Seth Godin recently wrote about what you give up when you let someone else drive, literally and figuratively. That got me thinking of everyday wisdom — the little things you learn from life that you forget were learned at all. In particular, it reminded me of some lessons I learned from hitchhiking that seem so obvious to me now, that I all but forgot learning them.

Back in the 1980s, I hitchhiked thousands of miles to find work, go rock climbing and visit relatives. After working the fish processing plants in Alaska, dressed in worn military surplus clothing, toting a large backpack and sporting a beard, I was not optimally groomed for hitchhiking success. I spent over eight hours by the side of the road waiting for a ride on many occasions and got picked up by a variety of somewhat unstable characters, including a nice old grandfatherly man who at one point was waving a gun about complaining about all the Californians invading Oregon. I never had a really bad ride, though and was only conditionally threatened with death ("If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you"). That seemed fair (I wasn’t planning to fuck with him) and he turned out to be quite a nice guy for someone only six months out of prison.

Over time I figured out some rules for successful hitching that turn out to be some pretty good rules for life, though I think I might need to remind myself of the lesson a bit more forcefully.

1. The slowest, most dangerous way to hitchhike is to stand by the side of the road with your thumb out hoping someone takes pity on you and stops to help.
2. The fastest, safest, most effective way to hitchhike is to go to places where travellers are already stopped, and pitch your case.
3. Looking dangerous puts you in danger.

If it’s not obvious why this is so and how it applies elsewhere, let me just ask this:

• Is buying from your online store as difficult as stopping a speeding car on a road without an adequate pullout for a total stranger who looks dangerous?
• Did you get your last job by waiting around for someone to post a position that matched your qualifications?

Some Commentary for Slow Learners

Let me explain a little more about how this works. Rather than standing by the side of the road, find a place like a gas station right off the highway. Approach someone and say "Excuse me, sorry to bother you. I’m trying to get to SomeCity. I’d be happy to help with the gas [unless you're really, really broke] if you’d be willing to let me ride along."

• Take control of the decision. If you stand by the side of the road with your thumb out, you have turned over the choice of whom you’ll ride with to random psychopaths passing in cars. Don’t let the psychopaths decide. Ask for help, rather than waiting for someone to offer. Donate to a political campaign early, before the big money psychopaths have chosen someone who meets their needs. Aside from his first job out of college, my brother has convinced every company he’s worked for to create the position they hired him into. I pretty much liquated everything and took on debt because the most important thing to me was to become a historian. Within two years I was eeking out a living and getting paid to do exactly the sort of research I wanted, despite only taking one history course in college. Lately, though, I’m disappointed in myself. I feel like I’ve been doing too much standing by the side of the road and not enough going to parking lots. I signed up to give a talk way outside my field in November. We’ll see how that goes.
• Make it easy for people to help you. I see a lot of people hitching where traffic is moving fast, there’s no decent pullout and I don’t get a long look at them. If they’re already stopped, you’ve taken away one impediment to letting you onboard. How hard is it to keep my foot on the gas compared to stopping? How hard is it to go back to Google for another search instead of trying to navigate your impossible website?
• Make a connection.You might think, "They can’t know I’m not a psychopath just by one sentence at a gas station." That’s true, but they can sense normalcy, they can see you up close, they can tell you’re not stinking drunk. Or just plain stinking. That’s already a huge boost over someone that they’re trying to glimpse by the side of the road at 50mph. Your one sentence is a chance to show you’re polite and respectful ("Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you") and your chance to persuade ("I’d be happy to help with the gas" powerfully invokes the principle of reciprocity — you’ve offered to help, so they’ll want to help too). That may not be enough to overcome their resistance to letting a stranger in the car, but it’s a lot more persuasive than sticking your thumb out. This is universal. Nothing makes people feel as good as helping someone out. Studies have shown that over the long term, most people get a bigger boost in happiness by giving gifts than by receiving them. If you make a connection, people will want to help you, and that could mean giving you a ride or buying from your store. I just made an unplanned purchase for $78 in the store next to the ice cream shop, because the people in there connected to me.
• Dress for Success or Birds of a feather flock together. If you look grungy, dirty and dangerous, you’ll get picked up by people who see that as normal. Your goal is to appear normal to the people your prospective ride. That doesn’t mean you necessarily want to look like your clients. You want to look like someone they can trust in this situtation. People in suits and ties don’t want mechanics in suits and ties.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what goes into making good decisions. There are, of course, countless considerations and ways of looking at the decision-making process. So these are not the three keys to good decisions, just three chosen from among many. That said, these are three factors that I often see people, including myself, get wrong:

• Use absolute numbers, not proportions
• Ignore sunk costs.
• Watch out for confirmation bias.

