Living in a Fantasy World

Fantasy can be fun. Movies, books etc. that show life outside what we live on a daily basis entertain us. They are especially attractive to children who do not yet fully understand the world we live in. Who among us, when young, did not think that maybe we could learn to fly like Peter Pan or to use magic to get what we wanted?

That is normal for children. Adults however, if they want to live reasonable lives, must face reality. Tinker Bell will not sprinkle pixie dust on us, nor will we find any magic wand capable of creating the food or anything else we want. As we grow up, we should learn that we get what we need by understanding reality and working with it, not by trying to change that reality – or worse, by pretending that reality is different from what it really is.

Sadly, many “adults” today do not seem to understand those simple facts, and their fantasies do more than their share of damage. We have just seen this in Belgium as Islamic fanatics murdered people at the airport and a metro station. Much of Europe has swallowed the line that, if only treated kindly, those fanatics will become good, law-abiding people. That is an attractive fantasy, but reality refuses to go along. If those European rulers were to look at the record they would see that the fanatics have never changed their goals nor their willingness to use violence to achieve those goals. Their pixie dust is an illusion. Those fanatics believe that they have a divine mandate to impose Sharia law on the world, and they are willing to die to reach that goal. No amount of kind welcoming will change that.

Nor is our U.S. president immune to such magical belief. He wants to admit Islamic “refugees” by the thousands, but offers no way to separate the dangerous potential terrorists from the real refugees. That kind of magical thinking gets people killed.

But why do we have leaders living in Fantasyland? In a democratic system there is an obvious reason: too many voters live in Fantasyland, voters who think government has some magical solution to all our problems. They fail to notice that:

Government has no magical source of goods or services to provide to the people. It only has what it takes from those people.

Government has no source of wisdom beyond that of ordinary people. Imperfect people select government functionaries from among the imperfect people actually available in this imperfect world.

Government has no greater integrity than that of those imperfect people who select other imperfect people to hold power.

Voters must think reality, not fantasy. Our security, our economy, and our freedom depend on it. We must reject the pie in the sky fantasy that many politicians promise. Those promises may sound attractive, but the real world rejects them.

Perception vs. Reality, Part 3

Related to fearing the wrong things is the mistake of giving unwarranted influence to the wrong things. When Gerald Ford was president of the United States he went skiing a few times. Sometimes he fell while skiing. Reporters and comedians, many of whom probably couldn't ski a bunny slope, made a big deal about how his “lack of coordination” made him a poor president. One late night comedian got a lot of mileage out of a claim that Ford could not walk and chew gum at the same time.

Nobody mentioned exactly how President Ford's alleged coordination problems interfered with his ability to make good decisions as president. Would the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time have solved the country's economic problems? Reduced crime? If the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time was so important, how did a president who could not walk at all get us through most of World War II? (In fact, Ford was a former college football player and one of the more athletic presidents in U.S. history. His falls while skiing would not have been unusual for most skiers.)

Ford's alleged clumsiness had nothing to do with the characteristics needed in a good president. The people paying attention to that were allowing emphatic trifles to distract them from the real issues.

Physical appearance is another characteristic given too much influence in our society. Starting with the 1960 presidential elections, television has played a major role in United States politics, and with that came an emphasis on appearance. Kennedy was good looking and defeated Nixon. Then later Nixon, to win the presidency shaved twice a day since his heavy beard gave a bad appearance on TV. There is, as far as I know, no connection between good looks and good judgment. Yet the better-looking candidate has an advantage in our elections, at least if he is a man. People often think of a man's looks as reflective of his ability. The opposite may be true among female candidates since many people think of beautiful women as mindless. Both perceptions are wrong. We should try to judge politicians on their honesty and ability, not on their looks.

Finding reality in spite of our perception can be difficult. I have touched only on some of the more obvious problems. Other perceptual difficulties can be more subtle. We've all seen optical illusions such as the Mueller-Lyer figure which has two lines of identical length. The only difference is the figures on the ends of the lines. One line looks longer than the other. You can look it up if you're not familiar with this, sorry I can't get a good representation to appear in this blog.

