CHAPTER 4-6 
               MY FAVORITE WORST SOURCES OF ERRORS
     Causes of error abound, as the long list of pitfalls in 
Chapter 4-5 demonstrates.  But there are some pitfalls that are 
so frequent and so serious that they deserve special attention 
here.  This chapter includes my personal selection of "favorite" 
pitfalls.
     1. Assuming that the source of a problem is the nature of 
the individual or group involved, when it is mainly the 
circumstances that cause the probability of the problem to be 
high ("others" file). 
     In the Wall Street Journal of June 26, 1989, a front-page 
story talked about how a 33 year old woman, Deborah Dean, ran a 
corrupt operation involving billions of dollars at the U. S. 
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  The story 
referred to her and her associates as "young adults" and a 
"kiddie corps".  It asked:  "Where were the grown-ups?" 
     Two pages later in the very same paper, a story about 
transfer of power after the Tiananmen Square massacre headlined 
"China's Old Men".  The story referred to the Chinese leaders as 
"old guys in their 80s". 
     Both stories imply that the officials' ages are important 
determinants of their activities and decisions.  The writers 
suggest that if people of more "appropriate" ages were put into 
office, the public would be better served.  
     These stories illustrate a recurrent fallacy in human 
thinking.  In their book Human Inference, Robert Nisbett and Lee 
Ross review data showing that people are likely to err by 
explaining events with recourse to the characteristics of the 
actors instead of the structural conditions of the situation.  In 
both China and HUD, the key element is the existence of a 
governmental entity which puts money and/or power at the disposal 
of officials.  As long as this condition exists, the likelihood 
of abuse exists. Sometimes the public gets lucky and the 
officials are honest and humble.  But inevitably some officials 
will take advantage of the opportunities. 
     The solution, then, is not to call for better officials -- 
of the right age, say, at which people are free of the urge to 
turn opportunities for money and power to their own advantage. 
The solution is to change the system. 
     It is interesting to wonder what Dean and Deng might have 
done had government jobs not been available and if they had 
applied their talents and energies in other fields, instead.  
Deng might have clambered to the top of a huge firm in a 
swashbuckling industry such as ocean shipping.  And Dean might 
have started a bangup temporary employment firm and franchised it 
across the country, both enterprises to the great benefit of the 
public.  Perhaps I give both of them too much credit on the 
skills side.  But there is little doubt that the same people who 
choose the anti-social route in one set of circumstances will 
choose socially-beneficial activities in another set of 
circumstances.  One of the findings of modern psychology is that 
people tend not to be consistent about whether they are "honest" 
or "dishonest".      An experience of mine illustrates the 
principle.  After I got out of the Navy I took a summer course in 
organic chemistry to complete my qualifications for entering 
medical school in the fall; most of the other 200 students also 
were pre-meds.  There were two hours of classes and six hours of 
laboratory work every day -- forty hours a week, with lots of 
homework.  The instructor put tough competitive pressure on the 
students to obtain high yields on their lab experiments.  The 
tension in the laboratory rose so palpably that it became obvious 
that students would begin to cheat.  I passed on that observation 
to a lab assistant, but nothing was changed.  Two-thirds of the 
way through the course the cheating began, and then the system 
broke down completely.  The wholesale cheating was not due mainly 
to the characters of the students, but rather to the structure of 
the system. 
     Indeed, sometimes the only difference is whether the society 
calls an activity legal and ethical or illegal and despicable.  
In the United States, a supermarket manager wins profit and 
praise for stocking delicacies and supplying them to customers 
who desire them and are willing to pay a handsome price.  In the 
Soviet Union the outcome is different, as this incident shows:  A 
few years back the director of Moscow's Gastronom No. 1 -- a 
grocery store that sells gourmet foods to the elite -- was put to 
death for selling delicacies like black caviar and wild boar out 
the back door.  In the U. S., he could use the front door and he 
would get a bonus for his initiative. 
     (One of the great advantages of a market system is that 
people are enabled to make a wider variety of voluntary exchanges 
legally than in a system where prices are fixed centrally and 
where supply does not equal demand at the market price. 
     Of course individuals' values matter, and people will differ 
in how they behave in particular circumstances.  I suggest only 
that we realize that underlying dispositions of people are far 
from the whole story, and if we change the circumstances 
sufficiently we often can alter behavior considerably. 
     Perhaps one reason that so many people prefer to find the 
cause of corruption in the individuals involved is that this 
allows them to cluck their tongues at how immoral other people 
are, which by implication makes them feel very moral themselves 
because they are not involved in those dirty dealings.  
     Attributing poverty or corruption or other undesired 
behavior to the "cultures" of particular ethnic groups (while 
attributing positive characteristics to one's own culture, of 
course) is a related error.  This error, such as the "Protestant 
Ethic" theory of Max Weber, has long thrived among scholars.  
