This unbelievably cynical. I don’t buy it.
And what would be gained?
Here’s the problem is conspiracy theories: when you divorce yourself from needing any evidence to draw a conclusion (nothing that could go before a court of law or a scientific paper), then anything is possible. No means to confirm or refute it! Why not claim that actually the CIA agents are working for Cuba and trying to reduce moral for the rest of them? That’s equally plausible as a generic psyop, but would at least have a more clear outcome. And I just made that up… or did I? Maybe I’m working for the CIA! I mean Cuba! No Russia!
Once you go down that rabbit hole, you throw away everything. So the baby goes with the bath water. You’re totally ungrounded, and at that point you’re totally manipulatable to whenever wants to create a conspiracy for their own agenda, even if that agenda isn’t very clear or sophisticated (eg aliens are doing X).
A healthy amount of skepticism is important. Too much and you’re wrong most of the time yet no logical argument or lack of evidence convinces you. If this happens at the societal level, it’s devastating.
I'm not saying that I KNOW this is X plot with Y intentions (most probably it's just mass psychosis) It's just that I do not take what a CIA operative says at face value.
Where there's free money, there will be people who find ways to get it. Was ever thus.
Then you also have the fact that damage to their vestibular system can be seen.
The UK certainly had many cases of outright "fraud" (whereby you should consider a claim fraudulent if the person is clearly exaggerating their inability to work). That's why at the start of the re-assessment there were over 7,000 people claiming they were unfit to work because they had sexually transmitted infections, and 10,000+ because they were too fat. Huge numbers of people voluntarily stopped receiving disability payments rather than be assessed at all!
Looking it up, the overall rate at which decisions in the UK were appealed against was ~40%. About 60% of appeals were denied. If you wanted to you could therefore consider that the fraud rate was 24% towards the end of the program. But in the earlier days the fraud rate was more like 75%! That's a high fraud rate by any definition, but even so is certainly an under-estimate. The people in question are unemployed, they've got time and there are no downsides to appealing. Meanwhile the appeals authority is, again, entirely un-incentivized to deny applications beyond the fact that if they never did they'd be replaced. We should expect a massive false negative rate on denials.
The original system ATOS used was check-box and computer driven for that reason: it's much easier to design an objective and fair system when you're not in front of someone who's crying and saying they're in pain. It would take a heart of stone to deny people "free" money which is what benefits creates at the point of individual assessment, so you can't rely on individual's subjective judgements. They will almost always side with the complainant, especially if they have to do it in person. There's tons of psychological and emotional downsides to being the "bad guy" and zero reward.
> The system's own claims of fraud rates can't be taken seriously; claimed fraud rates were low before the big re-assessment but abuse was sufficiently widespread for it to become a major political issue anyway.
The system's own claims of fraud rates should be taken much more seriously than widepsread political opinions, the history of the UK wrt "Benefit Street" etc mean that there's a big juicy voter wedge there, the numbers from the actual institutions tell the story much more evenly than the politicians do.
> Looking it up, the overall rate at which decisions in the UK were appealed against was ~40%. About 60% of appeals were denied. If you wanted to you could therefore consider that the fraud rate was 24% towards the end of the program. But in the earlier days the fraud rate was more like 75%! That's a high fraud rate by any definition, but even so is certainly an under-estimate. The people in question are unemployed, they've got time and there are no downsides to appealing. Meanwhile the appeals authority is, again, entirely un-incentivized to deny applications beyond the fact that if they never did they'd be replaced. We should expect a massive false negative rate on denials.
The rate that the appeals pass or reject does not map to the fraud rate, some applicants lack the agency to appeal and those who can appeal often can't do so repeatedly. The profoundly disabled are screened out at this point - this is where those "My dad was ruled fit to work and died of cancer the next week" stories crop up from.
> The original system ATOS used was check-box and computer driven for that reason: it's much easier to design an objective and fair system when you're not in front of someone who's crying and saying they're in pain."
This was widely, infamously abused to deny people benefits.
This "objective and fair" system marked my husband as capable to work a full time job because he could climb a single flight of stairs with my assistance, ATOS staff were encouraged to deflate scores and deny benefits. It was not objective or fair in the least, it was a rigorous exercise in accelerating toward the minimum number of people receiving benefit awards from that ATOS examination site.