We also have mental illusions that cause poor perception. These are just as prevalent as the optical illusions. For example, suppose you are tossing a coin. It is a fair coin and you are tossing it fairly. You know that the probability of heads on any given toss is 50%. It has just come up heads four times in a row. What is the probability that it will come up tails next toss? We have a natural inclination to expect a string of tails to balance out the number of times it has come up heads. That is wrong and is known as the “gambler's fallacy.” In fact the probability of heads is 50%, regardless of previous results. There is no cosmic law forcing it to come up heads and tails an equal number of times. It is a normal statistical fluctuation to occasionally get several heads in a row. In fact there is a 12.5% chance of getting the same result four times in a row with a fair coin toss! Put another way, if a large number of people each toss a fair coin four times, about 12.5% of them will get the same result all four times.

Cognitive scientists have been studying such mental illusions for several years now. What they have learned can be helpful as we try to overcome our perceptual problems. One book on the subject is Inevitable illusions by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini.1

Impressions can be wrong. The wise person will make decisions based on reality, not perception and external appearance. We will serve ourselves well in all aspects of life if we just take a little time and ask ourselves, “Am I looking at what is important, or am I allowing spectacular trivialities to divert my attention from the less obvious but more important issues? Does my perception of this situation really reflect reality, or is there something important I’m missing?”

1Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Inevitable Illusions, How Mistakes of Reason Rule our Minds, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, 1994 Be aware that there are some mathematical errors in the book. I consider the chapter on Bayes law to be particularly bad.

Perception vs. Reality, Part 2

Last time I described a case in which a young woman received treatment for her obvious injuries while her boyfriend died because his injuries were not obvious. The perception was that she needed medical attention while he did not. That erroneous perception cost his life. Most perception problems are not so severe but still cause trouble.

We have a tendency to fear the relatively benign. Mice, spiders, air travel, public speaking, tight places. All these and more can generate fears out of proportion to any danger they present. Appropriate caution is good, but we should avoid devitalizing our lives by overreaction to less significant dangers. How many people avoid visiting relatives because it's too far to drive and they fear flying, even though flying is much safer? How many miss the joy of visiting natural sites for fear of harmless animals? Overcoming those fears can make life more fulfilling and enjoyable.

Likewise, we often tend to fear the unfamiliar, people from a different culture, strange places, new technology, etc. That causes us to miss the enjoyment we might have if we learn of those cultures or technologies and partake of the best aspects of them. Worse, such fears lead to bigotry and class or racial warfare. That is also one reason for the widespread fear of anything “nuclear” or involving “radiation.” While radiation can be harmful, the general reaction to it is all out of proportion to the actual danger. In fact “nuclear” and “radiation” are witch words, (cf
http://hallillywhite.blogspot.com/2010/04/godwin-and-witch.html).

Of course these fears reside in the emotional part of the brain and it is not always easy to allow reason to overrule emotion and normal fears. This is especially true when reason tells us we can do something unnatural such as jumping out of an airplane. OK, I admit it. I used to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. Back when I wore Uncle Sam’s funny green clothes I was a paratrooper. It was fun and gave me extra pay.

My non-airborne friends used to claim I was crazy to do such a thing. The brigade commander, also a paratrooper, said something similar. He said we had to have something different about our minds to allow us to perform such an unnatural act...

I suspect our commander was right, we did have something different in our mentalities. If so, such a difference is not all bad. It allowed us to do something unnatural but not really dangerous. Most of us knew that the real danger was the trip to the airport, then back from the drop zone. For that we had to travel on the highway with cars and trucks whizzing by in the other direction. However, for humans, highway travel is an extension of our natural travel on land. Jumping out of airplanes is quite unnatural. What I did as a paratrooper was allow my intellect to overrule my intuitive fear. I knew that the parachute jump itself was statistically very safe. In fact, in all the jumps I did, many of which involved hundreds of paratroopers, I am not aware of any serious injuries, much less deaths.

We skew our thinking if we insist on classifying the natural as safe and the unnatural as dangerous. Hemlock is natural, and so are death cap mushrooms.

This problem cuts both ways. First we can overlook some real dangers in such things as food and medical products. Second, we deny ourselves, and sometimes others, the opportunity to do things that appear dangerous but in fact are relatively safe.

