humanitarian.info

… I promise. I’m drafting a reply to Patrick’s thoughtful response to my original discussion, but a few links came across my radar which I felt the need to dig into:

Crowdsourcing the counter-piracy problem in Somalia:

While criminals and pirates have effectively used a mix of low-tech and high-tech solutions to collaborate and target shipping, the maritime and national security communities have largely ignored their information strengths. Given the amount of data available and the large community of interest, we should launch a program to expose our information and develop a crowdsourced counter-piracy campaign… While we are not offering a specific approach, we hope the US and broader community will adopt crowdsourcing as a key strategy to achieve information superiority in the fight against pirates.

This is relatively non-insane, merely opaque. I am not claiming that crowdsourcing will not or should not be a key strategy in the fight against piracy; just because they don’t specify an approach, it doesn’t mean that such an approach doesn’t exist. However given that they don’t have any specific recommendations to make, they seem awfully confident that crowdsourcing will be key to any successful approach to the problem.

Crowdsourcing Security:

Imagine the US erected a thirty-foot pole every mile or so on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, with a swiveling video camera, solar panel, and satellite Internet connection mounted on top. Now imagine all of these videos feeds were accessible on the Internet, live, perhaps through an interface like Google Earth. Click the camera you want, and any American–or Korean, or Frenchman for that matter–could watch a live stretch of Afghanistan… Now wrap the thing up in a basic collaborative workspace. Have real-time statistics, showing which cameras are being manned and which aren’t. Let multiple users viewing the same camera chat with each other. Create spaces where self-organizing communities of armchair intelligence analysts can recruit members, discuss ideas, or analyze suspicious snapshots.

You’ll have to read the entire thing to get a full idea of just how bonkers¹ this proposal is on every level except the technical – as they point out, it could be done (although the author seems to have a very limited idea of what the cost of maintaining this infrastructure would be). This proposal has the virtue of explaining exactly how crowdsourcing security would work in theory, but the unfortunate side effect of demonstrating exactly why it wouldn’t work in practice.² However the mention of “armchair intelligence analysts” is a pointer to another aspect of beliefs about crowdsourcing; that nearly every human activity can be successfully undertaken by non-experts as long as there are enough of them.

How Ushahidi could help indigenous peoples:

Indigenous people still face marginalization, extreme poverty, forced relocation and other human rights violations. Their way of life and often their very survival is threatened, according to the United Nations. To me, this means that there are over three hundred seventy million people who could benefit from Ushahidi’s web based reporting tool… Where media has failed to report on the issues facing the indigenous communities spanning over seventy countries, data visually organized via Ushahidi could provide a bridge.

This is not insane – in fact I think it sounds like a very nice idea.³ However little is described about how crowdsourcing will help indigenous peoples – it just will, because that’s what crowdsourcing does. In general there seems to be a sense that information produced by crowdsourcing will be somehow more compelling and useful than any other kind.

Twitter is good, or else…:

I noticed a recent report, claiming to prove that Facebook and Twitter at work are good for productivity… What’s interesting here is less the validity or otherwise of the finding, than the urge to arrive at it… Clearly it would be nice, exciting, helpful if Twittering were good for workplace productivity. It would suggest a convenient alliance between a normative view of connectivity-as-good-in-itself and economic necessity. The very fact that the study was carried out confirms a desire for this convenient alliance.

Once again, I am not arguing that crowdsourcing does not work, since clearly there is evidence that it has provided significant returns in key areas (although I found Wikinomics to be unconvincing). I think crowdsourcing can work very well in a number of different areas, although the successful examples (or at least the most publicised ones) seem to be either emergent (rather than guided) or incentivised (rather than voluntary). This is not a criticism of crowdsourcing per se, but a call for consideration of the possibility that, while crowdsourcing is a very useful tool to have in the toolbox, it is not the only tool – and for some jobs it might not be the right tool.