These beliefs are again and again discredited by the 
extraordinary differences in behavior of the same cultural group 
in different circumstances, as for example:  1) The low Catholic 
and Jewish fertility in the United States now, compared to the 
high fertility of these groups in Europe in the 19th Century 
supposedly due to religious doctrine.  2) The lack of the 
Protestant Ethic among Chinese and Indians, which supposedly 
accounted for their poverty in China and India but is discredited 
by how these same people flourish economically outside of China 
and India.  3) Once in the Indian city of Jubalpur I met Sara 
Israel, a member of the small Jewish community there.  When I 
asked her what the various persons in the community did for a 
living she mentioned people working for the government railway, 
the army, and several other civil servants.  I asked if any were 
in business and she answered, "It is well-known that Jews do not 
have a talent for business."  So much for that cultural 
stereotype. 
     Too often the "culture" explanation results from some 
combination of ahistoricity and mental laziness.  
     2) My Personal Favorite Among Errors: Not Recognizing the 
Amount of Variability in a System, and Therefore Jumping to a 
Conclusion About What is Going On From Just a Few Observations.  
     I first noticed this error when I was in the Navy.  When the 
men aboard ship exchanged observations about the European ports 
at which we called, after every port there were some men who said 
it was the greatest place ever, whereas others said it was the 
worst.  Nor was this simply the tendencies of some to criticize 
and others to praise, because the same man might have a very good 
experience in one port and then a very bad one in the next, or 
vice versa.  The obvious explanation was that a person could have 
only a very limited amount of experience in a given port, and the 
luck of the draw might therefore influence whether the overall 
impression was positive or negative. .ig regression fallacy and 
intelligence and heredity and Rookie of Year and good restaurants
     The fallacy of "regression to the mean" -- "regression 
fallacy" for short -- is an interesting special case.  The child 
of very tall parents is likely to be shorter than its parents, 
though taller than average, and a child of very short parents is 
likely to be taller than its parents.  This is because height is 
the result of a chance combination of the genes that a person 
carries, and even if a person carries a set of genes that would 
on average produce a person somewhat taller than average, a very 
tall person is an unusual result even for such a person's genes.  
(Leave aside the complication of there being two parents; the 
principle is the same.) 
     By analogy, if you know that people on average have jars 
containing half red and half black jelly beans, while you know 
that you have a jar containing 60 percent red jelly beans, you 
predict that the next ten jellybeans you draw are likely to be 
more than 50 percent black.  But it would be unlikely -- though 
possible -- for you to draw ten which are only red.  If you do 
not know the composition of your jar but you do know that the 
average for everyone taken together is half and half, and you 
draw a handful of ten red jellybeans, your best guess would not 
be 100 percent red for your next handful, but rather something 
over 50 percent.  That models the situation for the heights of 
children of tall parents. 
     Have you noticed that, when you return to a restaurant where 
you had a remarkably good meal the first time you ate there, the 
second meal is seldom as good as the first time?  That's because 
the remarkable first meal is likely to have been so good at least 
partly by chance, and the chance element is unlikely to be 
repeated again.  Another example:  The Rookie of the Year in 
professional sports often produces disappointing results the 
second year in the league.  (From now on, perhaps you will not be 
surprised when this happens.)
     An interesting twist on the regression fallacy was observed 
by Daniel Kahneman in the training of pilots.  When the student 
made a good maneuver, the trainer would say "good", and move on 
to the next part of the training.  When the student made a bad 
maneuver, the trainer would say "bad", and have the student 
repeat the maneuver.  On average, the next trial of that maneuver 
would be less bad-- closer to the average just by chance because 
only bad maneuvers were followed by another trial.  The trainers 
therefore concluded that criticism had a better effect on 
performance than praise.  This unwarranted conclusion led them to 
rely on criticism rather than praise. 
     3. Overestimating Your Mental Powers Compared to Other 
People's.

     Most of us believe that we know our own situations so much 
better than another person can know it that we quickly reject 
advice and ideas about our situations.  Sometimes this is well-
warranted because the advice-giver really does know too little 
about the situation at hand to offer good advice; this disregard 
of dispensed knowledge is one of the main reasons that socialist 
centralized economic planning fails.  But sometimes the advice-
giver does know enough about the situation to offer useful advice 
on the basis of general knowledge, yet is rejected without 
sufficient hearing.  "You don't understand my industry" or "... 
my family" is too often an automatic response, and often a costly 
one.  That was the universal reaction when I proposed a volunteer 
auction plan to the airline industry as a way of dealing with the 
overbooking problem.  And it is the reaction of my close friend T 
when I suggest to him that he do a bit of market research about 
what consumers like in the garments he sells; he is sure that his 
accumulated knowledge is sufficiently great that it is not worth 
spending even a bit of money and time in systematic 
investigation, though this seems never to have been done in his 
industry. 
