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.

Emotion, reason, and LeBron James

This is a follow up on last week’s post about unresolvable questions in which I discussed evaluating basketball players and LeBron James, in particular.

After the Cavaliers’s win last night, James has once again led a team to the NBA Finals—this for the 8th straight year. This adds to his impressive resume and his claim to be greatest of all time (GOAT).  In my previous post, I argued that questions like “who is greater: James or Jordan?” were unresolvable.

At the same time, winning the conference finals 8 times in a row is—well, if Jordan had chosen to continue playing basketball instead of trying baseball, maybe he could have matched that feat. Perhaps Jordan was the more talented, but maybe those 8 straight trips to the Finals is the more impressive career? This also reveals two dimensions of evaluation I didn’t discuss in my previous post: the difference between potential and achievement.

But this is not about multidimensionality, but about the way that emotion can influence reasoning. To what extent is evaluation affected by emotions?  There is a plenty of actual empirical data on how emotions do influence reasoning (see, for example, the idea of “reactive devaluation”), but I’m just going to focus on one particular influence on evaluation.

This morning, I stopped at a cafe, and the music playing was music that was new and that I had loved when I was in high school and college. A lot of that music still seems particularly excellent to me.  Rationally, it makes no sense to me to suggest that the best musicians ever were all performing their best music in the first twenty years or so of my musical memory. But it often seems that way. Those songs were emotively impactful to me when the whole world was new. Music that is new to me today is often simply unable to catch my attention because I have so many other things in mind.

To what extent is this true for evaluating basketball players? Jordan was one of the great stars of that same period—high school/college—Jordan trying to take the mantle of greatness from Bird and Magic. I don’t really remember the greatness of Kareem, though I remember his long and productive post-peak career. Do I have a propensity to overrate Jordan in the same way that I have a propensity to overrate the music of my youth?  The baseball writer Bill James included a repeated item in his Historical Baseball Abstract in which, for each decade, he quoted old  ballplayers saying some variation of “they ain’t as great as when I was young.”

Will those who are in high school and college today—people too young to have watched Jordan’s great games live—will they be predisposed to consider James the greatest ever because he was the player who amazed them when the world was still new? And will there be a debate 20 years from now about whether some new player is greater than James (with Jordan having receded into the past)?
The decision-making process includes emotional elements that shape our reasoning. If we’re called upon to make a quick choice, the emotional factors are likely to be the deciding factors when complex decisions must be made because the complexity of carefully reasoned evaluation tends to defy answers.