1. No offense intended. [↩]
2. As well as being utterly abhorrent to anybody who places any value on personal liberty. [↩]
3. Note that this opinion may be a result of my personal bias towards do-gooding – somebody with a penchant for security issues will probably find the suggestion above more compelling. [↩]

If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you’ll know that I am singularly unconvinced by the utility of crowdsourcing in emergencies (at least, the sort of emergencies that I’ve been in). However – and I can’t emphasise this enough – I am often wrong. So I’d like to present a video from the Ushahidi meeting last month in which members of the team explain the principles behind Swift River, the crowdsourcing filter approach that they’re developing. Watch the presentation – it’s very clear and comprehensive – and decide for yourselves. However I will add a disclaimer: this presentation does not persuade me that my initial views were wrong. You need to bear in mind two things though – first, I think we’re talking about different types of emergency, and second, I’m often wrong.

http://www.vimeo.com/4067823

One of the claims made by Patrick in his defense of crowdsourcing:

Fifth, all the humanitarian organizations present during today’s meetings embraced the need for two-way, community-generated information and social media. Yet these same organizations fold there arms and revert to a one-way communication mindset when the issue of crowdsourcing comes up. They forget that they too can generate information in response to rumors and thus counter-act misinformation as soon as it spreads. If the US Embassy can do this in Madagascar using Twitter, why can’t humanitarian organizations do the equivalent? [my emphasis]

I responded:

Is there any evidence at all that the US Embassy’s Twitter feed had any impact at all on the course of events? I mean, I know it made a good headline in external media, but I don’t see how it’s a good example if there’s no actual evidence that it had any impact.

Patrick’s evidence was an assertion that the rumours didn’t spread. I find this to be implausible in the extreme, and I’ll let Jeff Allen explain why:

When the Liberian banks started charging a differential exchange rate (the same as their partner banks were doing in London), that reality-based fact morphed in the street into “the banks don’t take little heads”. The US Embassy put out a press release to try to stop the rumor. It said, “Dollars are dollars, big head or little. Every dollar anywhere on the planet can be exchanged for any other, and they are all dollars.” Which would be true, except it’s not. If you try to bring $10,000 from Liberia and spend them in the US, the odds that you have a counterfeit bill in there someplace are high enough that you’ve probably brought (on average) $9994 instead of the $10000 you thought you did.

In any case, a press release from the embassy certainly wasn’t enough to stop this story. Whether becaused they beleived the rumor, or because they just didn’t want to be the only one not believing it (the musical chairs effect), within a few days the vendors stopped accepting little head notes. This was a few days before payday, and several staff brought the story to me, worried I would pay them in little head notes that they could not spend in the local market. I showed them the newspaper, and told them a dollar is a dollar. They told me, “a dollar I can’t spend isn’t a dollar”.

This is my experience of dealing with rumours in the field. Most of the time, trying to counter them is a waste of time – you just have to work around them. In this case, MSF withdrew all the little head dollars from their financial system, and the problem was solved. Notice that the US embassy press release failed to reassure the market, and I don’t see why a twitter message (or any other web-based tool) would have any greater effect (even if Liberia had better connectivity than it does). This isn’t just a theoretical question, it has serious practical implications:

PS: Think rumors are funny? Managing rumors and knowing when to give up and get out of the way is serious business for humanitarian aid workers. Here’s an article about 3 Red Cross workers killed due to a rumor. My boss didn’t make the decision she made because she’s a nice lady. She decided this wasn’t a rumor that we were going to kill, and we needed to get the heck out of the way of it.

I agree that the humanitarian community needs to improve its communication in the field, particularly with beneficiaries, and that there are a range of tools with which to do so. However we need to be realistic about what those tools can achieve, and in this case recognise that when we feed “facts” into the rumour mill, it won’t stop the rumour mill from grinding – those facts just get all churned up with all the other rumours into a great big tasty rumour pie.

Nobody can deny that Clay Shirky is a clever guy, and that he knows his beans when it comes to the world of social software.¹ Part of his argument is that a) television has been masking the sheer amount of leisure time that we have to participate in communal activities, and b) the information revolution has provided us with the internet as a vehicle to make that leisure time more productive. This hypothesis of cognitive surplus seems reasonable, although one can argue with his assertion that making lolcatz is better than doing nothing, on the grounds that making lolcatz is at least doing something.

