JOLLY DAYS

Hillary and Barack and the Logic of Illogic

This article about the logic of illogic has such rich associations you have to re-think experience to see how it applies.

The idea is that in economic systems, and in all systems requiring choice, people think they are being logical, but they are being deeply, deeply illogical. A group of MIT students told to write the last two numbers of their Social Security number and then make a judgment involving numbers found that the higher the digits of their SSN the higher their estimates. They were sure they were simply being logical.

The idea evokes the question, “Can you really regard people as rational calculators if their decisions are influenced by random numbers?”

You sense the irrationality in most people and occasionally admit to yourself you might not have thought things out rationally, but to see that this is characteristic, a foundationalist aspect of human nature, is almost shocking.

Given the logic, that people “anchor” to first judgments, it seems Hillary's best response to Obama's early assertion of himself as an agent of change, was not to say she had more experience, but that specifically she is an agent of change and these are the specifics of that change and this is how that change could be extended. Essentially nudging the anchoring of Obama's assertion, using the illogic of a projection onto a blank slate of all sorts of hopes, into a value specific benefit.

A doctor at Harvard, after suffering an injury, wrote a book about misdiagnosis in medicine. He affirmed this idea, using the same language. He said doctors use “heuristics”, mental shortcuts, and tend to anchor to their original diagnosis. He said you as patient have to jar the doctor, asking, “What else could these symptoms mean?” Essentially, you had to nudge the doctor out of an illogical adherence to an idea based partly on experience, but also partly on impulse.

It turns out Obama has been clever in using those projections of hope and Hillary has been too logical.

Here is a link to a discussion of an extension of these ideas into social policy.