A friend once lost a family member to this skewed thinking. His father was a private pilot and often flew the family on vacations. The problem was that my friend’s mother did not like to fly high; she felt safer close to the ground. She insisted that her husband stay as low as he could. While such a feeling may be natural, that perception is quite wrong. The reality is that flying higher allows a pilot more time to recover if anything goes wrong. Something did go wrong over Wyoming’s Wind River Range. With no time to recover, the plane went down, killing one and seriously injuring two more. The forth person aboard was in also injured but was able to make it out and notify authorities.

That is of course an extreme example, but people make such inappropriate decisions regularly. Occasionally it costs lives; more often it costs time or enjoyment. It is common for people to drive to their destination in order to avoid flying, even though air travel is much safer than driving. The perception that flying is dangerous comes from the fact that we can’t do it naturally, and from the spectacular aspect of an airplane crash. Even the crash of a small plane will generate more news coverage than an automobile accident with the same number of casualties.

The type of misperception mentioned above tends to be widely shared. Most people tend to think of snipers as more dangerous than traffic and airplanes as more dangerous than cars. However there are individual misperceptions as well, many of which develop into phobias. The woman who wanted her airplane to stay low may have been suffering from acrophobia. Phobias are characterized by unreasonable fears, either fearing something harmless, or excessive fear of something that is a potential danger. The subject of phobias is generally beyond the scope of this article; their treatment is the province of certified therapists. However I would like to mention that those who suffer from phobias should be careful not to impose the same fears on their children. This takes effort, but no good parent wants to interfere with a fulfilling life for his or her children. If necessary, the parent should work with a therapist to avoid passing a phobia on to the children.

If we match our perspective to reality we will have safer, more enjoyable lives.

Perception vs. Reality, Part 1

We must never become so busy slapping at mosquitoes that we walk into the quicksand.
Richard L. Evans

The young woman was a bloody mess, writhing and screaming in agony. She had been riding behind her boyfriend on a motorcycle, wearing a bikini when the bike crashed. Her legs, arms and torso were covered with scrapes, scratches and ground in dirt. Bystanders, urged on by the distraught boyfriend, tried to help. The young man appeared fine; he had been wearing protective clothing.

At the hospital emergency room workers cleansed, disinfected and bandaged her wounds. They did a good job and she recovered completely... In fact she was able to attend the funeral of her boyfriend. The accident ruptured his spleen and he died from internal bleeding. His injury was neither obvious nor particularly painful. It was only fatal.

It is a fact of life: The attention we pay to an event is seldom related to its importance. The young woman’s wounds were dramatic; her boyfriend’s unseen injury was deadly. Spectacular events, celebrities, and scare-mongering distract us from less noticeable but more important issues. Modern life conspires to focus our attention on the trivial. We are constantly faced with the equivalent of an obnoxious male mosquito buzzing around our ears. While he distracts us, the female quietly sneaks in for a sip of blood.

Focusing on the spectacular hurts us two ways:

1. Distracted by the trivial, we ignore the important.

2. Fearing the benign, we devitalize our lives.

Residents of the Washington, D.C. area of the United States will long remember October 2002. For nearly a month they lived in fear as a sniper shot thirteen people, apparently at random. Adults, children, Blacks, Whites, men, women. Nobody was immune. News reports across the country and around the world trumpeted the danger. School recesses were held indoors. Football games were moved to secret locations with no spectators. Shoppers hurried through parking lots, looking over their shoulders. Nobody felt safe.

Finally two suspects were caught and the reign of terror ended. Children again played outdoors, much to the relief of parents and teachers. Everybody felt much safer. That “increased safety” was a misperception. While the danger from the snipers was gone, traffic accidents, street crime etc. continued to kill and injure people. The difference was that the press paid little attention to accidents and street crime.

Snipers are big news; they get a lot of media attention. However in any large metropolitan area accidents and street crime kill and injure people every day, drawing little if any press attention. Yet the risk of being shot by a sniper was insignificant compared to the risks we all run in our daily lives.

The terror those snipers created is an example of an all too human tendency. We fear spectacular but unlikely dangers but give no thought to common, often worse, hazards. Yes, the criminals did murder at least eleven people and wounded two others. However, the chance of them shooting any one person out of the millions living in that area was miniscule. In fact, the death rate from all causes probably dropped during their reign of terror. People were staying home, not exposing themselves to traffic accidents and other hazards. Common hazards kill and injure many more people than the snipers ever did.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

News outlets in particular distort our perception by emphasizing the spectacular and unusual. Unless a celebrity is involved, it really isn’t very big news when a traffic accident kills a driver, or a drug overdose kills an addict. A sniper or an airplane crash has much greater news value. Because of this, our perception of danger is often warped.