The exact means by which the internet enables us to capitalise on this surplus vary, but a lot of emphasis is placed on social software of various kinds – Web 2.0, as it’s sometimes known. In the last couple of weeks we’ve had some discussion about one general application – the possibility of humanitarian wikis, and the potential of crowdsourcing, the ne plus ultra of Web 2.0 – but throughout these discussions I’ve played the role of the sceptic. Shirky’s essay provides me with a starting point to address the most basic concern that I have about the role of crowdsourcing and other approaches in the humanitarian community.

The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.

This raises a problem which I think is often overlooked in our predictions about how these tools might change the sector. Humanitarian workers, generally speaking, don’t have a whole lot of cognitive surplus. If you’ve ever worked in disaster response – even on the periphery – you know that the working day can sometimes last literally the entire day. Even when you’re not working, you’re working, because you’re still in the crisis area and you’re essentially on call if something goes wrong (especially in areas which are insecure). Your cognitive surplus will not be focused on your humanitarian work; and even if you are inclined to contribute to a humanitarian wikipedia (for example), you are very likely be in a tiny minority.

It seems to me that this poses a serious problem for those expecting aid workers to be engaged participants in experimenting with these new technologies. It seems that this basic obstacle undermines many of the claims about how the humanitarian community might use these tools, although this doesn’t mean that those technologies have no future and it definitely doesn’t mean that we won’t be affected by their spread, especially as the web becomes increasingly mobile.

1. If you haven’t read Here Comes Everybody yet, please do so, and enjoy listening to this extended interview which riffs on many of the economic arguments in that book. [↩]

I hope that Patrick doesn’t feel that this is a hit post, because it isn’t intended to be. However I find it difficult to stay in my seat when I see the words “crowdsourcing” and “humanitarian” in the same sentence. So deep breaths, everybody. Patrick has just put up two posts, entitled Internews, Ushahidi and communication in crisis and Ushahidi: From Croudsourcing to Crowdfeeding. The posts were based on his attendance at a couple of events hosted in New York by InterNews (good organisation, by the way, we like them).

At the meetings, Patrick “introduced the concept of crowdsourcing crisis information” and says that he “should have expected the immediate push back on the issue of data validation”. These two posts taken together explain his position very well, but also explain why I am so very very unconvinced by that position – note that this doesn’t mean that I’m supportive of the status quo, which I’m not. More after the break:

Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Evans at Global Dashboard:

The point about Twitter and other social networking technologies is that in our hyper-networked age, we just haven’t yet had the time to develop the collective mechanisms to make sure that this awesome power to aggregate, to build positive feedback loops, is channelled safely.

Erik Hersman at The Ushahidi Blog:

Since we don’t believe there will ever be one tool that everyone uses for gathering information on global crisis, we see a future where a tool like Swift River aggregates data from tools such as the aforementioned Twitter, Ushahidi, Flickr, YouTube, local mobile and web social networks. At this point what you have is a whole lot of noise and very little signal as to what the value is of the data you’re seeing.

Anyone who has access to a computer (and possibly just a mobile phone in the future), can then go and rate information as it comes in. This is classic “crowdsourcing”, where the more people you have weighing in on any specific data point raises the probability of the finding the right answer. The information with greater veracity is highlighted and bubbles to the top, weighted also by proximity, severity and category of the incident.

The question is, how viable is a tool like Swift River as one of the “collective mechanisms” that Alex correctly identifies the need for? I think the Ushahidi developers are on an interesting track, but I think that there are limitationss to what crowdsourcing can achieve – not a problem when it’s a forum like Digg (for example) where the weight of numbers has a levelling effect on any individual distortions, and where the ratings are trivial.¹ However I’m still waiting to be convinced about the value of crowdsourcing in an emergency, because it’s crowdsourcing of the type which Alex describes in his example of a potentially dangerous Twitter meme.

1. I don’t mean “trivial” in a derogatory way, only in the sense that nobody’s going to make potentially life or death decisions on the basis of a Dugg article. [↩]

I spoke last week with Conor Foley, who’s looking at innovation in the humanitarian sector for the next ALNAP annual report. As any fule kno, innovation is a particularly interest of mine, particularly technology innovation, but I wasn’t surprised to hear that most of his interviewees shared my perspective: that the humanitarian community is not much good at innovation.

