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

Myth Supplants Reality & Fantasy Displaces Common Sense

By Gary Berg-Cross

Allan Sloan wrote recently about the 5 Myths of the Great Financial Meltdown. His list covered:

1: The government should have done nothing

2: The government bailed out shareholders

3: The Volcker Rule will save us

4: Taxpayers are off the hook for future failures. And

5: It's the government's fault.

The details in the article are worth reading, but I was particularly struck a compelling framing line that I could identify with in his analysis:

I find myself getting increasingly angry and frustrated watching myth supplant reality about what happened, and seeing fantasy displace common sense when it comes to fixing the problems that got us in this mess .

Some manifestations are because of ideological and political stances. We see fantasy and unsound thinking in the climate change debate and warming as conspiracy of scientists, who are the most reality grounded of us. We will hear more myth, like “death panels” in likely discussion the Affordable Health Care act. As Chris Mooney notes it seems at times the political right lives in a different reality that pushed serious, critical thinking to the back of the bus. You can see this for yourself by going to the Main page of Conservapedia. When I was writing this blog the following were the very mythic, anti-freethinking news stories featured:

Liberals have destroyed the perceived value of a college degree with their worst college majors: "Undervalued and overpriced, the beleaguered bachelor's degree is losing its edge as the hallmark of an educated, readily employable American." [9]

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The myth of neutrality.[10] Which side are you on?

Remind Wikipedia that their neutral point of view policy (NPOV) is a farce and they might as well confess they are liberals! See: Bias in Wikipedia

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Pastor Carl Gallups declares his anti-atheism and anti-evolution book is doing well around the world.VIDEO

Is there more bad news on its way for global atheism and global evolutionism? You know where to go to find the latest news detailing the decline of atheism and evolutionism![11][12][13] It is such a glorious time to be a Christian creationist.[14][15]

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Also, food related stocks with large international footprints are largely doing well in the Great Recession.[18][19] No matter how incompetent Barack Obama and secular European leaders are, people still need to eat!

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Much to the dismay of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Obama and "The Lord of the Fries" (Barack Obama), there are fast food restaurants serving big sugary drinks whose stocks are doing well in the Great Recession.[20]

Obese atheists and obese evolutionists of the world, stop driving up the price of fast food stocks! Also, a leading creationist organization declares, "Blaming gluttony on evolution seems very self-serving."[21] You thought you could blame your obesity and gluttony on "evolution". Think again! Start hitting the gym for 60 minutes a day evolutionist slackers![22][23][24] And give your body one day of rest a week.[25][26]

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Want to read part of the Conservapedia entry on Climate Change? Here is a snippet:

Ideologues insist that the world's top scientists have reached a "consensus" that most of the warming which land-based weather stations have recorded in the last century is due to human activity. The basis for this claim is a set of reports published by the IPCC, an agency of the United Nations. The assumption is that the government-appointed representatives who run the IPCC would be completely objective and neutral, and would place finding and revealing the truth ahead of any nationalistic interests.

A lot of money is spent publicizing each side's position in the debate:

"Newsweek purports to take readers inside the world of “Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine” without mentioning that the global-warming alarmists are even better funded, in some cases with government support

Myths replacing reality is a perennial worrisome topic to Freethinkers and the above is a large dose. Some of the WASH speaker’s have addressed the myth-reality battle directly. Rob Boston’s Talk on “The Christian Nation Myth” covered many aspects of this arguing that we have to

strongly oppose the Christian establishment myth and its associated principles, which exclude many people who now it can claim, are not true Americans. We are still struggling with our pluralism and the claim that non-believers that don't have America’s best interest at heart.

Another historical myth family has bothered my is the oversimplified stories about Western and American Exceptionalism such as Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest or the Reagan-like belief that “God has granted America a special role in human history.”.

Such Myths are potent in part because they cobble together reassuring ideas that we want to believe in. We just need enough support to get above a very low threshold of our version of “proof” that serves a confirmatory bias.

WallBuilders is an organization, for example, that shows a healthy dose of confirmatory bias towards the proposition of:

"presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built – a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined. In accord with what was so accurately stated by George Washington, we believe that "the propitious [favorable] smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation which disregards the eternal rules of order and right which heaven itself has ordained."

