Learning to Think - The Eyewitness

If you want to be a good thinker you have to stretch your brain with hard problems, problems that are over your head. This problem might be over my head but I THINK I understand it:

Suppose you live in a city divided between two racial or cultural groups - we'll call them A's and B's. In this city 15% of the people are A's and 85% are B's.

There has been a crime and we have an eyewitness who says the perpetrator was an A. The police test this witness and conclude that he correctly identifies A's and B's 80% of the time.

The police chief wants to use his resources wisely so he orders his detectives to focus first on suspects who are A's....

Given that our eyewitness says the criminal is an A and the eyewitness correctly identifies A's vs. B's 80% of the time this must be a good decision, right? Or is it?

Answer below.

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This is an interesting problem and one that will repay careful study. One of the most important lessons we learn from this problem is that a seemingly obvious correct answer can, in fact, be wrong.

If all we know is that an eyewitness says that an A committed the crime rather than a B, and that this witness can distinguish between A's and B's correctly 80% of the time, it seems obvious that the crime was most likely committed by an A.

But in this case we know something else: we know that A's make up only 15% of the population while B's make up the other 85%. The problem doesn't say whether A's or B's are more likely to commit crimes so, for this problem, we should assume there is no significant difference in criminal tendencies between the two groups.

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So let's do a thought experiment: let's imagine our witness saw 100 crimes rather than just one, and let's imagine that 85 of those crimes were committed by B's and 15 were committed by A's since that is the proportion we would expect to find given no difference in propensity to crime between the two groups.

If our witness saw 85 crimes committed by B's he will correctly tell us the criminal was a B 68 times but he will INCORRECTLY tell us the criminal was an A 17 times because he correctly distinguishes between A's and B's only 80% of the time.

On the other hand, if our witness saw 15 crimes committed by A's he will correctly tell us the criminal was an A 12 times and INCORRECTLY tell us the criminal was a B 3 times.

Looking at these two scenarios we notice that our witness will tell us, after seeing 100 crimes committed, that an A was the criminal 29 times even though, in reality, an A was the criminal only 15 times.

More importantly, out of 29 times our witness tells us that an A committed the crime he will be RIGHT only 12 times (41%) and WRONG 17 times (59%.)

In conclusion even though our witness has an 80% success rate of distinguishing between A's and B's and even though he identifies a particular criminal as an A it is still more likely, given the facts in this problem that the criminal was a B.

Without the eyewitness we would have have evaluated the probability of an A being the criminal at 15%. With the eyewitness the probability of an A being the criminal goes up to 41% but that is still below 50% so it would be a terrible mistake for the police chief to focus his resources on suspects who are A's. In the absence of any other evidence we have to conclude that our criminal is most likely a B.

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When we don't understand something we tend to think about it and try to figure out.

When we ASSUME we know something we stop thinking about it, and this can result, sometimes, in tragic consequences.

It would be wise to think about things we "know" just as much as we think about things we don't know, maybe even more!

Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

The Orwellian Age of Trump

If you still care about truth this might be the most important article you read today: Why Nobody Cares the President is Lying. Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes explains how years of attacks on the main stream media have finally resulted, not just in opposition to what are considered media lies, but to a disregard for truth itself.

He writes: “For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.”

Sykes quotes former world chess champion and now Russian political activist Garry Kasparov: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Trump and his team are actively seeking to “annihilate truth.” When people say, “Don't take him literally, take him seriously,” when they talk about “alternative facts,” when the president tells his followers to automatically dismiss every negative poll about him as “fake news,” when he attacks the great American free press as “enemies of the people,” and when he won't even bother to tell the truth anymore about something as easily verified as which recent presidents got the most electoral votes because he knows that his followers just couldn't care less that he is lying yet again, then the destruction of truth is well under way.

When we no longer distinguish between truth and lies, when we no longer agree on the basic principles of logic, or even agree that facts are facts, then we can no longer make good decisions, we can no longer think straight about important issues, we can no longer even communicate in any meaningful way.

So what can we do to keep the truth alive in what Sykes refers to as the “Orwellian age of Donald Trump?”

These are my suggestions:

1. Read news articles and editorials from both the right and the left. Try the National Review for conservative views and The Nation for liberal ones.
2. Read just one article per day if that's all you have time for but don't keep reading the same side, alternate from right to left, keep exposing yourself to ideas you may not like or agree with.
3. As you read each article try to capture the main point in a statement or sentence.
4. If the main point is a factual statement can you verify that fact from one or two other sources? If you can't, be very cautious about accepting it. If you can, be very cautious about NOT accepting it.
5. If the main point of the article is a statement concluding a logical argument can you you identify the premises or inputs to the argument?
6. Once you have identified the premises can you verify they are true?
7. If the premises are true then analyze the argument to see if the conclusion stated in the article really follows from them.
8. If the conclusion does not follow from the premises then reject the argument. If it does, then accept the argument.

If we keep reading and thinking, about ideas we agree with as well as ideas we don't agree with we might still end up on opposite sides in political debates but at least we will be on the same side in respecting - and searching for - the truth.

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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

Writing Like Hemingway

If you want to be good at something you should find the greatest masters of that thing and copy them. This morning I'm trying to learn writing from Hemingway.