I should qualify that. The humanitarian community is built on innovation – on just getting things done despite a lack of resources – but successful innovation is very hard to come by. I define “successful” in this context as innovations that become widespread and enduring – that is, that they spread widely and last over time. I should probably qualify that as well:

1. All innovations have a distinct lifespan, and are often superceded by a new innovation (or more rarely a completely new invention). So if an innovation endures over time, that is evidence of its success; but if an innovation doesn’t endure, that isn’t necessarily evidence of its failure.
2. All innovations are context-specific, and sometimes don’t translate into other contexts. So likewise, if an innovation spreads geographically / organisationally, that is evidence for its success; but if it doesn’t, that isn’t necessarily evidence of its failure.

These two qualifications makes successful innovation sometimes hard to identify – but not impossible. In terms of projects that I’ve been involved with inside the sector, I think the Humanitarian Information Centres, the ECB Project and NetHope all qualify without any doubt (although the innovation in each project is exhibited in very different ways). What interests me more is innovation outside the sector.

I’ve been involved with Sahana for a long time now, and I wouldn’t hesitate to identify it as the single biggest innovation I’ve seen – potentially revolutionary. You can also point to projects like Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS and so forth – projects that, while not “humanitarian” in themselves, have definite humanitarian applications – but the strange thing about all these is that they haven’t managed to get significant traction inside the “traditional” humanitarian sector.

The question is, Why is this the case? What makes the humanitarian community unable to recognise and replicate innovation? And that, my friends, will be the subject of the next post…

UPDATE: To my eternal guilt and shame, I forgot to mention a fourth project that I was involved with, Aid Workers Network – again, work that was well ahead of its time, mainly thanks to Mark Hammersley.

David Sasaki joins the conversation, which is great – it was starting to feel a little bit like a mens singles tennis match between me and Patrick. Now it’s mens doubles, or something. David starts with a strong serve, although his accusation that

Both men seem to have the academic tendency to speak in aphorisms

seems a little unfair – the heuristics post he’s referring to was simply me reminding myself that I’m not the great oracle on these issues, and that I should get ready to be wrong.¹

If I understand Paul correctly, his two main criticisms of Global Voices are that 1.) it doesn’t matter if you highlight moderate voices discussing the news of their countries because it is the extreme voices who will always make the headlines and 2.) during times of conflict and emergency, focusing on participatory websites rather than humanitarian institutions will lead to lots of conversation, but less action.

No. I’m not criticising Global Voices per se, and definitely not on those particular grounds. I think Global Voices is amongst the best that the Web has to offer. What I worry about is making claims about the impact of projects that go beyond a) what the evidence shows to be true and b) what those projects can realistically expect to achieve. Global Voices meets its stated aims convincingly, but what worries me is when people start talking about Global Voices – or blogs in general – as something which they’re not. As David notes,

We often portray Global Voices as the zeitgeist of what the ignored world is discussing when in fact we are an amazing international community of individuals with large online networks and particular interests.

David’s honesty is admirable, and I think that honesty reflects one of the strengths of Global Voices in general. What I was taking issue with more was Patrick’s statement that

Global Voices is a far more effective local information and response network than FAST ever was.

I simply disagree with this.² Global Voices is not a response network in any substantive sense, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a more effective information network either. I agree that there ought to be more attention paid to blogs as a source of information, but the strength of GV is precisely that it is not programmatic. The bloggers involved have not set themselves objectives to provide early warning information, or document human rights abuses – they are just private citizens who are writing about issues that are important to them. The situation is slightly different with Ushaidi, of course, which was conceived and developed specifically in response to the post-electoral crisis in Kenya. In the words of Ory Okolloh,

Ushahidi was mainly intended to be a mapping tool and a repository of information about the post-election crisis as seen from the view point of people on the ground. We were trying to capture information that was not mainly being reported in the mainstream (there was a lot of self-censorship in the media) and also provide a timeline for information for both mainstream and citizen reported events. In the case of real time mapping Ushahidi could be used to track where the violence or the peace efforts were taking place. We hope to be able to provide those people who are “addressing the real needs to real people” with information that might help their efforts and to be part of the “testimony” as it were of what happened.