Myths persist in part because considering the alternative, skeptical view is threatening. Then again, critical thinking, as opposed to the intuitive, feel-good version is hard work. Real historic understanding takes time and energy for evidentiary analysis and most of us routinely rely on short cuts that seem like common sense but are often don’t stand up to rational analysis..

Rational analysis for the masses, alas, remains an unfulfilled Enlightenment goal..

Understanding Confirmatory Bias and Dead End Arguments

By Gary Berg-Cross

In her popular blog “General Myers and His Endless War on Error”, Sarah Hippolitus took on PZ Myers essay, Sunday Sacrilege: Sacking the City of God, for its deliberate and provocative vitriol. The argument is simple, telling people they are wrong in this way just doesn’t work and is perhaps counterproductive. Sarah cited Chris Mooney's essay, The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science, in which Mooney explains why berating people, such as religious conservatives who are emotionally committed to an idea, can make them defensively cling harder to their beliefs and biases. An in-your-face criticism raises emotions and people respond defensively overwhelming any chance at reason. Over the last 50 years of social and cognitive research we have learned a considerable amount of the general type of phenomena of how people frame and defend biases (bracketology being one area where “experts” are visibly wrong) and unsupported beliefs and how we rationalization our beliefs rather than use reason to arrive at opinions. I’ve written on this topic earlier in such blogs as “Rationalizing Irrational Choices: That $45 entree and presidential choices” and Boxing Ourselves In with Category Errors. We have come to a sad, but scientific understanding from a coordinated system of studies that we humans are imperfect reasoners. The fact is that the emphasis on rationality encouraged by Enlightenment thinkers is a noble effort, but difficult, and does not come easily in many circumstances. The modern parlance covering this is to talk about gut feeling that overwhelm and, in effect, reverse engineer our opinions. More recently the studies have focused on group differences in cognitive styles and the role of emotions, like fear, in these differences.

The scientific study of general phenomena of changing the minds of people with convictions, especially faith-based ones,  goes back a long way, but progress was made starting in the 50s. Stanford University social psychologist Leon Festinger summarized it succinctly based on a study of a UFO cult that was convinced the world would end on December 20^th 1954 (see“When Prophecy Fails”):

"A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."

And it wasn’t just odd folks that show biases responses. Experimental studies of experts, such as Physicians, show they are often biased in clinical judgments. Their expertise could be improved upon by simple statistical rules, a discovery that prompted some hope for things like artificial, expert systems to aid human judgment.But this human tendency gets enhanced when it interacts with factors like ideology,  frightening circumstances and cultural framing.

The more recent studies on differences of reasoning style, which I touched on in Epistemological Styles. There I contrasted scientific with theist styles. Scientific styles are cognitively taxing and require considerable cultural support for chained combinations of postulates that get tested by experiment. These may confirm a belief but also disconfirm it. It’s all part of a humbling style that values exploration of ideas with controlled observation and measurement, analogical models and statistical analysis of regularities of populations.Such methods have been applied to self-study processes by which small groups have moved the country  away from intellectual  processes to more of a conservative agenda in this  country (see for example Hacker and Pierson's work Off Center). Such conservative, social-political engineering reflect reaching people who prefer far simpler style . It is to be an idea advocate and largely focus on evidence to justify existing belief and gut feelings.Taken as a whole this tends to appeal to conservative minds more than liberal ones.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, discusses such things in his recent book The Republican Brain The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality. His finding is simply states: conservatives and liberals don’t just have different ideologies; they have different psychologies (aka epistemological styles) that help explain their fact and expert denying positions on such things as climate change and evolution. It’s not just that they don’t know facts it is that they have a tendency towards a confirmatory bias that reflects a preference to focus on evidence that supports existing belief. Another part of who conservatives are is their preference for ideas that bind groups together rather than “truth” in an objective sense. And one of the big factors driving conservative beliefs is their tendency to emotional, fight or flight responses. Eye tracking studies, for example, show that people who score high on conservative positions tend to track “threat” objects in an environment (a knife or gun – maybe a stranger). There’s survival value in such a tendency so one may imagine how such a tendency was selected in populations and later frozen into cultural values. Conservatives tend to be ready to be afraid and this can turn off the reasoning side of the brain.
You can see a good discussion of all of this on the recent Up With Chris Hayes, where Mooney and Jonathan Haidt, UVA moral psychologist & author of The Righteous Mind, discussed group differences. They agreed that liberals tend to be more open to new experiences, new data and convincing finds. As a consequence they tend to be more sympathetic to scientific process, and take their scientific findings more seriously. This is a tendency/predisposition and not a hard and fast thing in all circumstances.  The socially generated tendency of Conservatives, meanwhile, is that they just do it differently. Haidt explained:

“I want to fully agree with Chris that the psychology does predispose liberals more to be receptive to science; my own research has found that conservatives are better at group-binding, at loyalty, and so if you put them in a group-versus-group conflict, yes, the right is more prone, psychologically, to band around and sort of, circle the wagons.”

