Regardless of your feelings about the election, inauguration, or national politics in general, they do make for great settings in which to explore the classic themes. No, not Hope and Change and Unity and Freedom, those are themes for Presidents, not Overcoming Bias. I mean the ways in which our monkey brains lead us into messes, and how sober reflection can lead us out.
First, IOZ nicely captures why Obama's economic program is counterproductive:
The central conceit of Obama's inauguration and the crisis-wracked program he began to lay out is that given our troubled times, we must put aside difference in favor of "unity" and seek common purpose in collective action. Subsumed beneath an overwrought paean to national character and responsibility is the notion that only through centralization can crises of such magnitude be met and bested. This is precisely the wrong lesson to draw. Each of our current crises, whether imperial overreach or economic calamities, are at root problems of scale. If you really wanted more a more flexible, resilient, and self-sustaining economy, you would seek means to increase regional and local enterprise at the expense of State-subsidized national and transnational corporations; you would notice, for instance, that most small banks are doing just fine, and you'd let Citigroup go belly-up.
It would be foolish to lay this at Obama's door – I think Hillary would do worse, and quite possibly McCain as well. The erroneous focus on scale and centralization and "pulling together in times of crisis" is a general human irrationality which politicians specialize in catering to.
Like many (?most?) irrationalities, it is likely a relic of our tribal past. In the ancestral environment, pulling together to help the tribe in a time of crisis was the best way for an individual to survive. In our modern environment, however, we are often led to identify with an entire nation as our "tribe", and it turns out that this is an inefficiently large group for most types of collective action. We evaluate the prospect of unity with ancient mental modules optimized for Dunbarian tribes, and that sphexishness leads us into disastrous collective ventures.
Continue reading "Tribal Biases and the Inauguration" »
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