Thinking like Benjamin Franklin

By Gary Berg-Cross

There are many reasons to celebrate Ben Franklin – the “First American.”  We celebrate him as a complex man, with many and varied insights available in his voluminous writings. He provided wise counsel in difficult and confusing times.  Without the benefits we have now of the science of decision making he steered a wise course based on self developed ideas.

Known for promoting common sense early on his is Almanacs, Ben went on to some uncommon wisdom. He seemed to understand a core of irrationality in people even in an Enlightened age. He glimmered cognitive biases and how to slow down thinking to improve its quality. He steered around obstacles when even intelligent people like John Adams had blind spots and yielded to  confirmatory bias which lead to dead end arguments. He understood information overload & how human intellect can be overwhelmed by details and conflicting ideas.

He made thousands of wise decisions. How did he functionally bring his insights together to make a balanced decision?  He did it used a formal method called a Balance Sheet that allowed him to carefully compare alternatives with many factors considered that affect the decision. His was a cognitive arithmetic that summed up things in a realistic, hence balanced way. By way of history, Ben described the process  as advice to an English scientist friend on how to make an important personal choice:

“My way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one Pro and over the other Con. Then during three or four days’ consideration, I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives, that at different time occur to me, for or against the measure. When I have thus got them altogether in one view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I judge some two reasons con equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out five; and thus proceeding, I find where the balance lies; and if after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly.” –Benjamin Franklin

Source: How to Make a Decision Like Ben Franklin

Franklin clearly understood the need to think deliberately He noted that one difficulty in making an important choice is because “all Reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time”

It might be worth noting (crassly) that in modern society your are more likely to run into Franklin’s Balance Sheet in a course on sales technique than in a History of Civics.  The “Balance Sheet” has been used by salesman for decades to guide prospect towards the a buying decision that the sales person prefers. 

This is the type of situation people face now in things like long election campaigns where we are sold a candidate. We find it difficult to accumulate reasons to support one candidate or another. 
I’ll leave it to the reader to try this for their choices they face. Over a period of time fill in your own column as thoughts occurred to you so that in Ben’s words:

“when each reason is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I judge better and less likely to make a rash step…”

Images

Ben: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/BenjaminFranklin?from=Main.BenjaminFranklin

Half a Truth: http://www.theburningplatform.com/?tag=ben-franklin

Short memory: From Facebook sites

Thinking that We Know and the Science of Thinking

by Gary Berg-Cross

2002 Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman delivers the free 12th Annual Sackler Lecture tonight at 6 at the National Academy of Sciences Building - 2101 Constitution Avenue NW - Auditorium (Washington). The talk is called "Thinking that We Know". Kahneman got the Nobel Prize for research that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making. Steven Pinker, who I hope is know to this group, called him "one of the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today."

For those who have not read his recent book (“Thinking, Fast and Slow”) the talk should covers some of his ideas on different modes of thinking and the search for the truth. Here is the abstract for the talk:

Truth is a philosophical concept, and the shared search for agreed and objective truth is the central mission of science. But the sense of truth is a subjective experience, which falls in the domain of psychology. Carefully reasoned argument is one way to induce a sense of truth, but it is not the only way, or indeed the most common. The distinction between different modes of thinking – fast and automatic vs. slow and controlled – provides a framework for understanding the variety of experiences of truth.

The New York Times review of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” noted this:

Human irrationality is Kahneman’s great theme. There are essentially three phases to his career. In the first, he and Tversky did a series of ingenious experiments that revealed twenty or so “cognitive biases” — unconscious errors of reasoning that distort our judgment of the world. Typical of these is the “anchoring effect”: our tendency to be influenced by irrelevant numbers that we happen to be exposed to. (In one experiment, for instance, experienced German judges were inclined to give a shoplifter a longer sentence if they had just rolled a pair of dice loaded to give a high number.) In the second phase, Kahneman and Tversky showed that people making decisions under uncertain conditions do not behave in the way that economic models have traditionally assumed; they do not “maximize utility.” The two then developed an alternative account of decision making, one more faithful to human psychology, which they called “prospect theory.” (It was for this achievement that Kahneman was awarded the Nobel.) In the third phase of his career, mainly after the death of Tversky, Kahneman has delved into “hedonic psychology”: the science of happiness, its nature and its causes. His findings in this area have proved disquieting — and not just because one of the key experiments involved a deliberately prolonged colonoscopy.
“Thinking, Fast and Slow” spans all three of these phases. It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching, especially when Kahneman is recounting his collaboration with Tversky. (“The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”) So impressive is its vision of flawed human reason that the New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and Tversky’s work “will be remembered hundreds of years from now,” and that it is “a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.” They are, Brooks said, “like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.”

Daniel Kahneman, P.h.D., is a Senior Scholar and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton University. His bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was selected by The New York Times as one of its Best Books of 2011. A 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences, Dr. Kahneman has laid the foundation for a new field of research, called behavioral economics.