He uses the simplest possible phrases, so simple some people might be embarrassed to write them, but then he connects them with "and's" to create a sense of motion, of sights and sounds and actions tumbling over each other, and he uses "all" to give a kind of child-like sense of wonder to some specific descriptive detail that overwhelms him, and then, sometimes, a certain word or sound is repeated and repeated and repeated like the rhyming in a poem or the drumbeat in a song.

Look at this description of the sights along the way as Jake Barnes and his friends head to Spain for trout fishing:

"We passed some lovely gardens and had a good look back at the town, and then we were out in the country, green and rolling, and the road climbing all the time. We passed lots of Basques with oxen, or cattle, hauling carts along the road, and nice farmhouses, low roofs, and all white-plastered. In the Basque country the land all looks very rich and green and the houses and villages look well-off and clean. Every village had a pelota court and on some of them kids were playing in the hot sun. There were signs on the walls of the churches saying it was forbidden to play pelota against them, and the houses in the villages had red tiled roofs, and then the road turned off and commenced to climb and we were going way up close along a hillside, with a valley below and hills stretched off back toward the sea. You couldn't see the sea. It was too far away. You could see only hills and more hills, and you knew where the sea was."

In this short passage there are at least 18 "and's" which help to create that tumbling effect of so many sensations coming in we can't keep up with them. The "all" in "all white-plastered" I think gives a sense of childish wonder to something in the scene that just overwhelms us and goes beyond our ability to describe. The rhyming of "green" and "clean," the repetition of "roofs" and more obviously "pelota" and most dramatically of all "see" and "sea" repeated six times and "hill" four times in the last four sentences give us that drumbeat feel that adds to the motion of the writing.

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A few pages later we find Hemingway using the same techniques like this:

"We climbed up and up and crossed another high Col and turned along it, and the road ran down to the right, and we saw a whole new range of mountains off to the south, all brown and baked-looking and furrowed in strange shapes."

Part of Hemingway's greatness is that he saw the world FRESH and was excited by it and described it clean and straight the way a very young and observant child might do if he were seeing the world for the very first time.

Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

Trump Doesn't Seem Very Smart After All

Is Donald Trump smart enough to be president? There is a lot of evidence suggesting the answer to that question is "No!"

An intelligent person can make distinctions between different things: true things and false things, for example, or good things and bad things. The ability to judge and evaluate is part of the definition of being smart. A person who can't examine two different things and see how they are similar and how they differ may have some wonderful qualities but it is certain that he or she is not very smart.

Trump has a lot of trouble making these kinds of distinctions, which suggests he is not operating at a very high level of intelligence, certainly not at the level we need in a president.

The most recent example of this came during an interview with Bill O'Reilly where Trump was asked if he respected Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and he said he did. O'Reilly came back by saying: “He’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.” Trump's response: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Trump has said so many outrageous things in the last 18 months that we have become jaded: we do not notice how shocking this answer really is. Trump is denying that there is any essential difference in the moral standing of the United States as compared to that of Russia. He can't really tell the difference between a country that is based on a belief in freedom and equal rights - the country of Washington and Lincoln, and another country that is based on dictatorship and terror - the country of Lenin and Stalin.

Now it is true that the United States has done bad things in the world. There has often been a terrible gap between the ideals of the United States and the reality. We have to keep working to improve and we have to keep moving in the direction of our best beliefs and principles, but for Trump to not see the difference between the United States, which has fought on the right side of history and Russia, which has fought on the wrong side, is very worrisome.

This strange and scary moral confusion we see in Trump has been seen before. In an interview during the election Joe Scarborough told Trump about Putin: “He kills journalists that don’t agree with him.” Trump's response: “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe."

For Trump there is simply no moral distinction between the United States and Russia! How can a man with that kind of moral blindness possibly make good decisions?

Other Republican leaders have no difficulty seeing the moral difference between the United States and Russia:

1. Senator Rubio tweeted: “When has a Democratic political activist been poisoned by the GOP or vice versa? We are not the same as Putin.”
2. Senator McConnell said that Putin is a "former KGB agent and a thug" and “I don’t think there’s any equivalency between the way Russians conduct themselves and the way the United States does."
3. Senator McCain agrees that Putin is "a murderer and a thug."

How come our president can't bring himself to speak with this same kind kind of moral clarity and moral intelligence?

There are many other examples of Trump's inability to make crucial distinctions. He has a hard time separating fact from fantasy, for example.

1. He spent years suggesting that President Obama wasn't really an American until suddenly reversing himself during the election.
2. In the final days of the campaign Trump raised the ludicrous possibility that Ted Cruz's father had been involved in the Kennedy assassination.
3. Now he claims that millions of people voted illegally last election day even though he has not presented any evidence to support such a claim.

How can a man with such limited ability to evaluate whether claims are true or false make good decisions for the country?

If Trump is too confused to distinguish between true and false, too baffled to separate good from evil, too lost in a fog to tell better from worse, then he is surely not smart enough to be president.

Check out this article for more on Trump's latest outrageous Putin comment: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/05/donald-trump-repeats-his-respect-for-killer-vladimir-putin

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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway