Some Rules of Thumb

 I was going to write some more on Trump, and what I think is going on post-election... but in typical fashion everyone's assessments are all over the place.

So I figured I'd write about some of my personal rules of thumb and shortcuts for evaluating information.

I suppose I ought to give all the usual caveats - I don't have any special access, I'm basing it off the same sort of news articles and social media commentary that anybody can read. I might be wrong. 

These guidelines are.... well. Writing them makes them seem more solid and rule-like than they are in my head. I actually haven't thought that deeply about them? They're things I've picked up here and there, and I'm probably missing some of the complexity with what I write. Don't make them out to be more than they are. Oh, and the whole point of 'rules of thumb' and 'guidelines' and 'heuristics' is that they're not 100% certain. They're shortcuts in thinking that work well enough to be useful, but you have to be aware of the loopholes and caveats when using them. I'm probably not going to go into that in greater detail because it'd make this post lose (even more) coherence.

So. Right. On with it...

Honor Harrington, a science fiction character, used surprise to great effect in her various space navy battles. And surprise often doesn't come because there was absolutely no warning whatsoever. 

It comes because people ignore, dismiss, or fail to notice the warnings they receive. 

This is rather well known in the real world. Nations spend a lot of time and resources keeping tabs on each other, and the effort it takes to mobilize your forces and prepare them for battle is noticeable. 'Surprise' comes from making people misinterpret the signals they see. 

The classic example is 'training exercises'. Training exercises are a convenient excuse to prepare for war while providing a cover story that keeps your enemies from reacting to the threat in time. It's a rather well known possibility, though, which is why most nations monitor any sort of 'training exercise' very carefully. Especially ones close to international borders, which makes it hard to use it for genuine surprise any more.

We also have a very hard time evaluating threats when our emotions are engages. Particularly when we really, really hope something is true - or are very, very afraid that it's true. 

That's kind of how con artists and scams work. "Do this and you can get a million dollars," and people will pay that $200 fee because they want to believe the scam is real. "The IRS says you owe another $1000", and people pay the scammers because they're afraid it's true.

So what do you do when you can tell you're not thinking clearly? 

Recognizing when that happens is the first step. If you aren't aware that you're emotionally compromised, it's hard to do much about it. 

But... then what?

That's, well. Complicated. If I had to put it into words, I'd probably draw on my military intelligence training. I'll use a scenario I gave before - you're trying to defend a location, and the enemy is on the other side of a mountain. There are at least two different routes through the mountain and you don't know which one they'll use. 

You don't need to spend all your time debating which one is right or which one is wrong... 

What you do is you think about how you'll know what the enemy actually does. Maybe there's a location where they have to take either the right fork or the left fork. Or there's a place where they're pretty much locked into one of the choices. So you try to find a way of monitoring those places. Set up sensors, or looking posts, or plan to have a UAV fly over the area at various times. Whatever. The point is to make sure you have enough warning about whatever their doing to react.

In the same way, it doesn't actually matter whether your hope or fear is correct. What matters is thinking 'what sorts of signs are there that would let me know?'. And then looking for them.

It's a little bit harder to apply that to people than mountain passes, but that's the sort of mindset I'd look for. I also don't think you have to manufacture or create the scenarios that will let you know... because if you're around anybody for a long enough period of time, something will probably crop up on it's own.

It's more about really listening, and observing. Everything people do gives you data points, pieces of a puzzle that you can start fitting together.

Not that the puzzle is ever truly complete! That's one of the fascinating things about people - you can learn 90-95% of them within a couple of months, but you can spend your entire lifetime learning the other 5-10%. And still never really know.  (As an example - when I was an adult I learned my Mom liked giraffes. We'd had this giant paper giraffe when I was a pre-schooler, but I'd always associated it with my sister - who also liked giraffes. Mom mentioned that we'd had the giraffe because she was the one who liked them. This, ofc, meant that for years we were all finding and giving her various giraffe gifts. And when she died, we had a table full of them where we asked people attending the funeral to go ahead and take one. In her memory, and also to find homes for all the giraffes. I've got a few giraffe things around the house to remind me of her.... but the point was that I hadn't known that about my  own mother for years.)

The funny thing is, most people make up their minds about someone and then reject any of the puzzle pieces that don't fit. 

Again - most surprises don't truly come with no warning. They come from dismissing, ignoring, and failing to pay attention to the warnings we actually receive.

When someone does something that we don't expect? When we have that urge to explain it away or justify it or find some way of squaring that behavior with the image we've built of them in our heads?

It might be time to revise your mental image of who that person is. 

This can be both good and bad, btw. Sometimes I revise my personal assessments up. Sometimes down. Generally it's neither good or bad, just fleshes people out a bit more and makes them more three-dimensional. Like 'oh, okay. When they're tired and upset they can get a bit snippy. I'd never seen them act like that before, good to know.'

Like I said, don't make any of this out to be more than it is... and there's plenty of room for discussion on just what is considered a signal, and how much it should matter. (Like - how important is it to know how a potential love interest treats the waitstaff at a restaurant? How much does it matter that they tell a white lie to make someone feel better? Signals, and how much they matter, are a very personal judgment call.)

Continued Musings

I'm not sure how to clarify my thoughts on this one without going into my own personal rules of thumb.

For example - I don't know anyone who wakes up in the morning and says "I'm going to be an evil person today".  Seems sort of self-evident when you put it like that, but the implications are deep.  That means, for example, that climate-change deniers are not saying to themselves "I'm going to pretend that climate change is not an issue so that I can make money, and screw everyone else!"

Any counter-argument that assumes they are greedy and deliberately lying will not be very effective, since it doesn't match their own experience as to why they  believe what they do, and why the people they know came to the same conclusions.  You can call them names all you want, but you're pretty much just preaching to the choir, and maybe even doing some virtue signaling or trying to overwhelm the opposition with a show of strength.  You are not persuading anyone to change sides, and you're not really engaging in debate.

Given my own experiences (with conservative and liberal relatives of various stripes), I would say they are sincere in their beliefs and are not malicious or deliberately hurtful.

If everyone is trying to do the right thing - in their own minds at least - and aren't trying to screw everyone else over, then why do we have such wildly different opinions on things?

That's where it gets complicated, of course.  Some of it has to do with our tendency to confuse what's good for us with what's good for everyone.  Some of it has to do with life experiences, and the lack of familiarity with what life is like for those are different (i.e. living in a bubble.  How can someone who is rich, and surrounded by rich people, understand what life is like for those who are poor?  And vice versa, but we generally aren't as concerned with that.)

And then there are those who, for whatever reason, have learned to justify less than ideal behavior.  There are people who deliberately lie, cheat, and steal.  I doubt they think of it that way themselves, though.  Like the con-artist's code, they find a way of making it seem like everyone else deserves what they get.

Finally, there are those who believe that the ends justify the means.  The ones who don't see themselves winning in an open and honest market of ideas (either because they believe their opponents won't let them, or because they believe people are too dumb to know what's good for them) and basically will justify doing whatever it takes to win in the face of it.  These are, in some ways, the most dangerous ones.  You see it with terrorists, who believe murder and violence is justified if it leads to their honorable goal (anarchy, Catholic rule, Islamic Caliphate, etc.)

Yet that same mentality can be used to justify less violent acts.  Like spreading misleading information.  Conducting a character assassination.  Manipulating public opinion with twitter bots, paid internet trolls, or a well-placed person in the media industry.

I don't know how often political adversaries have convinced themselves of their arguments first (and are simply spreading things they believe in, as well), versus cynically manipulating people with arguments they don't personally believe.  IMHO the former fits in with human biases of one sort or another, whereas the second is more problematic.