“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light…. supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way….
“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
- Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, April 23, 2020
This dangerous display of the boundless ignorance of POTUS 45 was also the day of my last class for the spring semester -- “Risk Management and Decision Making,” by ZOOM with a group of smart and curious law school students at CY Cergy Université in Paris.
That coincidence lets me appreciate and say thank you to my students – the experience was as rich for me as I hope it was useful and fulfilling for them. With brief context setting, it also tees up the punch line lesson offered here.
Our course examines how humans with all our foibles and limitations make decisions under complex and uncertain conditions. The contexts are broad – personal and social, but especially professional, business and political; the processes are often sub-optimal, and the outcomes frequently somewhere between poor and disastrous.
Topping a multi-disciplinary reading list is the pioneering work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose landmark 1974 paper essentially invented the field of behavioral economics – recently brought down for public accessibility by Kahneman’s own encyclopedic “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011) and Richard Thaler’s “Misbehaving” (2015).
Together we explore the many sources of recurrent but avoidable decision-making bias, flaws and error -- among them are herding, over-confidence, proximity bias, anchoring and frame blindness, hindsight, rationalizations, and leadership over-ride and disregard for non-confirming evidence.
Toward the end of the semester, the students take up with enthusiasm the Dunning-Kruger effect – that the less you know about a complex topic, the more likely you are to display your ignorance in flawed but over-confident actions and decisions that reveal – often with tragic and highly destructive consequences -- how little you actually know.
That trait is conspicuously displayed by POTUS 45. His egregious invitation to ingest or inject toxic household cleansers or internalize UV radiation is only the latest. Recall his allusions to nuclear weapons against hurricanes and wind turbines as cancer agents, a weather map re-drawn by sharpie, his challenges with the basics of aircraft catapults and domestic and international geography. The list seems endless of his stunning disregard and disrespect for technical, scientific and professional knowledge and expertise.
In an affectionate joint biography of Kahneman and Tversky, “The Undoing Project” (2016), author Michael Lewis includes a version of Kahneman’s single sly metric for intelligence: “the smarter you are, the faster you realize that Amos Tversky is smarter than you are.”
To their credit, my agile students will recognize that this maxim honoring the brilliance of Kahneman’s friend and collaborator can be inverted:
“The extent of someone’s stupidity can be measured -- how long does it takes to realize how stupid Donald Trump truly is?”
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The Undoing Project is a great book! Tversky and Kahneman were a fantastic team.
108 days left of Agent Orange's first term. Does anyone ever wonder if Anonymous is still in the White House? Remember in 2018, Anonymous wrote, "many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office." Oh by the way, isn't it great how leverage can keep a stock market going? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html
Posted by: Lally Doerrer | July 21, 2020 at 02:22 AM