Most people struggle to grasp simple logical thinking and usually botch it. But you should go beyond simple logical thinking and recognize the universality of multi-causality. This in turn gets us into all sorts of complexities — complexities that you must be able to cope with.
Most people think that logical thinking is comprised of simple, direct sequences of syllogisms, like this:
Mathematics and pure logic are the only fields in which this works. Causation in the real world looks more like this:
Most events have multiple causes, and some of the causes are more important than others. In the example above, Factor E is the most important factor; a simple-minded analysis would state that Event #1 was caused by Factor E. But other factors are at work, and although they might not be as important as E, sometimes it is unwise to ignore them.
Here’s an example of multi-causality at work. My wife is about to leave for work, when I stop her and remind her not to forget to pick up the milk on the way home. On her way to work, a drunk driver runs a red light and hits her car. I feel guilt; had I not stopped her, she would have passed through the intersection before the drunk driver arrived and she would have been fine.
Wrong! The situation is represented by the diagram immediately above. The primary reason for the accident was the fact that the driver was drunk; that’s Factor E. My reminding her to get the milk was like Factor A. Factor B might be the fact that she was held up by a slow truck; C that another car swerved in front of the drunk driver just before he entered the intersection, and so forth.
At this point the guilty mind interrupts. “All of this is true, but the undeniable fact remains that, had I not stopped her, the accident would not have happened. Hence this simple logical relationship applies:
I stopped her to remind her to get the milk —> the accident occurred
The flaw in this reasoning is the fact that it’s standard boolean thinking: simple black-and-white stuff. A proper analysis would be probabilistic, not boolean. What’s the probability that making her 30 seconds late would cause an accident? It’s exactly the same as the probability that NOT making her 30 seconds late would cause an accident. Far and away the largest probabilistic factor comes from the fact that the driver was drunk. The overall probability of the accident is a function of each of the individual probabilities that went into it. My probabilistic contribution was microscopically tiny and in fact was temporally symmetric — based on the information available to me, being 30 seconds early was just as dangerous as being 30 seconds late.
It’s entirely too easy to fail to properly estimate the magnitude of differening causal factors. Here are a few examples I have seen just recently:
The dangers of asteroid impacts
People are fascinated by the prospect of an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out civilization. The odds of this are infinitesimal. The last serious impact was 65 million years ago. We’ve had about five mass extinctions in the last 300 million years. If every one of these was due to an asteroid strike (not likely), then the odds of an asteroid strike in any gi von century are about one in half a million. There have been two small strikes in the last 100 years: the Tunguska event and the Chelyabinsk meteor. Both struck in remote areas and neither did much damage. Even had they struck over a densely populated area, the damages would have been less than those from a moderate earthquake.
Yet people want to spend millions of dollars to protect us from the possibility. Meanwhile, we face much more dangerous threats from volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and especially global warming and nuclear war. Donald Trump is a one-man threat to humanity’s well-being.
Antarctic vulcanism
Scientists have recently detected anonamously high temperatures in an undersea region near Antarctica. Gas readings have led them to conclude that these are likely due to undersea volcanic activity. We’re not talking about volcanos erupting undersea; instead, this is likely a number of hot spots that are releasing heat from a region of small vents. Yet politically motivated climate science deniers have seized upon this discovery to dismiss the possibility that the planet is warming. This is a simple case in which they see two possible explanations for the melting of Antarctic ice: global warming and undersea thermal vents. They put all their money on the latter explanation so as to deny the former explanation. The reality is that the former explains most of the melting, and the latter might explain a small portion of the melting.
Unemployment
Another obvious example comes from job losses in the USA. Most of these job losses are among the lower middle class. Some people rush to blame immigrants for the job losses; others blame globalization. As it happens, the single most important factor is automation, which is replacing millions of jobs. It’s not just in manufacturing; we need fewer checkout clerks in stores because automation has greatly increased the productivity of individual clerks.
Globalization has also cost a goodly number of jobs — but it can also increase the number of jobs. For example, consider solar cells. Here’s the rough distribution of jobs in the solar industry in 2017:
Installation: 130,000
Manufacturing: 37,000
Sales & Distribution: 31,000
Project Development: 36,000
Other: 17,000
Total: 251,000
The Chinese can manufacture solar cells more cheaply than here in the USA; imports from China, Malaysia, South Korea, and Vietnam displace American solar manufacturing jobs. However, many more jobs are generated by installing solar panels than manufacturing them. The net result is that, by placing tariffs on Chinese solar cells, the USA has driven up domestic prices of solar cells, which in turn has depressed demand for their installation. The net result, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, is a net loss of 23,000 jobs.
This is a key point that few people understand: globalization drives down the price of goods, which in turn encourages the creation of other jobs. The case of solar panels is extreme; usually the benefits of globalization are not so obvious. But by focusing attention on only one of the factors in unemployment, we end up making stupid mistakes.