     Perhaps such self-assurance is necessary, and the absence of 
it damaging.  I probably would have been a better father if, 
during my children's adolescent years, I was more sure that I 
knew what I was doing and that my decisions were good ones.  
Instead, my lack of confidence led me to indecision and weakness 
in the face of the kids' determined claim that my wife and I 
should have the same rules as other parents (except where our 
rules were more lenient, of course), and that the kids knew best 
what was good for them; this indecision and weakness were, I now 
believe, unhelpful and unnecessarily painful.  Even if I really 
did not know well what I was doing, it probably would have been 
better if I thought that I did, and acted  so.  
     More generally, people tend to have an inflated assessment 
of their own capacities relative to those of other people.  For 
example, surveys in several countries show that about 80% of the 
respondents believe that they are better-than-average drivers 
(Paul Slovic in Against All Odds). 
     Charming recent research by cognitive psychologists has 
documented how people tend to be overconfident in their mental 
abilities in a wide variety of test circumstances.  (When their 
actual chances of being right are low -- below, say, 20% -- they 
tend to be underconfident, however.  For a review of this 
literature see Baron, 1988, pp. 200-202.)
     Corollary 3a) Thinking that you can figure out and control 
processes and events that are unknowable and uncontrollable.       
Our belief in our capacities to decipher patterns feeds on the 
assumption that there must be a pattern to be discovered.  (And 
this assumption in turn is intertwined with a world view which 
sees the cosmos as a structure of inherent "laws"; see Chapter 6-
7 on World Views.)  This belief in our pattern-finding abilities 
emerged strikingly in an experiment I once conducted.  I 
presented a series of randomly-generated numbers to people saying 
that they were stock prices.  (They might just as well have been 
actual stock prices, which look just about identical to randomly-
generated numbers;  see Chapter 8-0 on portfolio selection.)  
People tried an extraordinary variety of devices to impose 
pattern on the numbers -- drawing curves, taking averages, making 
assumptions about which directional movements must follow which 
(e.g. an up must follow a down, etc.), and so on -- even though 
they had no sound reason in experience or theory to believe that 
patterns could be found.  Even more striking, after I ended the 
experiment and told the subjects that the numbers were randomly 
generated, many wanted badly to continue playing and testing 
their pattern-deciphering systems against other peoples' results.      
Another piece of relevant evidence is the resistance of almost 
all sports fans to the idea that there are no patterns in 
baseball batting or basketball shooting that allow the coach to 
identify "slumps: or "hot hands" (see Chapter 1-4[?]). 
     Perhaps it is good that we are not aware of the frailty of 
our thinking lest we would walk about in fear and trembling, an 
idea that has come up earlier in other contexts (see the 
introduction).  Overconfidence in our capacities may also have 
the beneficial effect of making us optimistic about the future, 
and contributing toward our being in a good mood.  Studies show 
that depressives have a less positive view of their capacities in 
laboratory tests than do "normal" people -- but the depressives' 
assessments are more accurate in this regard than are those of 
normal people. [cite from Depression].  The good feeling may be 
worth the damage caused by the overconfidence. 
     Corollary 3b) Believing that there is a connection between 
morality and education or "intelligence".  
     Many people assume that the more "intelligent" people are 
(whatever is meant by "intelligence"), and the more education 
they get, the better will be their character.  But to my 
knowledge there are no data showing this to be the case.  One of 
the reasons that the horrors of World War II had such a crushing 
effect on many people's world views and their assessment of human 
progress was because it was thought by many that Germany was the 
most "enlightened" country in Europe earlier.   Yet Germany 
behaved in ways that were worse than primitive or barbaric.  
Moral expectations about Germany based on its intellectual 
accomplishments were simply founded on an unsound assumption.  
(This is not to say that on average moral behavior does not 
improve somewhat as civilization evolves cultural patterns.) 
     One of the most painful errors in human conduct is to assume 
that the people with whom one shares political ideas are of 
higher character than the others.  This especially afflicted the 
Communists in the 1930s.  The disappointing let-downs by supposed 
friends in that party were devastating to many. Corollary 3c) 
Underestimating the power of "ordinary" .       4) Over-
estimating the Power of "Clever" Individuals --Others and 
Ourselves -- To Create Sound New Social Systems and Feasible 
Radical Solutions for Real-life Economic and Political Problems. 