This is consistent with Sarah’s earlier argument about the reaction of believers to strong, mocking arguments. In conversations with conservative thinkers (as opposed to  liberal styles) we should be aware that they may not have the same regard for the Enlightenment’s style of rational argument. We are either fooling ourselves or just being a bit too rigid in our style. But we need not be quiet or withdrawn certainly in our own communuty, and we can use the new understandings that come from cognitive and social science to guide us. The value of framing (see my Framing Arguments: You say Flaming Atheists and I Say Non-Confrontational Humanist) 
is one tool we can use. Another is to recognize that individual reasoning is biased. We are often battling a strong confirmatory bias that repels facts and strict logic. What we need instead is get into a dialog to challenge our biases as well as others. Socrates was on to this a long time ago and its time to update that technique drawing lessons from the relevant science. Overcoming a reflexive conservative denial of the science of denial would be a big step. We need to get the word out on that.

Is A One Percent Justification Meme Spreading?

By Gary Berg-Cross

In The One Percent Doctrine Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind discussed the Bush Administration hunt for terrorists after 9/11 and its conflation with a justification for attacking Iraq. The title comes from VP Cheney’s position that:

“ If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.”

With the war drums beating for an attack on Iran some, like Robert Parry (Consortium News) see an early Return of Cheney's One Percent Doctrine:

But it should be clear what the game is. Israeli hardliners and American neocons want a return to former Vice President Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine….. That is, if there is even a one percent chance that a terrorist attack might be launched against the United States, it must be treated as a certainty, thus justifying any preemptive military action that U.S. officials deem warranted.

That was the mad-hatter policy that governed the U.S. run-up to the Iraq War, when even the most dubious - and dishonest - claims by self-interested Iraqi exiles and their neocon friends were treated as requiring a bloody invasion of a country then at peace…

One % positions and their murky data provide weak justification for war but seem enough for people predisposed to hawkish positions. As Suskind himself argues t not every 1% hypothesis gets treated enough to get what Cheney calls “a response”. Besides being some broad rationalization of an angry, militant response the One Percent idea also has as an aspect of confirmatory bias that I’ve previously discussed. This means we can actually ignore data that doesn’t fit our hypothesis. Analysis leading to other conclusions is “undesired.”

In practice I believe that many people operate on something like a 1% approach and do it dynamically. That is, they may only require a small hint of something being possible to confirm it in their mind. Then over time on top of a 1% possibility we strengthen our belief by using a fraction of new evidence and selected analysis. One winds up with a .1 or .01% doctrine or principle.

This is the type of thing, I believe, one sees in layman beliefs and debates over climate change. Barely half the U.S. public thinks carbon pollution could warm Earth. It’s just too complex and as noted in The Psychology of Climate Change Denial:

Even as the science of global warming gets stronger, fewer Americans believe it’s real. In some ways, it’s nearly as jarring a disconnect as enduring disbelief in evolution or carbon dating…Our response to disturbing information is very complex. We negotiate it. We don’t just take it in and respond in a rational way.”

On one side there is an enormous aggregate of evidence and analysis such as in an IPCC report ranging from weather statistics and extremes, atmospheric measurements, climate history, glacier melting, changes in animal migration, arctic melting, rising sea level, stronger floods and droughts, the spread of tropical diseases and the decline of sensitive species. Against this a non-believer cites one little piece of evidence from how scientists discuss analysis in emails! It’s more of a .1% principle than even a 1%.

This has some relation to defining characteristic of true believers like VP Chaney, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum who seem to be spreading the meme for a low evidence belief. They have disdain for serious analysis and believe instead in a narrow view of reality that is emotionally backed by a cohesive group of fervent believers. You hear them in some Republican debates howling support for 1% claims such as a war on Religion or how Fannie and Freddie caused the real estate bubble. disturbing. Believing and understanding otherwise is something they don’t want to think about. So what they do in political debate is what they do in daily life - create a bubble world where the 99% possibilities are not present or accepted. Keep uncomfortable ideas at a distance is likely to lead to a serious problem 99% of the time or so.

