On Whiskey and Scorpions

Practical fallacies and the virtue of practical thinking.

There’s a ton of content out there on logical fallacies—the concept of logical fallacy has definitely entered into the network of “pop sci” content outlets (Boing Boing, Wired, Radiolab, Malcolm Gladwell, TED, etc). The idea being, I think, that if you can rid humanity of logically improper thinking, you can get right to the business of landing on Mars, ending poverty and disease, and/or finally cancelling “The Bachelorette”.

 I applaud this effort, even though I was recently caught using the phrase “begging the question” terribly wrong. Stamping out the Lake Wobegon Effect or “If-By-Whiskey” is absolutely a worthwhile endeavor, but I do have one concern (without being a concern troll): logic only gets you halfway to the door.

This guy is doing his part to stamp out "If-By-Whiskey"

Here’s an example: there’s an infamous game theory puzzle called the Two Envelopes Problem. In it, a participant is given two identical envelopes, one containing X amount of money, and the other containing twice that. This hypothetical participant takes one envelope, but before opening is, she’s given an opportunity to exchange the envelopes. When she gets that envelope, she’s given the opportunity to exchange the envelopes, and so on.

The trick here is that the math says you’re always better off to switch envelopes (much like in the Monty Hall Problem, you’re better off to switch doors). Unfortunately, the math doesn’t take into consideration that you don’t have all eternity, dang it, and $X is better than $0 (for positive values of X, of course). “Wait, wait,” you’re saying, “this is game theory! If the math doesn’t reveal the most logical course of action, there’s something wrong with the math, not with logical thinking on the whole!”

And you’d be right. But, as of right now, the math isn’t there. It hasn’t been corrected fully, so it can’t be used. So you’re stuck there shuffling envelopes indefinitely until you make an illogical, but practical, solution (though I would switch envelopes at least twice, in case the weight of the money is a giveaway). Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the world still shuffling envelopes. I see three big ways this happens, and I'll talk about one right now:

Forgetting Why. The TED-friendly marketing dude Simon Sinek has a whole talk on “Starting with Why”, and the tl;dr version is this: “People won’t buy your product, they’ll buy your vision.” And that’s awesome, but the “why” I’m talking about is more like the “why” in “Why do scorpions have poisonous stingers?” or “Why does my car have bags of air that inflate when I crash?” and less like “Why does Apple make cool gadgets?” Forgetting Why is forgetting that scorpions can't choose not to have stingers.

A classic example of Forgetting Why stems from Malcolm Gladwell’s recent appearance on the Radiolab episode “Games”. Jad and Robert were talking about a study that showed that 4 out of 5 people root for the underdog in any given, unbiased scenario. Gladwell, apparently did not, and briefly mentioned his sadness when the expected winner fails in an athletic contest. In doing so, he illustrates just what I mean by “forgetting why”.

You see, the “purpose” of a tournament isn’t to identify the strongest team. If that goal were more important than all others, we could simply have a committee do some math to the field of teams after a long season and we’d have a verifiable winner without all the madness. But the reason we have an NCAA basketball tournament is because it’s entertaining, and entertainment has a market value. The reason March Madness exists is not to tell us who's the best—it's to make lots and lots of money.

Conflating the perceived “purpose” of a thing with its function is a problem, because it can have the logical conclusion of a stung child telling the scorpion to get rid of that stupid stinger. We've all seen people who are obsessed with a cause that they cannot possibly effectively champion. Many of them are Forgetting Why, assuming that someone, somewhere, is making life unfair by his or her choice, and if he or she would only choose otherwise, a massive problem would be solved.

In other words, if you can’t assume that products of evolutionary systems control their existence. Like scorpions, or basketball tournaments, or cultures, or economies. Next up: Forgetting How.

The Information Problem

We have too much content, not enough information, and surprisingly little data.

The great futurist Alvin Toffler predicted a world with relevant data so profuse that information overload would be the inevitable result. He was wrong. The 21st Century does not have a problem with information overload. It has a problem with Content Overload.

You might think that I'm splitting semantic hairs in order to make a polarizing statement, but perhaps it would help my case to point out that the surfeit of content on the internet is of varying informational value. Quite a bit of it is opinion, and much of the stuff that is purportedly informational is of questionable truth value.