     Over-estimating one's own capacity, and the capacity of 
others, to decipher complex patterns of relationships in society 
and in nature has been the source of many of the costliest  
blunders of the human race.  Individuals' blunders are magnified 
greatly when the blunders are made by officials on behalf of 
governments.  Since the beginning of history, military leaders 
have led armies to slaughter with a combination of fancy 
reasoning and slick rhetoric.  In modern times the possibilities 
for catastrophe have increased as countries have developed the 
totalitarian organization necessary for regimes to rule by force 
even into the household.  The combination of dazzling Marxist 
theory and equally dazzling Marxian oratory promised that the 
"rationality" of Communism must surely produce greater efficiency 
and equity than the "chaotic" and "unplanned" system of 
capitalism, as discussed in Chapter 6-4. 
     The proponents of socialism have often been persons with 
extraordinary intellectual credentials, persons considered clever 
and intelligent by all the usual tests -- from Marx and Engels 
and Lenin, to Einstein and Russell and Sakharov.  The doctrine 
sounded good.  It still sounds good to those unacquainted with 
its results in practice.  Many other new theories of society also 
sound good.  And many of them deserve to be tried.  The tragedy 
is that people can become so convinced of the correctness of a 
scheme on the basis of speculation and "logic" that they are 
willing to make vast changes without conducting small-scale 
experiments first, or without examining evidence that is 
available on the working of the scheme.  One of the key elements 
in Marxian theory is that under socialist conditions officials 
could be expected to act mainly for the good of the public.  
Another key element of the theory is that ownership of an 
enterprise such as a farm is unnecessary to motivate people to 
work hard. Much could have been learned about the validity of 
these propositions from the behavior of officials and farmers in 
a variety of other circumstances. 
     If citizens had been less ready to trust in political 
leaders on the basis of their intellect, and if they had -- in 
James Michael Curley's immortal phrase -- preferred to be 
governed by the first thousand people in the Boston telephone 
directory than by the Harvard faculty -- these huge errors in 
governance would have been less likely to occur.  While not much 
intellect is necessary to drag a country into war, considerable 
intellect usually is required to persuade people to put their 
trust in new economic schemes.  Aside from the Marxians, the most 
successful economic doctrine of this century came from John 
Maynard Keynes, in the eyes of his contemporaries the most 
brilliant of humans; this characteristic which contributed 
enormously to his success.  Bertrand Russell said of Keynes' 
intellect that it was "the sharpest and clearest that I have ever 
known.  When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my 
hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool" 
(Skidelsky, p. 124).  But the Keynsian doctrine has now been John 
Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920 (New York: Viking, 
1983)discredited as a remedy in most sets of economic 
circumstances, and it is more of a burden than a benefit to the 
human community.  If people had been less impressed by Keynes' 
intellect, economic science and economic life almost surely would 
now be better off.      Many children are awesomely willing to 
sally forth on the basis of their own reasonings, and to be so 
sure of their reasoning that they have only contempt for the 
advice of adults whose experience contradicts those reasonings.  
     The fallacy of long chains of logic (see Chapter 4-2) goes 
hand-in-glove with the fallacy of cleverness and intellectual 
dexterity.  One of the frequent characteristics of people 
considered clever is that they master mathematics quicker than do 
others, and they often purport to prove conclusions with complex 
mathematical arguments that less-clever people do not follow.  
This is wrongly taken as a sign of the likely soundness of the 
long logical argument.      5) Not Taking Into Account the 
Indirect and Far-Off Consequences of a Change, Along With the 
Direct and Immediate Effects. 
     Frederic Bastiat was the great expositor of the "seen-
unseen" error (see Chapter 00) which occurs frequently in all 
kinds of cost-benefit analysis.  This error of neglecting 
indirect and long-run consequences is especially common in 
analyses of social policy in which public opinion is susceptible 
to the fallacy of giving undue weight to vivid evidence.  
Consider, for example, social policy with respect to drugs.  
Legislators vie with each other to propose ever more draconian 
sanctions against drug use because people are so frightened of 
the terrible effects of drug use in their families and 
communities.  Horrifying assessments are made of the effects of 
drug use, which prohibition of drugs is hoped to prevent.  But 
less notice is given to the ill effects of the sanctions 
themselves.  The deaths due to drugs being illegal -- not only 
from drug-related killings, but also due to unsafe drug use due 
to quality-controlled drugs not being available legally -- are 
perhaps 8,000 per year (James Ostraowski, Spelling?), "Thinking 
About Drug Legalization", Cato Policy Analysis, May 25, 1989).  A 
sound over-all cost-benefit analysis in terms of lives or 
resources might well show drug legalization -- or just 
legalization of marijuana -- in a positive light, as the public 
seems to have decided it has with respect to alcohol 
legalization. 