Simple Help to Understand Difficult Issues and its Argumentation

Gary Berg-Cross

The recent arguments on this Blog about supporting language-based charter schools in DC raised some fundamental issues about argumentation and bias in my mind. It starts from the obvious observation that there are usual many sides to an issue like this. But our experiences, values and broad stances often frames what we consider good arguments. Facts are certainly important in an argument. So the fact that “there are Christian Arabs” is one of many facts that can be cited to support an argument. They may be used to support or oppose principles and thus provide a coherent argument. But since there may be so many relevant facts it is often hard to focus down to critical facts and arguments can quickly become so complex they are difficult to follow, especially when the various sides of an issues have a large history and many interacting factors. In addition to heaps of facts in an argument one may cite such things as:

· Principles (schools should serve broad student bodies)

· Hidden agenda and motivation (Christian evangelical kids learning Hebrew so that they can proselytize in Israel) Again facts may be used to expose or distract from agendas ,

· Ideology and values (English is our official language or Charter movement is said to have shifted into an effort to privatize education and attack teachers' unions,) but (we shouldn’t have publish money going into religious schools and “Two yet-to-be-opened Hebrew charter schools in New Jersey each received federal grants of $200,000”)

· Backers & group associations (Some Charter schools have ties to religious groups ), and a variety of other factors that go into human situations and our understanding of them.

· Uncomfortable trends (Religious Charter Schools are proliferating)

Some of these as well as supporting facts I may have only a small knowledge of for example who is in back of language-based charter schools. I may have a general sense of how is in back of charter schools and wonder if this is a camel’s nose under the tent strategy. I may connect this to larger, religious agendas such as abortion control or teaching creationism is schools that work tirelessly to nibble away at resistance to their broader agenda. In such grey areas I may be in conflict because I can see a goal that has potential good, but may afford and opportunity for some downside too. If I hear that New Gingrich favors Hebrew language charter schools for DC and these are getting funds from Sheldon Adelstein, who is know to fund Independent Jewish schools, I might worry that there is an agenda here, although it is a loose chain of reasoning.

How do we assess all these factors and role them into a judgment on issues that are complex like this and where only limited facts are know and the environment is not transparent enough to be sure? One may ask how humans reach a reasoned judgment when there are so many factors. Learning a language, for example, is good while supporting schools that are anti-union is bad. It’s all more than a direct calculating and adding up of all supporting and opposing factors in some type of vast numerical calculation. Critical thinking & reducing complexity by analysis that breaks things down a bit helps. I’ve done just a bit of this in my bullets. Using argument maps to explore what has been said can be useful. Argument maps allow us to clarify the thoughts and look at various parts of an argument. But it takes time and training so it is a selective improvement.

This is now well enough researched in Cognitive Psychology and Decision Science to offer some insights. But it itself is complex enough that only a gesture to the full story is attempted here.

So how do we reach judgment under such complex situation? Our mind often shortcuts the complexity. One factor are frames that influence what we believe are facts and have much to do with our arguments on complex issues helping us simplify them down to what seems like a coherent argument. But another is active filtering and biases. We choose to seek out and accept the information that fits our existing mental model or viewpoint, instead of all information available. And so yes this often involves biases in our reasoning process.

One big factor in such judgments is a confirmatory bias - a tendency for us to favor information that confirms our beliefs, hypotheses or even our identities. So if we already hold a belief that teaching Hebrew is good (proselytize in Israel or maybe the tourist trade is good for the Israeli state) you can you can find data to support this and even the general notion that learning any new language is good confirms your belief. In other words, our judgment may be biased by seeking information which confirms an existing viewpoint. This simplifies things. We don’t have to worry about competing ideas such as, “well learning a new language is good, but why learn Arabic and not Spanish (with a growing population) or Italian (a nice place to visit)?”

What about new data? Well frames and a confirmatory bias helps direct interpretation of new “facts. ” It can be as simple as ignoring or downplaying information that doesn’t fit our concepts. But it can be active as new information is reinterpreted to match expectations and preconceptions. In controlled studies even if two people observed the same events, their interpretation can be completely different and influenced by preconceptions (shades of ideological thinking!).

So how do we get beyond things like confirmatory biases to understand what going on? Well being aware of the bias is a start. Critical thinking and a skeptical attitude helps. No matter what side you are on there are some general ideas such sharing your arguments with other critical thinkers. Since we are weak in finding flaws in our own reasoning other people may see the biases and fallacies. It can be hard on the ego though. Exposing arguments on a Blog like this is a way to do that, but one has to be open to personal progress and not rigid.

As to methods 2400 years ago or so Socrates came up with a dialogue method to help us get unstuck from our pre-judgments. It takes extended discussion that is less of one advocate clashing with another like 2 lawyers representing clients. It is more like a cooperative search for the truth.

We also have the rational, empirical scientific method which values challenging but testable hypotheses, questions data and has a way of converging on hypothesis that are supported by validated facts through systematic observation. Being more like a scientist and less like a lawyer just sounds better to me.

Bracketology, Biases in Inexact Sciences, Energy Futures & Religious Projections

Spring in the DC region can be a mixture of both wonderful & maddening things. The cherry blossoms are wonderful. The budget battle is maddening. We are just ending a type of furious wonder with basketball's March Madness. This year with a baker's 68 we have a small extension of madness into April. Someone once describe the tournament as 4 weeks of Super Bowls!

I enjoy it, but do not participate in one thing that adds to some people's entertainment. This is filling out (and gambling on) brackets to predict the winners as the tournament unfolds. After the Sunday announcing the brackets people get their office copy machines busy on Monday. This locks in commitment for the next few weeks. (But another perspective from 1 survey is an estimate that March Madness distraction, during the 1st week of the tournament games are on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoon, could cost employers as much as $1.8 billion in unproductive wages.)


But this year we hear the groans of people with "busted brackets" as we enjoy the heroics of teams like Butler and VCU. Most people's brackets were burned to toast early as top seeds exited and none of # 1 or 2 seeds made the final four. Saturday's national semifinals featured a No. 3 (UConn) beating # 4 (Kentucky), and # 8 (Butler) beating a ultimate underdog # 11 (Virginia Commonwealth) who had to play in from the new first round of 4.

Each year my son-in-law has my daughter and their kids fill in a bracket and he invites me to participate. This seems reasonable since I spend more time watching the BB season than he does. But I've never tried to fill in a bracket, because there are always teams (like VCU, Arizona, Oakland or Morehead State) that I've not seen in competition. I never feel that I know enough or have good bracketology sense to make even a good wager on likely outcomes. I know that lots of what I would do would involve bias rather than real informed decisions.

But like President Obama I might do as well if not better than supposed bracket experts. By the time of the final 4 the President had none of the finalists, but overall he ranked in the 94.9 percentile of ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge which had 5.9 million brackets were filled out. He was well ahead of supposed experts. Premier college basketball analysts for ESPN and self-proclaimed "king of bracketology" Joe Lunardi thought that all four No. 1 seeds would meet in Atlanta. Dick Vitale with 450 points as at the 21.5 percentile and he had seen most, if not all, of the teams play and had time to analyze then. But Vitale and others seems to have lots of confirmatory bias and favor the big guys or teams they see more of. They talk about the big teams all the time - it plays the odds. Once they get the idea that Pitt is a solid team they have trouble seeing their weaknesses. Note, our local noisy spotlight vampire Tony Kornheiser had an even worse score - 420 points or 12.0 percentile. This performance is up there with Wall St financial experts in 2006-2007.

Part of attraction of brackets is that is just fun to out guess the experts. From a fan's perspective, that's one thing that makes the tournament so special. We may avoid expert biases and get some excitement back underdogs.

But getting the brackets exactly right remains a low probability for anyone. Why is this? With some much time and effort spent, some of it from professionals and experts, one wonders why we don't have better predictions. Bracketology is all very humbling, yet it represents the type of thing that we humans do in understanding the world. Each year more there is more TV coverage of teams including special bracket busting games with match-ups previously seen only in the NCAA tournament. ESPN has numerous shows analyzing teams and ex-coaches and players offering insight. We have the stats on dozens of dimensions - 3 point shooting percentages, rebounding, fouling. We can watch the tape just as if we were a coach preparing for a game. Yet this year we have busted brackets galore.


