Logic: Not a Tool for the Weak, Proud
Thomas Lyons“We all need, at times, to escape the implications of our logic.”
Chicago Tribune writer Eric Zorn blogged today about his experience using a series of online political questionnaires. The intent, of course, is to have an objective tool (computer programming) compute the user’s answers to policy questions and determine the user’s ideal candidate. I found the following very interesting from Zorn:
“At the end…, my consensus first choice among all candidates in the presidential sweepstakes was:
Democratic Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich.
Is this what it feels like to use a dating service? You open the door to meet your perfect match and …wah-waaaaah!
Kucinich and I apparently line up on a significant number of issues but, honestly, there’s no spark between us. No magic.
Despite our ideological similarities, I don’t see him as the candidate best suited-stylistically, temperamentally-to move the country in the direction I’d like it to move in the coming years.
More than lock-step agreement with me and my sometimes quirky opinions, I’m looking for a candidate with inspiring vision and a gift for communicating-a leader, in other words, not a bureaucrat, policy wonk or saint.”
He continues:
“Regular readers will assume that I was motivated to write this column by the criticism of Barack Obama — “my” presidential candidate in just two of the 10 surveys — that he’s little more than a short-time legislator with good speechwriters and a magnetic personality. And while that assumption is true, my point applies…”
So here’s what happened.
a.) Zorn liked Obama.
b.) Zorn wanted a computer to tell him who to vote for, perhaps subconsciously hoping it’s Obama.
c.) The computer told him to go with Kucinich. Judging by his reaction (“wah-waaaaah”), he was still attached to Obama.
d.) Zorn figured computers don’t factor in “leadership”, “style”, and “temperament.”
e.) Zorn used this to trump what the computer told him.
f.) Zorn scorns his reader for not seeing it his way, later saying “The effort to quantify and then rank these contenders by qualifications and positions is as fruitless as it is foolish and ultimately frustrating.”
Further, he will explain it by saying that “It’s because we know that great leadership is something you can sense but you can’t measure.”
Before I continue, let me say that it seems clear that:
a.) leadership ability is an important trait in a president,
b.) all of the dimensions of leadership are not easily measured,
c.) leadership ability should, perhaps, earn a candidate a bit of consideration that incongruence on policy decisions with a voter might not otherwise net.
Continuing, though, this reminded me of an essay written by Bill James, page 348 of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. James’s comparison highlights the Zornian error, in talking about clutch ability in baseball player evaluation. (Italics his, bold mine).
“The prominence of clutch performance as an element in player ratings can be attributed to…the fact that we all need, at times, to escape the implications of our logic.”
Later in the same essay, he continues.
“Baseball men often like to attribute the success or failure of a team to clutch performances. Those of us who study baseball systematically know that this is largely untrue, that the number of runs a team scores is a predictable outcome of their hits, their walks, their home runs, and their other offensive accomplishments – and further, that the number of games the team wins is largely a predictable outcome of their runs scored and runs allowed. Clutch performance can increase or decrease a team’s wins, but clutch successes and failures generally even out over the course of a season, leaving most teams with about the won-lost record they deserve.
But, since this elusive “clutch ability” has no particular statistical dimension, it has become popular within the discussion as a bullshit dump. All discussions have bullshit dumps; we need them. Our logic, whatever it is that we are talking about, can never be completely worked out; all subjects worthy of discussion are too complicated to be fully encased in logic. Thus, in all discussions, the least precise areas become bullshit dumps, elements of the discussion which are used to reconcile our formal logic to our intuitive sense of right or wrong, justice or injustice, accuracy or inaccuracy, reason or madness, moderation or extremity….
If a player rates 53rd at third base in terms of runs scored, RBI, and batting average, but you just know that he was one of the greatest players of all time, how do you close that gap? Crediting him with being a great clutch player is an easy way to bridge the gap between your knowledge and your conviction. It’s easy to assert; it’s impossible to disprove. If Gene Tenace rates as a better player than Garry Maddox, you can easily downgrade him by asserting that he wasn’t a “clutch” player; after all, look at his RBI. Whatever you want to prove, clutch performance will get you back there – if you don’t need logic to get back home again.”
Do you see the similarity? Zorn needs to escape the implications of logic – that he should vote or campaign for Kucinich – because he loves Obama. “Leadership” will get him there. Leadership is just like clutch ability to James – “easy to assert…impossible to disprove.”
If you, the loyal TOO reader, want to vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney or Dennis Kucinich or Winnie the Pooh solely because they smile well or look good in a suit or have a great haircut, well, this is America and I can’t stop you. I will, however, use my TOO column to blast that criterion as shortsighted.
I also respect one’s decision to vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney or Dennis Kucinich or whoever if the decision is built around reasoned, principled policy decisions. Further, small adjustments in our opinion based on peripheral factors (charisma, ethics, etc.) might be appropriate from time to time.
But a candidate’s policy or philosophical decisions map out the direction he or she would like to take the office for which they are running. Perhaps the quantity of skeletons in a candidate’s closet will affect the extent to which we can trust a candidate’s word at preferring their stated direction. Leadership or charisma or speechmaking provide the inertia towards meeting that end. Ethics or leadership or charisma are not, in and of themselves, the end we evaluate. Charisma is often inflated by our subjective biases irrespective of the meat of issues, heightened by media attention. Again, I’m not saying charisma shouldn’t play a role, but it should not be the litmus test of the voter, as it is for Zorn.
In evaluating candidates for any political office, there are two principled positions we can take.
a.) We can believe someone is more in line with our political worldview than their respective competition, or
b.) Not.