     Another example is the belief that the number of jobs is 
fixed, and therefore immigration and labor-saving technology 
necessarily imply more unemployment.  This misconception is a 
classic case of taking into account only "the seen" and not 
taking account of the "unseen" -- the latter being the process of 
creation of new jobs.  And if economic logic alone were not 
enough to refute this notion, the history of the human enterprise 
should demonstrate conclusively that new technology on average 
creates more jobs than it eliminates.  
     Oscar Wilde is said to have said that an economist is 
someone who knows the price of everything and the value of 
nothing.  But a good economist -- or a good thinker with respect 
to any cost-benefit matter -- is a person who calculates value 
well.  The key hurdle to be overcome in calculating well is 
including the indirect and far-off costs and benefits into the 
reckoning.  
     Bastiat effects occur not only in human affairs but also in 
the biological and physical realms.  For example, biologists have 
"recently raised the surprising possibility that very low doses 
of ionizing radiation may not be harmful after all or may even 
have net benefits" (Sagan, Leonard, "On Radiation, Paradigms, and 
Hormesis", Science, 11 Aug,. 1989,pp 574, 621 [sic]; see also 
Wolff, Sheldon, "Are Radiation-Induced Effects Hormetic?" ibid, 
575-621). But this should not be very "surprising".  Low-level 
radiation has always been part of the human's environment, and 
our relationship with our environment is so complex and intimate 
that it seems reasonable that just about every facet of the 
environment has mixed effects upon us.  Indeed, the same author 
tells us that "The stimulatory effect of low doses of a wide 
variety of chemical agents on the growth of organisms had been 
noted by Hugo Arndt and Rudoph Schultz...in the 19th century.  
They considered the phenomenon to be universal". (Sagan, p 574). 
The "surprise" comes only if you expect to happen only what you 
have observed to happen in the range of the observations you have 
already made, and do not expect there to be an extraordinary 
number of effects which we have not yet learned about. 
     Similarly, based on the physics that has developed within 
the last hundred years, many people worry that the world will 
eventually run out of energy.  But this assumes that within the 
next 7 billion years humans will not find new suns as sources of 
energy, or new ways to get energy from nature that we do not 
comprehend (just as nuclear energy was not even imagined a 
hundred years ago), or that our needs for energy will diminish 
rapidly, perhaps faster than a fixed supply of energy (as Freeman 
Dyson as suggested) -- a very strong assumption indeed about the 
state of our current knowledge, it would seem to me, and one 
which likely illustrates the error of overestimation of our own 
knowledge and mental powers. 
     This general point of view influenced my choice of career.  
I had planned to go to medical school after I got out of the Navy 
in 1956.  But I had an intuitively-based belief that people 
should not take medical drugs except when the need to do so is 
clear-cut and strong.  I feared that that view would cause me to 
be badly-adjusted to the medical profession, which at that time 
dispensed drugs quite freely as if drugs have only direct effects 
on a given disease and no side-effects except those already known 
about -- and especially, no delayed side effects in the far 
future.  One basis of my view was experiments showing that rats 
and babies often can choose their diets wisely from a cafeteria 
of possibilities, and also Walter Cannon's notion of "the wisdom 
of the body"   Additionally, my maternal grandmother's face was 
faintly blue.  I had heard that this was due to a physician 
prescribing the drug Argyrol to her on a steady basis many 
decades earlier; only later had it emerged that Argyrol had 
delayed effects.  So I had somehow come to the belief that 
tampering with a complex system that we still understand so 
little was inherently dangerous.  
     Medical practice nowadays is closer to this view.  And 
ecologists' conception of nature is similar to this conception of 
the human body, if I understand the ecologists correctly.  They 
believe that we ought not to make changes in the existing natural 
order unless there is pressing reason, and unless our knowledge 
of the likely consequences is extensive, because so many 
undesirable effects may be indirectly caused by a particular 
alteration. 
     The same view applied to nutrition suggests that one should 
eat a diet containing a wide variety of foods, because we may 
have needs that science has not yet discovered, and a varied diet 
is more likely to fill those needs than is a narrow diet, no 
matter how healthy the narrow diet may be deemed on the basis of 
current knowledge.  And the same should hold in reverse:  too 
much of any food may be dangerous because it may contain 
something that we have not yet identified as harmful.  
Furthermore, a diet that corresponds roughly to human diets over 
the millennia is probably safer than a diet that is a large break 
with human history, because we have evolved in consonance with 
that traditional diet.  Without further knowledge, there would 
seem to be a reasonable presumption that a traditional diet is 
reasonably safe. 
