On the incident with Jason Spencer and Sacha Baron Cohen

In an ideal world, people make rational decisions, right? They make decisions based on good reasons, on due consideration of potential outcomes, including bad ones, right? When people are driven by strong emotion, it is generally agreed that they don’t make good decisions. People do things when scared or angry that they would not do if they were calm and had time to reflect on the ramifications of their action.

With this in mind, it would be nice to think that our elected officials are making decisions based on good reasons, not reflexive fear reactions.  Whatever policy legislators  are going to propose, wouldn’t it nice to think that the deliberations leading to that policy were driven by due consideration of evidence and reason?

So, anyway, Jason Spencer is a Georgia state representative who just tendered his resignation as of July 31, 2018 because he did some stuff that was recorded for television, and after the fact he regretted having done these things. Putting aside any judgement of the people or actions involved, I want to focus on Spencer’s explanation (from the BBC):

[Spencer] said in a statement Baron Cohen had taken "advantage of my paralyzing fear that my family would be attacked". 

"My fears were so heightened at that time, I was not thinking clearly nor could I appreciate what I was agreeing to when I participated in his 'class'," he said.

His paralyzing fears were heightened.  Apparently, Spencer goes through life constantly fearing and expecting terrorist attacks from people of the Islamic faith. He’s far more likely to be killed in an automobile accident, or by any number of relatively innocuous causes, but for Spencer, apparently, the myth of constant threat from Islamic terrorists is constantly at work, and, thus “I was not thinking clearly nor could I appreciate what I was agreeing to.”

This is the problem with discourse that focuses on vivid dangers like terrorist attacks. It stops us from reasoning clearly; it stops us from making good decisions.

To some extent, the first bad decision is to focus on the vivid and emotional event that is a terrorist attack. Of course, such an attack deserves attention, and of course, the victims of such an attack are deserving of sympathy. But so, too, do all the people who have fallen victim to any of the sundry dangers of modern life. Well over 30,000 people die in automobile accidents in the U.S. each year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year), but Spencer doesn’t appear to be afraid of that very real and far more likely danger. The thing about terrorist attacks is that they are special. They are unusual. They make good news because they are special and different. We are shocked by them. With something like automobile fatalities, they are so common that we cannot be continuously outraged or distressed. Trying to report on automobile fatalities would be a bit like the body counts that were featured on the news during the Vietnam war: it becomes numbing. That numbing might be good if it lets emotions ebbs and allows higher order reasoning, but that same numbing is bad because it allows the problem to be ignored.

The vividness of the unusual event is precisely what makes it so psychologically powerful—so able to trigger the fears that overwhelm good reasoning.

Wouldn’t it be nice if political discourse was dominated by arguments based on good evidence and sound reasoning, rather than decisions dominated by fear where the person making the decision is “not thinking clearly nor [able to] appreciate what [he/she is] agreeing to”?

As someone with an explicit interest in clear thinking (or at least in “thought clearing”), I place a high value on trying to seek out the best reasoning and on trying to avoid situations where decisions are made on passion rather than reason.  I know that no significant decision is ever purely rational, but that doesn’t mean that one cannot strive for rationality. Horst Rittel, who shaped the program in which I studied, held that rationality was ultimately impossible, but that nonetheless, we ought to strive to use the tools of rationality as much as possible to guide our decision-making for the precise reason that the decisions we make can have vast consequences. We can’t eliminate the emotional elements of decision making. But we can—and should—make a concerted effort to avoid letting our thinking be constantly driven to a state of panic due to a threat that is, realistically speaking, incredibly small.

Multidimensionality, trade-offs, and perfectionism

Willie Dixon, the great blues singer, laid out in specific form one of the general problems that people face in decision making when he sang “I’m built for comfort, I’m not built for speed.” (Howlin’ Wolf did versions to which I’m partial.) The general principle is that sometimes there are multiple desirable characteristics that compete against each other.  In automotive design, one common trade-off is the choice between comfort and speed: higher speeds want lower weight vehicles with stiffer suspensions, which means a bumpy ride, while greater comfort wants a softer suspension and greater weight, for a smoother ride.

One could say that a designer could seek both—indeed, it’s possible to seek both comfort and speed, but generally at some other cost (for example, more care in the design process, and more expensive components): a Porsche may not be any faster than a top-of-the-line Nissan, but it will cost more.

Real-world decisions involve many different considerations—different dimensions on which something can be evaluated. The Howling Wolf example explicitly invokes two dimensions, but most decisions involve far more than two dimensions.  One difficulty in evaluation processes is in balancing different evaluative dimensions. 

Consider, for example, the evaluation of an athlete in a team sport. Strength, size, speed, quickness/reaction time, agility, and balance all matter. So do intelligence, confidence, judgment, and ability to work with others. A professional team that considers adding a player to its roster must consider all of these, as well as considering the player’s future prospects, and the cost of signing that player. Do you get the greatest talent, at possible cost to team chemistry, or do you get less talent to support chemistry? In baseball, two of the greatest second basemen of all time exemplify this question: Rogers Hornsby and Eddie Collins were near contemporaries.  There is little debate that Hornsby was the better hitter, but his teams didn’t do particularly well, and often traded him away. Collins, on the other hand, played a key role on multiple championship teams.  Who was greater?  There isn’t a clear answer.

