10. Government of Blind Leading the Blind
To believe you and your preferred leaders have no biases is to be for electing a government of the blind leading the blind. Our best brain science tells us that all humans, including—and sometimes especially—leaders, are fallible and biased and susceptible to blind spots, because of how our brains work. In judging erring leaders, we should be more forgiving of those who have shown that they have a more honest relationship with their mistakes, and who have proven that they use bias-balancing mechanisms in their policymaking.
Science has relearned what many wisdom traditions have long taught—that certain kinds of certainty certainly increase the risk of making serious errors. Overconfidence in your own correctness, a particular kind of pride, hubris, or vainglory, as the saying goes, goeth before a fall. We must be ever vigilant against signs of such bias in our leaders and the organizations they work in. Ask yourself: Does the way they make decisions increase or decrease their susceptibility to their own biases? Do they allow experience to educate and alter their assumptions? Or do they cling to doctrines despite data demonstrating that they don’t work? These questions make clear a key asymmetry between the two main political parties.
In this sense, the Republican Party has shown itself to be too true to its beliefs by allowing dogma to trump data. They continue to preach their free-market faith in the effects of lower taxes and lighter regulations, in the face of the fact that such policies didn’t deliver the promised economic benefits the last time they were tried. Those policies did, however, deliver an increased share of the national economy to the richest, while weakening the rest of “the people.” John Maynard Keynes once said, "When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?" Applying Keynes’s question to the Republicans leaves only two possibilities: They are betting on their blind faith, or they want to extend the “not for the people” affects their policies achieved before.
Unlike the GOP, the Democratic Party has demonstrated that it can counterbalance its biases. Democrats regularly seek solutions across the aisle and add them into their policies, so much so that Ezra Klein, writing in the New York Review of Books, described Obama’s 2012 platform as consisting of “Romney’s health care… Gingrich’s environmental policies… and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rates.” Klein also says that the GOP has tried to tarnish these as “the greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx sat down for a beer with Friedrich Engels.” This is a particularly untrustworthy and treacherous twist. Rather than be seen as willing to work constructively with Democrats, the GOP seems to prefer to shoot itself, and the country, in the foot, for the sake of gaining a “political” advantage in the game of getting elected. They put seeming different from Democrats, by repudiating ideas they created and once championed, ahead of advancing policies they previously told us were good for the country.
It’s an especially foolish error to fail to hold politicians and their parties responsible not only for specific lies and the problematic outcomes of particular policies, but also for the general processes they have demonstrated they use. These days, if you’re inclined to support GOP policies, voting for Democrats will get you many of the better, less blind-spotted GOP ideas.
Just as to err is human, to be biased is to be human. But to forgive either, if done unselectively, is a political error. To paraphrase Groucho Marx on biases, who are you going to believe, me or your lying biases?
Science has relearned what many wisdom traditions have long taught—that certain kinds of certainty certainly increase the risk of making serious errors. Overconfidence in your own correctness, a particular kind of pride, hubris, or vainglory, as the saying goes, goeth before a fall. We must be ever vigilant against signs of such bias in our leaders and the organizations they work in. Ask yourself: Does the way they make decisions increase or decrease their susceptibility to their own biases? Do they allow experience to educate and alter their assumptions? Or do they cling to doctrines despite data demonstrating that they don’t work? These questions make clear a key asymmetry between the two main political parties.
In this sense, the Republican Party has shown itself to be too true to its beliefs by allowing dogma to trump data. They continue to preach their free-market faith in the effects of lower taxes and lighter regulations, in the face of the fact that such policies didn’t deliver the promised economic benefits the last time they were tried. Those policies did, however, deliver an increased share of the national economy to the richest, while weakening the rest of “the people.” John Maynard Keynes once said, "When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?" Applying Keynes’s question to the Republicans leaves only two possibilities: They are betting on their blind faith, or they want to extend the “not for the people” affects their policies achieved before.
Unlike the GOP, the Democratic Party has demonstrated that it can counterbalance its biases. Democrats regularly seek solutions across the aisle and add them into their policies, so much so that Ezra Klein, writing in the New York Review of Books, described Obama’s 2012 platform as consisting of “Romney’s health care… Gingrich’s environmental policies… and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rates.” Klein also says that the GOP has tried to tarnish these as “the greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx sat down for a beer with Friedrich Engels.” This is a particularly untrustworthy and treacherous twist. Rather than be seen as willing to work constructively with Democrats, the GOP seems to prefer to shoot itself, and the country, in the foot, for the sake of gaining a “political” advantage in the game of getting elected. They put seeming different from Democrats, by repudiating ideas they created and once championed, ahead of advancing policies they previously told us were good for the country.
It’s an especially foolish error to fail to hold politicians and their parties responsible not only for specific lies and the problematic outcomes of particular policies, but also for the general processes they have demonstrated they use. These days, if you’re inclined to support GOP policies, voting for Democrats will get you many of the better, less blind-spotted GOP ideas.
Just as to err is human, to be biased is to be human. But to forgive either, if done unselectively, is a political error. To paraphrase Groucho Marx on biases, who are you going to believe, me or your lying biases?