Snipers, airplane crashes, terrorist threats all get our attention even though any one of us has almost no chance of becoming a victim of those dangers. Meanwhile, we continue to travel on our roads without a second thought, often even driving when we are tired or under the influence of intoxicants. Warped perceptions both blind us to the real dangers of what we may think of as safe, and cause us to fear things that are not really very dangerous. Only by using our intellect to decide what's really important can we overcome this problem.

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Giving Orders to Nature

The Indiana legislature once nearly passed a bill that would have made the value of pi to be 3.2.* Now it would be nice if they could really change the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle to something so simple. It would be much easier to work with than the actual irrational number whose digits extend indefinitely. School work would be easier as would many endeavors in science and engineering. The problem of course is that Nature pays no attention to laws decreed by mere humans.

We might pass laws about the value of pi, about what we will allow gravity to do, about how nasty germs are not allowed to infect us. We could print those laws in books and distribute the books widely. Nature, however, would ignore those laws and we have not the slightest ability to enforce them. The effect of such laws on Nature would be exactly zero.

However any such laws would have an effect on us. Buildings constructed with the incorrect value of pi would not be reliable. Anyone trusting gravity to obey human law might take a nasty fall. Those who trust human law instead of good health practices would get sick.

Human law cannot overrule Nature. However attempts to overrule Nature can harm us.

Now all that is too obvious. Why should you worry about such things when there are no proposals to pass such laws today?

Are you sure there are no attempts to legislate Nature today? Actually there are, though the laws to be changed are laws of economics and human behavior rather than of science. The most flagrant current example is in Greece but there are attempts all over the world to legislate Nature.

The Greek problem is that many voters and public employees seem to think that their government can just give them what they want, ignoring where that comes from. Over half of the Greeks employed are on the government payroll. Their contracts call for great pay, benefits, and retirement packages. Furthermore they cannot be fired. More and more of them are becoming eligible to retire, plus the number of government employees who must be paid has grown. Those “entitlements” now exceed what the government can afford. The results are predictable.

Greece is so deeply in trouble that the European Union has to bail it out. Of course the EU doesn't want an indefinite commitment to pay for Greek ineptitude so the bail-out comes with strings attached. Greece must get its financial house in order, cutting back expenses to match resources. That is quite a reasonable demand. Without such measures the Greek expenses will just continue to grow and consume more and more EU resources.

How are those people reacting? Are they facing the fact that somebody has to produce the compensation they claim they should receive? Of course not, they are rioting and demanding a continuation of their benefits. They are demanding a change to economic law quite as impossible as the Indiana legislature's change to the value of pi.

What the Greek rioters ignore is the fact that economics is not about money, it is about goods and services. Governments may be able to create money by decree but they cannot do the same with goods and services. No human law will cause wheat to grow faster, clothing or housing to magically appear, or medical facilities and personnel to become available without cost to somebody.

The fact is that neither Greece nor any other country can long spend beyond its means. Spending on credit can be fun for a while but when the bill comes due the fun ends.

Nor is Greece the only country guilty of such profligacy. In fact the US has been borrowing and spending for years, mortgaging our future to China and the oil sheiks. Our creditors loan us money only because they see the probability of a good return on their investment. In general they do not like us and will happily sink us if it appears to be to their benefit to do so. Is this the kind of people we want to trust with our future?

Sadly the U.S. is following the same path as did Greece, they are just a bit farther down that path than we are. We've funded everything that seems like a good idea, without regard to ability to pay the entire bill. What will happen when the chickens of our excessive spending come home to roost? Will we continue to demand that the government ignore the laws of economics?

Or is there a better way? What if we started now to recognize the laws of Nature? To realize that economic laws are just as immutable as the laws of physics? To live within our means, even when we cannot fund everything we want to do?

The choice is ours. So are the consequences.

*The actual bill is somewhat more complicated and in fact intended for a different end. However even the simplified version here described is adequate for my purpose.