It's important to make a distinction between content, information, and data. While I'm not suggesting that there's anything inherent in each of these words that usefully distinguishes them, it is clear there are definitely three different phenomena which can be distinguished, regarding the stuff we take into our brains.

Content is what I'll call all print and digital "stuff" in general. This definition of content would include movie reviews, lolcats, sports scores, et cetera. Information is content which can be assigned a truth value. That gets tricky, because an opinion piece is clearly not information in and of itself, but may contain information (or misinformation). Data is a special kind of information, that appears in tabular or numeric form. The universe of Content and Data can be seen as a scale that runs from the lowest density of fact to the highest.

Data is not always foolproof, as Charles Seife identifies in his data-in-journalism analysis, Proofiness. A lot of figures are either half-right, made to appear to support erroneous conclusions, or just plain made up. Of course, that makes any informational statements based on these data unsupported, and opinions formed around this information, misinformed. To hear Seife tell it, there are a lot more errant conclusions out there than accurate ones--which leads me to believe the following:

Nearly everyone is wrong most of the time.

The most logical solution to being wrong is to check facts to make sure they are accurate before basing opinions and decisions on them. If this were possible, it would certainly make for a much better world. Unfortunately, verifiable fact is hard to come by. In many cases, scientific studies have not been done (or cannot be done). Worse, sometimes results of different studies conflict. Exercise science and nutrition seem especially prone to this: one month, authorities say it's essential to focus mostly on cardio, the next, weights are the thing. Fat used to be the killer, now carbs are. Any attempt to be consistently right, even most of the time, is probably doomed to failure.

Unfortunately for us, the number of decisions we have to make every day appears to be increasing. From financial choices, like bank selection and the use of credit cards, to consumer choices about everything from insurance to running shoes. Further, it seems as though the options we have are also increasing, adding even more difficulty to the task of human decision-making, and making the human life experience a multi-decade pratfall.

As a shortcut to making decisions, we tend to lump like decisions together, as a pattern. We may then seek to explain these patterns with a narrative. For example, my wife loves to shop with coupons. Her decision-making pattern is that if we don't absolutely need a product right away, she doesn't buy it at full price, or even close, ever. The narrative behind this pattern is the idea that companies engage in promotional deals to catch unwary shoppers off their guard, but that by putting in a little extra effort, you can subvert these deals to make your shopping exceptionally cheap.

The progression in my wife's example is from individual decisions, to patterns, to explanatory narratives. This is a practical approach to decision making. The reverse is the ideological approach: to take the narrative and impose it on practices and individual decisions. There is nothing wrong with the ideological approach if you use it to govern decisions made without a thought for immediate outcomes. Ethical decisions, for example. One deals honestly because the narrative of "Honesty is the best policy" embodies a state which the decision-maker wishes to attain, not because it yields a direct benefit. When you use the ideological approach and expect a specific result to a specific decision, things get crazy.

This is because narratives are based on, again, patterns made from lots of little decisions, which the narratives then explain. When the method by which the narrative was built is unknown, the truth value of the narrative is obscured. Using content in the place of information or data in order to make decisions is terribly dangerous. Using unverified information as if it were verified is terribly dangerous. Analyzing data incorrectly is terribly dangerous. And yet, this is what is happening in decision-making all over the world, from households to governments and beyond.

Data in and of itself is incredibly powerful. Bringing up Seife and Proofiness again, it's clear that attaching a number to a fact is a shortcut to credibility. But humans are notorious for misreading and abusing data, and creating narratives based on these tortured numbers. Here's an example debunking a mostly harmless myth about pet ownership.

What I'm driving at is this: humanity might make better decisions if we would take what's reported as news and science, et cetera, with a grain of salt. This proves exceptionally difficult, because in reacting to one incorrect or incomplete narrative, we often create an opposing narrative that is just as incorrect or incomplete. There may not be a solution to the "Information Problem", but I propose that you, Dear Reader, go conduct your own studies to verify my narrative, and live by holding out judgment until proof is overwhelming.