Trump vs. Amazon

Now that Trump is bashing Amazon, the Internet company may face hard times. My suggestion is that they invest in Trump, buy up his countless  loans and consolidate them. That should greatly improve the company's prospects while simplifying Trump's foreign policy. 

Why Reason Doesn't Work

What follows from an old New Yorker article:

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.

In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.

“Thanks again for coming—I usually find these office parties rather awkward.”

This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.

Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the February 27, 2017, issue, with the headline “That’s What You Think.”

• Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
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Michael Cohen

Today we were told by Michael Cohen's attorney that Michael Cohen arranged the payment to silence Stormy Daniels without Spanky Trump's knowledge. And Spanky never signed the document, so the document is a contract between Daniels and someone who did not know the contract existed. 

I understand nothing about what makes a contract legally enforceable, but maybe both parties have to know it exists. In that case Spanky might want to hire a new fixer.

Repeal the Second Amendment

Right now you can't run for political office and win if you argue that we should repeal the Second Amendment. Nevertheless, we should begin to discuss repeal. In time repeal is going to win.

The Founders thought it would be a good thing if White males had muskets and could quickly form into local militias. The Founders thought militias might work better than a standing army, which turned out to be wrong. That's why we have an army today.

Worse, the original militias were a lot like the militias who back the Bundy family. They were, basically, an enforcement arm for White supremacy. Militias existed to keep slaves in chains, recapture indentured servants, kill Indians and take away Indian land. 

We no longer use militias, and we should replace the Second Amendment with one more suited to our current reality. 

(And, no, the National Guard is not a militia. It's a state army.)

Barry

If you like offbeat sit-coms, you might look at BARRY on HBO, the story of a hit-man who takes a class in acting.

The Walk against Guns 2

According to our local newspaper, THE CORPORATE DEMOCRAT, the high school sophomore who turned out to be the best speaker at our anti-gun rally in Santa Rosa, is named Jonah Gottlieb, and he's from Credo High in Rohnert Park, a public charter school. Credo High is a small school (138 students) with above average academic scores. 

I don't know what Credo's mission is, but I did guess from the start that Gottlieb was not attending a regular public school. I support the regular schools, but children develop faster when they get individual attention. That's more apt to occur in small schools.

Gottlieb told the thousands in attendance that if someone says that what will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, he's trying to sell two guns. 

That observation is central to the gun debate. 

Out for a Walk

This is a good day for a walk. I know where a bunch of people will be gathering at 10, here at Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa. Going to stretch my legs. I will add to this, say how it goes.

George Will Tries But Screws Up

I seldom pay attention to rightwing commentators except for David Frum, but on occasion I read George Will, who made factual mistakes in his latest column. He wrote that in 2012, Democrats “instituted a primary system under which the top two vote-getters for any office are on the November ballot, even if both are from the same party.” (Some call this system a jungle primary.) Will claimed that the system handicaps Democrats.

Will thinks the Democrats handicapped themselves. 

In fact the change happened in 2010, not 2012, and its main backers were Arnold Schwartzenegger, Dan Schnur and Abel Maldonado, Republicans. For the most part professional politicians from both parties opposed the change. It made re-election less certain. 

As a result of this measure (which I didn’t vote for at the time, my error), the Democrats soon achieved supermajorities in California. (This was helped considerably by a provision that turned redistricting over to an independent commission.) So Will is wrong on most counts, which is not unusual. George Will seems serious and honest to me; but, as one of his university professors, John Kenneth Galbraith, once said, Will was a “B” student.

(Next day: Will published an excellent column on the lunacy of making a war-mad infidel, John Bolton, a member of the government.)

The Police

I’m critical of a system that apparently trains police officers to shoot children like Andy Lopez, but I’ve taught many officers I respected. Yesterday I read about an officer in Maryland who heard shots fired in a high school and immediately ran toward danger. That was the job. The shooter is dead. We don’t know yet if the student shot himself or was shot by the officer. I want to keep this incident in mind—it’s why we pay police officers substantial salaries and offer early retirement. 

Alexander Hamilton/Donald Trump

When a young and somewhat naive James Madison wrote the first draft of our Constitution, he believed that a meeting of 100 White males from 13 different states would be such an incredibly diverse group that Congress would not divide into competing political parties. Instead, each educated and elite White man would think for himself, be open to compromise and help govern in a reasonable way. The Constitutional Convention soon worked like that and became a startling success.

Alexander Hamilton was more realistic. He believed that if you got 100 representatives together in a hall, a shrewd authoritarian could quickly form 51 of them into a majority party, take absolute power and, Hamilton hoped, turn us into a workable dictatorship. Hamilton began this process by creating the Federalist Party. (I’ve heard that Hamilton’s goal of creating a dictatorship was accidentally omitted from the current Broadway musical.)

Hamilton’s particularly gross descendent today is a woman-grabbing traitor named Donald Trump. My point is that Trump is not an unusual President, except for his coarse stupidity. Trump has the same goals as a dozen predecessors. 

Why the GOP Supports Mueller

The GOP leadership is so afraid of Trump’s primary voters that they openly support Trump. And they rightfully fear the general election voters who dislike Trump. Their solution is to support Mueller’s investigation of Trump and hope that Mueller will do what they lack the backbone to do. 

Walking to Humboldt Bay

I buy the Press Democrat, I'm ashamed to say, to work the puzzles. I no longer read the editorial pages, but maybe once a week I come across a useful headline. I appreciate the State Senator Mike McGuire coverage this morning. Mike is pushing a bill to reorganize our railroad system so it will provide a walking trail from from San Francisco Bay to Humboldt Bay. That's about 300 miles, some of it through unseen wilderness, following the old railroad tracks. 

Mike and Assembly Member Jim Wood are unusually intelligent representatives of the northern coast. I don't always agree with them, but that's inevitable. If I were in their shoes, dealing with the dealing, I would soon be in disagreement with myself. That's the system. What you can hope for in an American representative is someone reasonable and humane who will do the best he or she can. Mike's skills. progressive creativity and energy add much more.

Student Loan Paid!

Today we paid off the student loan we took to help our children through college. They said it couldn't be done, yet we have done it, and I am only 83!  What an unusual  system of higher education our nation has developed. We are exceptional! No one else does it our way. 

Trump's Bum Boy

What model is Trump following as he attempts to run the government? People say that he’s running the government the way he runs his businesses, but that can’t be right. Trump has no idea how to run a business. He’s a con man. He couldn't manage a burger joint. But he does have a well-learned model for how to pretend to run things, his TV show, THE APPRENTICE. 

If you recall, THE APPRENTICE was a show in which a motley group of people would attempt to win his favor and become his chief bum boy.  One by one he would find them inadequate and fire them. At the end of the season a single brown-noser would be left, the winner. At least that’s how I think THE APPRENTICE went. I never watched it. In a sense I am watching it now, the government of the United States as a spin-off of a fake reality show.

I just heard an expert say that maybe Trump will soon get the cabinet he wants. There’s no such cabinet. What Trump wants and gets is his show, his  churn, his turnover, his posse of fools attempting to placate him and failing.

This is madness.   

A New Sheriff

I read today that Ben Boyce has endorsed John Mutz for sheriff. That's good enough for me. We badly need a new sheriff after that office and the district attorney failed the community and shrugged off the killing of Andy Lopez.

Rexit

I'm sitting here this morning watching the talking heads on TV discuss the belated news that Rex Tillerson has been fired. Actually he got fired on Friday,  but the news was kept secret until today, Tuesday. So far no one has commented on the timing, which is interesting. (No one cares about  Rex Tillerson, who was worse than a failure.)

Rex Tillerson was pretend-fired today, Tuesday, because the Republicans are probably going to lose a special election for congress in Pennsylvania this evening. This is in a district that Agent Orange carried by 20 percentage points 16 months ago. After a year of cascading corruption, the Republicans look bad. Trump runs the White House by attempting to control the headlines one day at a time. He thinks life is public relations.  Today he wants to divert us from the special election and from the possibility that Stormy Daniels may soon post photos of his junk on the 'net. At last some may get to compare Little Trump to his tiny hands.  I plan to avert my eyes.

Don and Stormy

While his wife was recovering from delivering his latest son, Don Trump took time off from his cascading corruption to have an affair with a porn actress, Stormy Daniels. Now he's trying to drag Stormy down to his level, but she's putting up a strong battle. Daniels wants to discuss the matter. More power to her. 

The Fate of Businessboy

Marvel Comics is looking for superheroes, which may explain the rumor about a new dynamic duo, Agent Orange and his son-in-law, Businessboy. Agent Orange's super talent is found in his tiny paws. He grasps humans by their parts, rendering them helpless, and, at the same time, using his free paw, clamps on any money they might have and extracts it with loud boasting. Businessboy's super talent is to make things smaller, particularly real estate investments, whose values shrink whenever he buys properties. 