     Is this an argument against any intervention in human as 
well as non-human matters?  This charge has been brought against 
such writers as Hume, Smith, and Hayek.  I do not think that it 
is accurate, however.  This view does imply that we should study 
the existing state of affairs very closely before changing it, to 
check for complex relationships that have heretofore escaped our 
notice.  That is, we should find out why the fence was put up 
before we take it down, in Robert Frost's words.  But knowledge 
need not be perfect, and never can  be.  When we are satisfied 
that we understand the system as best we can, then we should 
proceed to make changes.  This point of view differs from a more 
interventionist point of view only in emphasis, not in logic. I 
do not, however, share a more extreme non-interventionist anti-
growth point of view with those ecologists who are so convinced 
that any alteration might knock our whole system out of whack, 
which would then induce a series of changes to compensate, which 
would then have even worse effects, and so on until the whole 
system comes apart or explodes; this was the viewpoint that 
underlies the famous book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (New 
York:  Houghton Mifflin, 1962 Crest reprint, esp. pp. 16, 17, 18, 
22).  Interestingly, many persons who espouse the latter view 
with respect to natural systems are very ready to intervene in 
human systems.)       6) Misjudging the role of motives.            
Considering the motives of the source of information can cause 
error in both directions -- a) ignoring motives when appropriate 
to do so, and hence not making proper allowance for bias, and b) 
discounting valuable information on the basis of an assumed 
motive on the part of the person providing the information, when 
it is not appropriate to do so, and hence rendering the 
information less valuable.  
     The great African boxer Battling Siki fought Mike McTigue 
for the light-heavyweight championship in Dublin on St. Patrick's 
Day 1923 and lost by a close decision.  One would not have to be 
paranoid to wonder if there might have been some bias in the 
judging.

     Even very young children learn that they should not accept 
at face value all the impressions that advertisers seek to leave 
with television audiences.  The children understand that the 
advertisers have a stake in their believing that the advertised 
products are better than the competition. 
     The desire of journalists to come up with a scoop, together 
with the power of scare stories to sell newspapers and attract 
television audiences, contributes to the propensity of 
journalists to seek out supposed social problems for stories.  It 
also contributes to their propensity to put a bad-news twist on 
what is mainly a good-news situation.  For example, a story about 
an improvement in the worldwide food supply, though at a somewhat 
slower rate than the year before -- it is inevitable that the 
improvement some years be less than others -- may be headlined 
"Food Supply Lags".  Another case -- this is for real from the 
esteemed Washington Post - "Good Crops a Bad Sign".  It is 
necessary to understand the journalists' motives in order to make 
sense of a world which is getting better in most material 
respects and yet is described in horrifying terms every morning 
and evening.  It helps to keep perspective if you notice the 
subjects of the stories.  When the worst problems the journalists 
can dig up are local scandals, and scares about the shortages of 
places to dump disposable diapers, you can infer that nothing 
very bad is happening elsewhere in the world.  
     Judging information in the light of the supposed motives of 
the source when it is not appropriate to do so probably leads to 
more error than neglecting to do so, however.  It is said of one 
of the main human groups that "If you say to a Z that everything 
you tell a Z the Z takes personally, and the Z will say `I do 
not'".  Perhaps this remark should simply be referred to the 
entire human race rather than to just one group, however. 
     Journalists habitually ask "Why is she saying that?" and 
"What's his angle?"  Especially journalists who work in the very 
political environment of a capital city find it difficult to 
accept that anyone  makes certain statements simply out of love 
of truth or concern for the public welfare or other enduring 
value, independent of any personal or institutional benefit; 
rather, the journalists assume that there must be some short-run 
motive.  (Politicians tend to share this attitude even though 
many themselves love truth for its own sake.)  This attitude 
leads to faulty evaluation of information. 
     The flip side of this fallacy is the attempt to prove that 
something did not happen because the person had no motive to do 
it.  Consider the statement of Mayor Marion Barry of Washington, 
D. C., who had been accused of using cocaine:
     Barry said the allegations of convicted crack dealer Charles      
Lewis were too implausible for anyone to believe. "Anybody      
who knows anything about America knows any mayor who really      
wants to get dope can get it without going out on the      
streets," the mayor said.  He also said it would be      "idiocy" 
for any politician to use drugs "around four or      five other 
people", adding: "I've never been accused of being      an 
idiot". (The Wash Post, Sep 16, 1989, p. B 1).
     Journalists are not without reason to inquire into motive, 
however.  Politicians routinely deny that their taking fees from 
a trade association, or owning shares in a corporation, could 
possibly affect their votes in Congress or their administrative 
actions.  But AT&T long ago understood that owning just a few 
shares of that corporation's stock could make the owner 
favorably-disposed toward its fortunes, and it therefore set out 
to sell AT&T shares to as many Americans as possible, with 
successful results. 
     It is quite amazing how strongly a person's self-interest 
can affect the person's interpretation of the facts.   A group of 
South Florida physicians desired to prevent the very large 
Cleveland Clinic, which has been a pioneer in heart surgery, from 
entering their market.  The physicians arranged that "Carl C. 