To me it tells us something about the current, in practice limits of human expertise and knowing. Much of human knowing is guided by simplifications and leveraging assumptions and heuristics. To understand a complex topic we apply some simplifying principles such as "talent wins" or "experience wins".
Sure, but these are qualitative and judgmental. What is a significant talent gap? How do we aggregate across positions? We may be a bit more sophisticated and say. "Quality guard play is more important than interior depth."

Or we may balance things this way:

"Poor foul shooting is not usually an Achilles heel for a top-tier team, because talent can overcome that negative." Such things are in Jared Trexler's "99 Things You Wish You Knew Before...Filling Out Your Hoops Bracket." Jared is National College Basketball Columnist at Sports Network, and I'm not exactly sure how he did this year. His early predictions for the East's 2nd Round had 2 errors - George Mason over Villanova, Clemson over West Virginia. He got 3 of 4 right for the East's Sweet 16 teams: Ohio State, Kentucky, Syracuse, North Carolina but like Obama his regional final was all wrong - Ohio State vs. Syracuse. His West regional final? Duke vs. San Diego State - Nope, all wrong.

Vaguely the whole humbling process suggests a degree of caution in dealing with other complex topics some of which have oppositional frames. The Gulf oil gusher was an us against them saga with technology overtaken by natural risk. Opposition, which we artificially structure in games, reflects choice aspects that we simplify things into. Take energy choices. Do we want nuclear or something else? Well there are many other choices including conservation techniques that may not be considered. This is analogous to not making the NCAA selection cut. You are not part of the conversation.

Once selected as a topic, say for nuclear power analysis focuses on strengths such as benefit and risk . You can view it in a competitive (bracket) fashion and ask if you like the odds of nuclear power being a better choice than say coal. Binary choices are simpler. A front-page story (Nuclear power is safest way to make electricity, according to study) by David Brown in April 3, 2011 Washington Post, illusrates comparative risks of nuclear and coal power. In the data reviewed, nuclear power seems like a far lower of a risk to public health than coal generation. Like our brakets there is lots of data to consider, such as mining deaths vs. deaths from radiation etc.

"Compared with nuclear power, coal is responsible for five times as many worker deaths from accidents, 470 times as many deaths due to air pollution among members of the public, and more than 1,000 times as many cases of serious illness, according to a study of the health effects of electricity generation in Europe."

But there are lots of other factors that whiz by without an easy calculus. There is yet no solution to used fuel storage. There are qualitative factors and projections about the health impacts of climate change. But like expert predictions for BB brackets I've very unconvinced that the analysis reported by the Post is adequate. Citizens do have to choose which energy sources they might support, but the interactions with the environment of each energy approach is more like the team contest and equally hard to predict. Linear projections are untrustworthy tools for dynamic situations and there is always the aspect of human biases to wrestle with. It is well known that our perception of risk is not calculated logically from a neutral unbiased view of the evidence. Rather the psychology of how we process a perception and respond to risk situations mixes emotional reactions to how we interpret evidence. We can be very influenced by salient evidence, such as team rankings, the height of players, even their personality. Once we’ve made up our mind about a risk, a confirming bias takes over and we choose to believe the evidence that agrees with what we already believe. All very humbling and cautionary for how we bracket our decisions about important topics.

A final thought on analysis of religions and secular humanist. Don Wharton discussed some ideas on the possible end of religion - http://secularhumanist.blogspot.com/2011/03/end-of-religion.html Again something like a linear projection is involved and cultural paths of rival ideas is likely to be more dynamic. After all the alumni of some groups is pretty strong, has good guard play and a good recruiting system. Of yes, and they can play rough.

It might be fun to think about secularism in a contest with such religions.


We might have the Big Old West religions Christianity: 2.1 billion with many sub-divisions and New East religions Islam: 1.5 billion (all figures from http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html

In the New West we have :

Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion

In the Old East we have:

Hinduism: 900 million
Chinese traditional religion: 394 million and
Buddhism: 376 million

That still leaves space for the mid-majors such as

Primal-indigenous (that old Pagan category?): 300 million
African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
Sikhism: 23 million
Juche: 19 million
Spiritism: 15 million
Judaism: 14 million
Baha'i: 7 million
Jainism: 4.2 million
Shinto: 4 million
Cao Dai: 4 million
Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
Tenrikyo: 2 million
Neo-Paganism: 1 million
Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
Scientology: 500 thousand

I'm not exactly sure how to bracket these, but you know who I am rooting for overall. The thing is that predicting a winner in the next few rounds is hazardous and I'm not going to rely on a simple linear projection.