please go ahead and subscribe at https://remoteaccessbar.substack.com/.)