Gill, the chief executive of the Clinic's Floria enterprise, and 
a surgeon who has done 4,000 [note: an astonishingly large 
number] open-heart operations, was denied local hospital 
privileges.  The credentials committee of Broward General Medical 
Center said he lacked enough experience" (WSJ, Aug 18,  89, p. 
1). Who could believe that such a wild charge would stick?  But 
it did.     
     How could anyone truly believe such a proposition?  Every 
one of us must have come across some religious beliefs (of other 
groups, of course, not of ours) that seem to us outlandish 
passing any possible belief by a sensible person.  Yet such 
beliefs are held by many sensible persons.  Chapter 8-0 on 
religion [to come] offers some explanation.  And there is no 
obvious difference between those "outlandish" religious views and 
believing so strongly that a conventional idea is correct that 
you are impervious to contrary evidence.  Even when presented 
with irrefutable data on the scarcity of raw materials over the 
centuries, as measured by their prices, many people cannot/will 
not divest themselves of the belief that raw materials have 
gotten more scarce, and are likely to become more scarce; the 
same is true with the cleanliness of urban air and of the 
drinking water supply in the United States.  
     Not only may people disbelieve the truth for their own 
interests, they may even "kill the messenger", as in this case:

     John Kartak...was assigned to an Army recruiting station in      
Minneapolis.

     When he discovered that the office forged high school      
diplomas and concealed criminal records in order to meet      
recruiting goals, Kartak called the Army hotline.

     The response from the Army was to order two psychological      
evaluations on Kartak, with one superior telling hospital      
officials, "He has lodged numerous complaints recently...I      
find his behavior highly unstable.  I am concerned that he      
may do something to harm himself or others".  
     Kartak's superior was indeed afraid that Kartak would do 
something to harm others -- more exactly, harm to the careers of 
his superiors.  And the Army inspector general later found at 
least 58 in the office guilty of illegal acts.  (Washington Post, 
Aug 25, 89, p. A 19).
     But again, there are some people with the courage and 
integrity to fight for the truth -- John Kartak, in this case.       
How can you sort out the courageous truth-lovers from the gutless 
finks who will bend the truth any which way for their own self 
interest?  I wish I knew.  My only advice is to hold your 
judgment in abeyance until you see a person tested by events, and 
try not to let your judgment be swayed by whether the person is 
pleasant or seems sincere.
     It is prudent to attempt to design a fact-finding system so 
that it is as free as possible of interests which may bias the 
result.  The jury is perhaps the most successful example of such 
a system.  The heart of the jury system is that the individual 
jurors have no personal stake in the outcome.  Their reputations 
are not at stake, nor their personal economic positions.  And 
because there are twelve jurors, individual prejudices tend to 
offset one another.  Research (R. Simon, 1967?) shows 
resoundingly that the jurors generally do behave in a sensible, 
thoughtful, disinterested fashion -- better than in any other 
institution that I know of. 
     Even the jury system can be perverted, however.  When I 
served as defense counsel aboard a Navy destroyer -- a small war 
ship with a complement of about 300 officers and men most of whom 
knew each other personally -- trials were sometimes kangaroo 
courts, with the verdicts arranged in the officers' wardroom in 
advance.  (The "jurors" were three officers, unless the enlisted 
man on trial asked for enlisted personnel, and few did.)  The 
defense counsel was "supposed" to be an orchestrated part of this 
arranged justice, though I naively did not fully understand the 
system until years later:  I assumed that a defense counsel was 
"supposed" to give the accused the best defense possible.  In one 
case the entire summation of the "trial counsel" (the 
prosecutor), angrily flushed in the face, was: "I know he's 
guilty.  You guys [the three judges acting as jurors] know he's 
guilty.  Even Simon knows he's guilty [not quite so].  So find 
him guilty." He then sat down.  And of course the verdict was 
"guilty".  (On appeal the verdict was reversed -- at which time I 
found that appealing a verdict off the ship was an even worse 
breach of proper behavior than providing a vigorous defense at 
the trial.)      Perhaps involved here is a belief by many that -
- to paraphrase Mao Tse Tung's remark that power comes from the 
barrel of a gun -- truth and justice are what the majority, or a 
powerful political bloc, says that they are.  This is a view of 
politics which asserts that whatever the majority or an effective 
bloc are able to wrest from the governmental machinery and 
pocketbook is fair game.  Indeed, the view of many is that that 
struggle is the whole of politics. And in this struggle the only 
appropriate limitation on rhetoric is whether it will be 
sufficiently credible to advance the cause.  (It should be noted 
that this view is inconsistent with the Constitution of the 
United States, which asserts limits upon a majority's power to 
turn events in its favor.)      7) Assuming that effects are 
either-or when they are actually more-or-less. 
