Suppose you have a set of cards, each with a letter on one side and a number on the other. There are four cards on the table in front of you with the following showing: C, 3, F, 7. If we demand that any card with an F on one side has a 3 on the other, which cards do you have to turn over to assure that it's true?
Many people get this wrong. They know they have to turn over the F because if it doesn't have a 3 on the back then the requirement fails. But some also flip the 3 looking for another F. In fact the other card to turn is the 7, since an F there would also fail. The value on the back of the C and 3 cards don't matter. Deceptively simple tests like this make pseudo-intellectuals say arrogant things about how ordinary people can't reason. In fact everyone has a powerful ability to reason, sometimes intuitive and untrained but nonetheless efficient and affective. Given a few nudges in the right direction these natural talents can make hard problems seem like child's play.
The puzzle above above can be transformed into a logically identical problem that everyone can solve without even thinking. Suppose you're in a bar and you can see either how old someone is or what they are drinking. The four people you see are: a root beer drinker, an old man, a whiskey drinker, and a teenager. The rule is that if someone is drinking alcohol they must be 21 or older. Which people do you have to "turn over" (either checking what they are drinking or checking IDs) to assure the rule is being followed? The answer is obvious: the whiskey drinker and the teenager. The other two are irrelevant.
People who mistakenly turn over the 3 in the card-turning puzzle would never dream of asking the old man what he's drinking in the bar, even though the two actions are logically identical. The problem is that the human brain is not a generalized problem-solving device. Instead it consists of what neuroscientists call "modules" which, while very powerful, are fairly specialized in their abilities. The trick is getting the problem into a form which allows the specialized modules to operate.
Notoriously lazy thinkers, mathematicians always look for shortcuts to turn hard problems into easy ones. For example, proving that a particular type of operation is NP-complete (difficult for computers) is hard to do in general, but a standard shortcut is to transform the problem into one that has already been proven in the laborious way by someone else. Often this is something from graph theory, like node coloring or "the traveling salesman," since these provide convenient visual metaphors informing the construction. The human visual cortex has remarkable computational ability, able to detect complex patterns and relationships even in imagined scenes. Being able to visualize a math problem is often the first step toward solving it.
Visual stimuli come at us in real time and have to be resolved quickly. We cannot carefully and rationally consider if the outline we detect is a lady or a tiger; we sense it instantly and feel the answer in our gut. Moral problems have the same kind of urgency. If we wait too long to decide if we have been gypped, or if we react with insufficient force, the moment passes and we lose the opportunity to make an appropriate response. Given the time-sensitivity of detection and response, it makes sense that we have brain "circuits" dedicated to those functions.
Among the obvious modules for vision, movement and language, the evidence indicates that we have an innate capacity for social morality -- in particular detecting cheaters.
This is illustrated by the example. Starting from a purely symbolic problem, it was first transformed into a visual one (card flipping) which made it somewhat easier. The real gain was made by transforming the abstract puzzle into a question about social conformance. Given a reasonable rule that everyone has to follow and a set of examples, we can easily determine if the rule is being broken or not.
Many of these transformations are built into our culture. The golden rule, for example, can be thought of as a simple heuristic -- a problem-solving tool -- for transforming a hard problem into an easier one. It's hard to know, in any given situation, the right way to treat another person. The golden rule proposes that instead of trying to solve it directly we transform it into an easier one. Just imagine yourself in the same situation and see what you would want, then do something at least that good for the other person. It's not foolproof, but it provides a kind of minimum standard of behavior that even small children can readily solve. For adults with well-formed opinions about what we think is right for ourselves, the golden rule acts as a test of decency that rises with our abilities to think out the consequences of our own actions.
We have been told again and again since November, albeit by parrot-like pundits, that the GOP is the party that appeals to people with strong morals. As evidence we are presented a small handful of fringe social issues. These have some emotional power, especially among a specific subculture who have been perverted to respond to these issues and very little else. But the moral equation has been overloaded and stretched to incredulity. In fact the Democratic platform is far more genuinely moral across the broad spectrum of political policy issues. Turning the tables on the GOP, it appears, may be a matter of transforming the perception of the raw inputs in a way that people's natural moral computations can operate correctly.
Morality, like all other processes of the human nervous system, is based on computation. Computation requires taking what we perceive and casting it into the types of problems that we are good at solving. There's been a lot of focus in politics lately in trying to appeal to voter's emotions. Positive campaigns appeals to their hopes, negative campaigns to their fears. I think there's enormous potential in appealing to their reason. Not the abstract reason of logic and mathematics, but the gut-felt rationality of clear moral conclusions. The key is providing the right heuristics for decoding the political landscape into everyday moral situations. Not a trivial task, but one which could be perhaps a way out of a more and more intractable morass.
- jack*
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