Now that’s a series of specific objectives that can – and should – be measured in order to judge the impact of the project. However if you look at the underlying requirement for all of those objectives to be met, it seems to me that the basic requirement is a systematic data collection system – which is exactly what Ushahidi did not have. It’s entirely possible to run a Ushahidi instance with a more systematic foundation – but then it stops being the Web 2.0 poster child that everybody wants it to be, and becomes a visualisation tool for a standard human rights monitoring system.

Now I don’t have a problem with that – it’s not as if we’re over-supplied with really great data visualisation in the human rights field – but that’s not why people got excited about it. People got excited about it because it’s a Revolutionary New Way Of Doing Things Just Like Clay Shirky Says, and I’m asking what I hope is a valid question: it may be a revolutionary new way of doing things, but is it a better way of doing things? Maybe it is – in which case, show me.

I think this tension is at the heart of most of these initiatives. Patrick unwittingly gave away one of the reasons why he thinks bloggers are better than the established systems, and it goes right to the heart of this tension.

Unlike the local information networks at FAST and conventional conflict early warning systems, they are not paid informants.

This belief is part of the cult of the amateur that I think the internet has reinforced, but it is not inherently better to do something for free than it is to do it for pay.  Personally I think that as soon as they stop acting as bloggers and start acting as human rights monitors, they will cease to be good bloggers – and they probably won’t be very good human rights monitors either. I also think that the strengths of citizen journalism – the amateur spirit, the personal perspectives, the improvised approach – are in this context potential weaknesses. Joshua at Registan almost nails one of the key problems for Global Voices when he says that

too many internationals, including me, are far more alike each other than they are to their home countries.

Even though many of them are from the regions or countries that they cover, the Global Voices bloggers – in certain important ways – are more like each other than they are like the people in their home countries. In particular, they share “democratic values” just as Patrick describes, and a positive, can-do attitude that impresses people.³ Yet those democratic values may be the very thing that makes them less representative, and that raises an interesting dilemma for David and the others who are interested in Rising Voices.

In relation to Ushahidi, I wrote

The virtual world isn’t resistant to real-world pressures, and it doesn’t necessarily overcome social divisions – hence the problems with the [Mashada] bulletin board. These pressures can be managed, but it’s no easy thing – but would Ushaidi be any less resistant to hijacking by people intent on promoting social divisions?

I suppose that’s my question, in the context of David’s job – what defense mechanisms do we have against the real world?

1. Besides, academics don’t usually talk in aphorisms – they prefer to maximise their word count. [↩]
2. Although that doesn’t necessarily mean that I think FAST is particularly effective. [↩]
3. However a positive attitude is not enough – I have frequently said that I would prefer to work with people who really couldn’t give a damn about humanitarian issues but who are excellent at their jobs, than work with people who are lousy at their job but who really, really care. I’m not saying that the Global Voices bloggers are lousy at their job – but their job is not “early warning”, it’s blogging. [↩]

Bearing in mind my previous post, I’d like to take on Patrick – in fact, I’d like to take on his entire Global Voices love-in.  First, though, a word from our sponsors!

Global Voices Online, Ushahidi and the range of similar projects using the web in novel ways are fantastic initiatives that have already started to transform the way in which we do things. Blogging and other forms of internet-mediated communication point towards a radical shift in the way information is transmitted and consumed. The impact of the information revolution on the problem sciences – particularly in areas such as humanitarian action, human rights work and conflict prevention and resolution – will be comprehensive, radical and unpredictable.

It’s precisely because these impacts will be comprehensive, radical and unpredictable that I am wary of gazing into the crystal ball and telling everybody exactly how the game will end. Similarly Patrick isn’t in the game of hype – his critique of conflict prevention mechanisms is unflinching – but when I read his recent posts about global voices think that he’s become over-excited based on the good intentions and winning personalities of the people involved.

Most people, most of the time, in most places are nonviolent. Social extremes are by definition minorities. Global Voices are more informed and moderate. Giving a voice to these Global Voices online is likely to diminish the impact of extremists.

As far as I can tell, there’s no basis in fact for this conclusion. Not only is the media – including the web – skewed towards extreme positions¹ but human cognition is also skewed towards extreme positions. We tend to take more notice of things that are at the edges, especially if those things make us uncertain or afraid. The echo chamber effect of the internet also suggests to me that it doesn’t matter much how many “moderate” voices² you present to the world – the extreme voices will still be in the headlines.