     Ask the person sitting next to you:  What would be the 
effect on the smoking rate of raising the tax on cigarettes?  
Your neighbor will probably say "A raise in the price will 
neverget people to stop", or perhaps, "Yes, raise it good and 
high and they will have to stop." In fact, an increase of 10 
percent will lead to some people stopping -- perhaps 6 percent, 
and another increase of 10 percent will cause a decrease of 
another six percent, and so on -- but many will continue to 
smoke.  The point is that the answer to the question should be 
phrased in how-much terms and not in yes-no terms. 
     Converting the discussion from qualitative to quantitative 
often has a powerful calming effect upon bitter arguments between 
people with locked-in positions.  When people are asked for a 
how-much estimate they often find that they are much less opposed 
to each other than they had thought, and they recognize how 
imprecise is everyone's knowledge.  The parties then find it 
easier to work toward a reasoned and satisfying conclusion. 
     The effect of most social policies on people's behavior is 
best viewed quantitatively -- the effects of welfare on the 
propensity to work, of public transportation upon auto driving, 
of seatbelt laws upon the use of seatbelts.  This is because 
there is dispersion among people's behavior in response to 
particular incentives.       
     8. Focusing on Blame Rather than on Improvement. 
     The human animal has an extraordinary propensity for making 
itself feel good by charging someone else with being bad.  
Newspaper journalists spend much of their careers ferreting out 
who is to blame for public ills, rather than analysing the 
underlying causes which may make the bad thing happen again and 
again, or discussing how to improve the situation. And the rest 
of us are forever attributing responsibility to others for all 
the unwelcome events in life.  We even curse the chair when it 
clumsily gets it the way of our shins.
     This urge to blame, and to ask people to justify themselves, 
is sunk deep into our language.  Try speaking for a week without 
using an expression such as "Why didn't you...?" or "Why can't 
you...?" instead of the less blameful "I suggest that next time 
you..." We even use a related form toward the future, "Why don't 
you...?" All of these negative terms -- don't, can't, didn't -- 
are literally downers, and just put people on the defensive 
rather than evoking their constructive thoughts.  
     Maybe the satisfaction that we get out of blaming makes it 
worth the doing.  But there is every other reason for not doing 
it.  Most important, it distracts our attention from looking for 
solutions to our problems.

                               ***
     Following on all this discussion of errors in thinking in 
Chapters 4-5 and 4-6, you may despair about our ever thinking 
well enough about any matter to avoid every-day catastrophe.  And 
yet there is irrefutable evidence that civilization advances in 
material ways, and we live longer and healthier and more 
comfortably with every decade.  How come?  There are several 
partial explanations: 
     1.  Many of the laboratory demonstrations of people's 
incapacity to think clearly are based on quite subtle situations 
-- for example, peoples' inability to choose correctly among 
gambles that are not at all obvious even to trained 
statisticians.  But the decisions that really matter are -- by 
their very definition -- those where there is a large difference 
between the alternatives, and such large differences are easier 
not to overlook.  
     The same is true in scientific investigations.  If fancy 
statistical tests and subtle interpretations are necessary, the 
conclusion usually -- though not always -- is not earthshaking.  
Where the results of the study are powerful and important, they 
can usually be seen in simple tables or graphs. 
     2.  More than one person -- sometimes an entire committee -- 
is likely to be involved in important decisions, and the quirky 
personal aspects of one person's thinking are likely to be 
neutralized by others' quirks.
     3.  Many of our decisions are made repeatedly, and we 
therefore have a chance to learn what is sound and what is 
erroneous.  (Sometimes, however, there is no way to check on the 
results and therefore learn by experienced, and hence we may 
never improve.  This is the problem with choosing a dentist; we 
have almost no way to determine if she or he is doing good work.)     
     4.  We don't need to be anywhere near perfect in order to do 
well.  This is apparent in our competitions with other persons 
and organizations.  Even the best tennis player in the world, on 
the best day she or he ever has, makes lots of errors.  Think how 
many more errors a good club player can make and still win.  It 
is much the same in business or politics.  And it is true of our 
struggles with nature, too.  Weather forecasting does not need to 
be perfect to be useful. 
     5.  The worst performers in a situation tend to leave that 
situation.  The weather forecasters with the worst record 
eventually must find other lines of work.  This is not true in 
politics or religion or even some aspects of science; the persons 
who prophesied resource scarcities in the late 1960's and early 
1970's have been confounded by subsequent events, but continue to 
offer the same prophecies, and continue to be received 
respectfully.  But in most situations that are not so emotionally 
charged, failure does not persist so successfully.

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