These two don't fight evil alone. With them comes a small army of helpers, mostly urinators. The ironic catch is that Businessboy's father is a really nasty ex-con, and Businessboy seems to be heading, against his will, down the same road. Yet there's nothing he fears more than the shame of  prison food. Businessboy is secretly petrified by his seemingly inexorable fate. His stony face, very smooth, is hairless with fear. And there's apparently nothing he can do to stop his slide into urination, spankings and a tiny barred room on the Hudson. 

Fire McMaster

Who influences Mad King Trump the most? At first it seemed to be Jared Kushner, business boy. Then this dude and that dude.  In fact the key adviser for recent Presidents has been the national security advisor. Right now that's General H. McMaster.  How long will he last with Trump, and should we care?

Look at what H. McMaster published in the Wall Street Journal.

General McMaster: "The world is not a 'global community' but an arena where nations, non-governmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring in this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it."

In short, the world is an arena and simultaneously a forum where actors and businesses compete. We have unmatched moral strength, especially when grabbing international affairs by the genitalia. And we like it that way.

McMaster's view of our human interactions as ruthless, elemental and brutal combat is nuts, but if you are a dim-witted general, what you see in the arena from your soft seat at the forum will always be combat. If you are a hammer, what you see is nails. It's time for McMaster to retire. 

Look at the Second Amendment (and what it doesn't say)

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Take a look at what the Amendment does not say.

It does not say that the militia has the right to bear arms (which would be like saying that our army has the right to bear arms).

It does not say that people have the right to own guns to defend themselves or their homes. (It does imply that people have the right to own guns to take to a local militia call up to defend against the British or the Indians.) 

It does not say that guns should be regulated (which in those days meant "well trained"). It says local militias should be well trained. 

It does not say that people have the right to carry concealed weapons.

While the First Amendment grants the right of people to assemble, neither the First or Second Amendment states that people have the right to take weapons to churches, bars or school board meetings (or Donald Trump rallies, where for some reason guns and Bowie knives are forbidden). 

The First Amendment was adopted because the Founders thought a national army might become the fist of a tyrant. Instead of an army, they proposed militia, by which they meant local volunteers in a town, say, who would train together. (They weren't proposing our current National Guard, which is an army.)

***

But that's ancient history. Our courts have, over the centuries, interpreted the Second Amendment in new ways, and that is settled law, I guess. Depending on which state you live in, you can own some guns but not others, defend your home, maybe secretly carry a gun when you go to church, etc. You can not drive around in an armed tank, but maybe you can carry a military assault rifle--or maybe not. We know this much. In the states with stricter gun laws, there are fewer gun deaths.

(on Facebook) 

The Oscars Problem

I find the Oscars a gigantic bore of 1950s dancing and music, but I have developed a way of watching that speeds things up. I record the Oscars, then shoot through them, stopping only when I see the emcee. His appearance means that the next segment will be an actual award. If the award is for best lip-synching or whatever, I speed up again.

Every year there are complaints that White men have won too many awards--as if giving more awards to women, gays and people of color would change things. That approach has been tested, and it failed.

The real problem is that White men make 85% of the movies. Of course they win most of the awards. If green monsters from Mars made 85% of the movies, green monsters would win most of the awards. The problem is not awards.  The awards are a symptom. Giving more awards to so-called minorities (soon to be a majority) will solve nothing. Gays, women and people of color should be financed to create more films. We will get better films that way. And the awards will come.  

Jefferson Blowregard Sessions

Yesterday I heard Attorney General Jefferson Blowregard Sessions talking on TV about honor. It struck me that I had never heard anyone talk about honor other than tiny Southern political hacks. Among actual people, honor is not a topic.

Politicians talk of honor when not a single politician in America has some. I don’t blame them. We badly need skilled politicians, and the best have probably lengthened my life by banning smoking, for example. But the nature of the political job (cutting ugly deals with corporations) and how you get the job (begging rich people for campaign cash, dumping old political friends in the rush for power) rules out honor from the start. That’s our American system.  As Harry Truman said, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. 

You can trust your dog. The politician closest to honorable is the one who, once he’s been bought, stays bought. 

Trump's Revenge

As many know, California sued to stop the building of a border Wall near Mexico, and then we lost in court. President Trump this morning threatened not to build our part of that Wall: he “decided that sections of the Wall that California wants built NOW will not be built until the whole Wall is approved.”

In short, Trump wants the Wall, California does not want the Wall, and Trump is punishing California by not building the section of the Wall that California tried to block. 

Damn the man and his cold heart! And I hope he doesn’t realize that he can further punish California by forcing on us a huge federal grant for bridge and road repairs.