More pointedly, I’m still failing to see what the impact of these projects are in the field of humanitarian and human rights action. Let’s take human rights monitoring as an example for which there are two main rationales – advocacy and legal action. In terms of advocacy, projects such as BrightEarth and Ushaidi both have a role to play; but the question of how to leverage their visibility into effective campaigning activity is not one that is well-defined. In terms of legal action, they have no utility at all, nor are they likely to on their own terms. More to the point, the high visibility of these projects runs the risk of creating a public priority that skews towards advocacy (which is important) and away from legal action (which is more important – and is also what the advocacy should be leading towards).

At one point, Patrick writes

Global Voices is a far more effective local information and response network than FAST ever was. [Emphasis Patrick's.] … Bloggers at Global Voices are directly linked to local social and political networks… As more of the irregularities of the voting [in Kenya] surfaced, bloggers quickly found themselves as citizen reporters, using twitter, photoblogging and other tools to document and respond to the escalating violence.

I can’t quite see how blogging is a “response” in any significant sense. One of Patrick’s key arguments is that current early warning systems – such as FAST, referenced here – are not sufficiently linked to policy and operational decision-making structures. With the case of the Kenyan blogging community, that charge is surely doubled – not only are they not linked to decision-making structures but there are no decision-making structures in sight. That’s not a criticism of “citizen journalism”, which is a worthwhile endeavor on its own terms – but let’s not pretend that its something it’s not.

There are several dangers here. One is that if people who get involved in projects like these don’t see a return on their investment, they are unlikely to come back again – they’ll put their energies somewhere else. Another is that there’s a limited amount of resources out there, and resources placed into one project don’t go into another project. Yet another is that the power of the web skews towards those with the best access, which means that organisations that might be doing better work suffer from not being as visible. Yet another is that by trying to move into a new – and admittedly sexy – area, projects like GVO will start to suffer from mission creep, diluting those elements which made them useful and attractive in the first place. And finally the peer-based nature of this interaction – which is fantastic in and of itself – but which does not necessarily reinforce the institution-based action which is essential for human rights framework.

Now I’m mad for emergent social processes, and the aggregation of all this geospatial data collection, blogging activity and general intertwingling is likely to produce some pretty interesting developments. I wouldn’t want to tell people that they should stop doing things that they feel are worthwhile³ but one of the things that humanitarian organisations struggle with is measuring impact rather than output – basically, did we help versus in what ways did we help. We have a clear idea of the outputs of these projects – in fact some of the projects are just outputs – but not good metrics for their impact, and that means we can’t judge whether they are worth continuing or not.

Participation without purpose creates fatigue – see how quickly the efforts after Hurricane Katrina disappeared as people went back to their everyday lives. Visualisation without intent creates nice pictures – but doesn’t necessarily have the impact in the real world that we might think it does if we spend a lot of our time online, where our efforts will be amplified and run straight back to us. I sometimes feel like a lone and unwelcome voice (well, not lone – my co-blogger Tom has similar feelings) but that’s because I believe that the workings of the Web can help us take this work forward. I just need to be convinced – not just by discussing the possibilities, but actually seeing them working.

POSTSCRIPT: Patrick is entirely correct when he states

the conflict early warning field is still in the middle ages when it comes to the use of emerging information communication technologies

and that’s something that we need to fix. But he then goes on to say that

these factors are antithetical to the observation made by Rupesinghe exactly 20 years ago (!) vis-a-vis conflict early warning and response systems: “a democratic flow of information is the first condition for a democratic and open system of warning and resolution.” Stress on democratic and flow. It is high time we in the humanitarian community pay more attention to Global Voices.

Now while Global Voices definitely fits the requirement for information flow, I’d be very, very careful about calling it democratic. Global Voices is not a representative body; it’s not an accountable body; it’s not even a “body” as such. We like Global Voices because it reflects our own values – but democracy is not supposed to reflect our values only, it’s supposed to reflect everybody’s values.

1. It’s worth noting that this includes technotopianism of the sort we see embodied in Global Voices. [↩]
2. And the question of who decides which voices are “moderate” goes unasked in this discussion. [↩]
3. Although they should always bear in mind the humanitarian fallacy. [↩]