One trade-off that is central to writers is the trade-off between time and quality, about which I’ve written before. You can choose to spend more time on a project in order to improve its quality, but that additional time spent on the project is time that cannot be spent on other projects.  For researchers, this is essentially a never-ending conflict: research never answers every question—indeed, every answer will lead to new questions (Jorge Luis Borges lays out this problem in his essay “Avatars of the Tortoise”).

Perfectionism inevitably runs up against this reality.  There is no “right” answer to these questions.  There are only decisions that one must make.

I suppose my suggestion for a perfectionist is to look beyond any single project to look at something bigger—something that encompasses any single project—a career, for example.

If you focus on one project and want to make that project perfect, that’s great. But what if making that project better means that you don’t spend time on another project?

Where do you focus perfectionist intentions? On individual projects, at possible cost to your career or to your life? Or do you focus your perfectionist intentions on your career, which might lead to making compromises on an individual project?

Again, there isn’t a clear answer, which is why this is such a thorny issue.  You have to make a decision that serves you.   When there are multiple dimensions on which to make an evaluation, and when there are trade-offs, choices become difficult and there is no really objective standard by which to judge. The choice is yours--don't think you've failed because you chose to make a compromise.

One cookie now or two cookies later

Yesterday I was talking with my friend about some difficult issues he was having related to raising his son, and in particular with respect to a complex decision where there are clear pros and cons on either side of the equation. On a certain level, of course, it's laughable to ask me about raising a child, since I've none of my own. But philosophy is philosophy; some wisdom is always worthy.

When we were talking, I was thinking of him and his son just as people like those I often help--which is to say graduate students. He's a smart guy, but his son is eight, so you can't quite talk through ideas the same way with an eight year old. "But there has to be a simplified parallel that he would understand," I finally claimed.

And there is; it's a classic one. I think that Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence says something to the effect that those who, as children, choose two cookies later over one now, tend to be more successful as adults--successful in most measurable dimensions, in terms of career, social life, etc. I don't know if Goleman's assertion is true, but it is clear to me that the one cookie now vs. two later is a model for many of the things we face in life.

My friend was concerned with some issues of social responsibility, but also with his son's social community, too. He felt a conflict between large-scale social responsibility, and a desire to care for his son and to give him opportunities. Two different value systems were coming into conflict.

As I was out running today, I was thinking that the one cookie now vs. two cookies later paradigm is a good one for talking about the complexity of issues, and for showing how we can be faced with questions whose answer is not clear, or which inevitably involve some sort of compromise.

Suppose you're offered one cookie now vs. two later. One good first question might be "how much later?" If you only have to wait one minute for the two cookies, it seems like a no-brainer. Similarly, if you are going to wait a decade to get the two cookies, it seems pointless not to take the one right now. Somewhere in between these two extremes, we might logically presume that there is a point where it is hard to decide.

In exploring the complexity of the question, we can also note that the reward offered for waiting (the two cookies) can be altered--maybe it's three cookies later, or ice cream and a cookie later instead of just a cookie now.

These are terms, I think, that an eight year old could understand. On the other hand, getting an eight year old to see the point, and to accept it may be unlikely. After all, this is difficult for adults to manage.
Some decisions are like the one cookie now vs. two cookies in one minute decision: it's easily made. Most are not.

When we're writing, or when we're managing a project, or when we're trying to decide whether to support an institution (like my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley), we're faced with questions that are much more closely balanced. Yes, the University builds weapons of mass destruction; it also harbors and supports some very good progressive thought. Yes, the university sports programs are problematic in many ways; they also do some good, and buying tickets to one game won't really make a difference. Yes, you want your son to be able to have communal activities with friends, including ones that you enjoyed as a youth; you also want your son to be able to make socially responsible decisions that promote peace, justice, etc.
Or, to take this out of the realm of my friend and into the realm of the writer: we might offer this similar paradigm:
shitty draft now vs. good draft later. How long do you wait for the good draft? A shitty draft now may be far superior--if, for example, you have been told you must submit something immediately or be dropped from your program. Sure, at such a moment it would be nice to have a good draft, but often we feel that the draft we currently have is a shitty one.
The answer is never clear. Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, once wrote that a bad letter in good time was better than a good letter late (though he said it more elegantly than my awkward paraphrase, I have lost the original quote and the reference to my source--I think it was from a collection of his letters). But if you submit a bad draft to a publisher, you may be rejected out of hand, hurting your future chances, while waiting longer would have meant a better reception.

Sadly there is no clear answer to many of the problems that we struggle with (which may help explain why we struggle with them). I believe that the more clearly we can see what is involved in choosing the different alternatives, the better we can make a choice that will serve us well.

Well, the logic sounds ok, but I wouldn't want to try to convince anyone of the wisdom herein--least of all an eight year old.