We will, all else being equal, vote for candidates of the former, vote against those of the latter. Where all else is not equal (shady histories, nice smiles), we will adjust carefully and methodically.
To reverse that, though, and vote against option a and for option b requires a way for us “to bridge the gap between [our] knowledge and [our] conviction.” When we can measure knowledge, compare knowledge, collect good, hard, comparable data and gain more knowledge, and we’re still attached to a competing conviction, we have two options. We can admit we’re wrong and change, or discredit the data collection process to ride our conviction.
Zorn has chosen to continue his quasi-appeal to emotion and hold fast to less well-founded convictions. Don’t commit the same mistake.
January 11th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
What would you say to prospective voters who lack the capacity, resources, or motivation to learn about and understand the implications of policy positions? Would you advise them to vote or not?
It raises a question of how much we can really know. I think it is safe to assume that if we could look into the future and see the possible histories of the nation played out with each of the candidates as president, we would most likely still have very close elections - how much influence does the president really have? Perhaps it is just as valid to vote for a presidential candidate based on looks as it is to vote on policy because we can’t really make any reliable predictions about what they might do in office, even with knowledge of their platform. What have you to say to that?
January 12th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Well, I don’t know what Tom would say, but I’d say that all one needs to do to see the extent of the President’s influence is to look at the spiraling dollar and America’s overtaxed military, both of which have important and far-reaching consequences for the country and neither of which was the case prior to George Bush’s presidency. Yes, given the limits on his term in office and the influence of the entrenched mid-level federal bureaucracy, the President’s influence is not as great as it’s usually made out to be. But it’s still sizable.
And given the limits on any kind of definite knowledge or predictions about the future, it is often a craps shoot electing anyone to any kind of major office. But so what? That’s the case with most decisions, and not just about our leaders. When buying a house, for instance, it’s usually considered prudent to analyze the local housing market, the surrounding location, the quality of the local schools (if you have children), as well as your own financial situation and the market as a whole before you make a serious purchase. But take your thoughts about choosing a President a little further and it’s not at all a stretch to say that you’re just as well off choosing a house because there’s a McDonald’s within walking distance as you are doing all that other analysis first. After all, given the limits on our knowledge, could you really say that you’d learn anything of value from all that analysis? The market can change quickly. The schools may have inflated reputations or be havens of PC drivel that soften children’s mind while plugging them full of useless facts. We can’t be certain about any of these questions, after all, but we can be pretty certain that we’ll probably get a decent meal at McDonald’s.
As to your comments about uninformed or apathetic voters, I think you’ve put your finger on the dark side of increasing the franchise. The Founders limited the vote to free property owners worth a considerable amount of money. That group constituted a sliver of the overall population, but it was the group most likely to be well informed and make the most rational decisions regarding the President and Congress. As more and more people were allowed to vote — first all white men in the 1830s, then blacks in the 1860s, then women in 1920, then 18-year olds in 1972 — the chance that eligible voters would be ignorant, apathetic, or unintelligent increased exponentially. The best way to make sure that we don’t have stupid, uninterested, or ignorant voters is to re-limit the franchise. If we’re not willing to do that, though, we have to accept that giving a bunch of people the right to vote means that many (if not most) of them won’t take that right very seriously. We can try to remedy the situation through education and exhortation, but the situation will be what it will be as long as lots of people can vote.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I’m not certain I’d get a good meal at McDonald’s. Moving on…
Given two options:
a.) Limiting the vote to the most rational 5% of the population, or
b.) Giving every 18-year old citizen a vote,
One could most certainly make a rational argument that the former fulfills the greatest good.
Wasn’t there a Simpsons Episode about this?
January 14th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
A phrase that applies here, I think, is “cult of personality.” That’s what all this “leadership” nonsense boils down to. Obama has more charisma, and a more appealing “persona,” that Kucinich. People who have the intellectual ability to differentiate between their emotional reaction to a politician’s charisma and their reasoned position on political issues ought to exercise that ability. That someone who can, in fact, tell the difference would still advocate using the cult of personality to select a leader gives me chills.
January 16th, 2008 at 1:49 am
You mean the Simpsons where the Mensa members take over control of Springfield and then run it into the ground because they can’t agree on what the best course of action is for the city? And then Stephen Hawkings shows up? That’s a pretty good one.
You can encourage people to vote for the candidate who most closely aligns with their issues, but whether or not they’ll say it, most people will sacrifice some of their issues for “candidate viability”. They’d rather support a person who will win and give them some of their issues than a candidate with a slim chance who promises most of their issues. You might call it selling out, but it’s perfectly rational. You’d rather miss by a little on the plus side than go completely negative.
January 16th, 2008 at 7:46 am
This is a symptom of social and political interaction in general. The further you are from power and decision-making, the more freedom you have to say what you would or would not do. The closer you are and the more power and responsibility you have, however, the more you have to pay attention to what is practicable as well as what is right or desirable.
By voting for a candidate that has no real chance of winning, a person is making a statement. He’s not throwing away his vote, but he is choosing to give it to someone who will not win. The statement he’s making is that, for him, a candidate’s purity of position trumps a candidate’s potential for power. The two categories are not inherently mutually exclusive, but they end up that way most of the time. The question for many people is which category is more important for them.
My mother, for instance, told me that she did not vote for her favored candidate in the NH primary because she thought she would be “throwing her vote away” if she did. She voted for one of the top-tier candidates instead. Many people, as John has noted, do the same kind of thing. I think that, with few exceptions, it is only “selling out” from people on the “purity of position” end of the spectrum. For most other people it’s just a fact of life.
September 9th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
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