Absolute Numbers Rule

Remember absolute numbers: essentially the postive value of the difference between two numbers. When the decision we’re making has a big number involved, that big number tends to make other numbers seem inconsequential. Ask a few people to assume that they are about to buy a TV for $800 at a store 30 minutes away. They open up the newspaper and see an ad for the same television on sale for $200 at a store that’s a two-hour drive away. Would they drive three hours round-trip for that amazing deal? Now ask the next few people to imagine they’re buying a $52,000 luxury car and they find out that they can get it for $51,400 two hours away.

Researchers find that when faced with this type of question, people will commonly say they’ll drive the two hours each way to save on the television, but rarely for the car. Why? Because it seems like an inconsequential part of the price of the car, so not much of a deal. But in both cases, the total savings is the same. It should either be worth $600 to drive for three hours or not. The price of the item you’re buying shouldn’t matter.

Strategy: Look at the absolute number that’s truly at play and ask yourself: if someone were to give you the cash to make the same decision, how would you decide. In other words, if someone said "I’ll pay you $600 to drive around for three hours for no particular reason" would that be worth it to you? If so, then the deal in the other town is worth it. If not, it’s not. The total price of the item makes no difference.

Forget Sunk Costs

A friend opened my eyes to this one many years before I had the name or the concept of sunk costs. He went to a movie that had a terrible, violent opening that completely turned him off. He walked out after five minutes and told me later, "I had already wasted seven bucks, I didn’t see the point in wasting two hours on top of it."

Sunk costs are costs that you can never recover. Let’s say you’re writing a book and you’ve worked on it for 500 hours and you realize that at the rate you’re writing, it will take another 500 hours, for a total of 1,000 hours. There are two possible traps here.

• You feel like it’s not worth another 500 hours, but you can’t give up because you’ve already put in so much work and you can’t bear to let it go to waste, so you stick it out and finish.
• You feel like the book simply is not worth 1000 hours, so decide to quit.

However, since the first 500 hours are gone and can never be recovered, they shouldn not really count in your decision. The proper question is: if I were starting from scratch today and knew that I could complete the book in 500 hours, would I think it was worth it?

There’s another, interesting version of this that Dan Ariely talks about in Predictably Irrational. They asked people to imagine they were going to a concert where the tickets cost $80. They then asked one of two questions:

• You buy tickets in advance. On the way, you lose your tickets. Do you buy another ticket at the door and go anyway?
• You’re planning to buy tickets at the door. On the way, $80 falls out of your wallet, but you still have your credit card and the rest of your money. Do you still buy a ticket and go to the concert?

People who lose the ticket are much more likely to say they would turn around and go home, because they couldn’t bring themselves to spend $160 for the concert. People who just lost the money, though, didn’t see that as a cost of the concert, so they were less likely to change plans. But in fact, all that really matters is whether you have the budget to lose $80 in whatever form and still spend the $80 on the tickets. If it was worth $80 to you originally and it’s still worth $80 to you, it makes no difference whether you lost $80, lost a ticket, or found a Franklin on the sidewalk. What happened before is a sunk cost and not part of this particular decision, except insofar as $80 would break your budget for the week.

Confirmation Bias

This is the hardest one for me. Basically, when we arrive at a decision, we then tend to look for corroboration. I catch myself doing this a lot in my scholarly work. This is typically the way criminal investigators work: find a likely suspect and then gather evidence to prove the case. From a consumer point of view, you find what appears on first look to be the best camera for you, then you look for other positive aspects. The problem is that the information that you uncover early in the process is not necessarily the most salient information and yet, because of confirmation bias, you’ve closed yourself to other options.

I still find this one tough, but when doing scholarly research I try to divide my investigation into a discovery phase and an analysis phase. So the first thing is to frame the question properly. Ask not "Is Little John the same as John Jacobs?" but rather "What do I know about Little John?" The second thing is to gather a set amount of data ("I will consult these five sources") before starting analysis. This increases the possibility that you will find and, more importantly, still be open to contradictory information that comes to light late in the process. Then always ask this question before making a final decision, "If I knew when I started what I know now, would I make the same decision?"

Putting It Into Practice

Of course, even if this helps with analysis, making the right decision can still be hard. I have a friend who, after seven years of study (sunk costs) was about to become an ordained priest. Meditating the night before on a prayer of Saint Francis, he realized that he never would have entered seminary if he had known what he knew at that moment, seven years later, about the support he could count on from his community of brothers. In other words, he had overcome the confirmation bias problem. From there, it took an act of will and great courage to ignore the sunk costs not just of the seven years, but also the sunk costs of commitments to family and friends to whom he had said he was becoming a priest. It was not an easy decision, but by framing the question correctly, it was possible to make the right decision for him. But as his case shows, often courage is more important than reason and courage is harder to learn.

This is not exactly my usual fare for Raised by Turtles, but I had the occasion to get a little firefighting training some time back, and recently had need to write this up. In our rural neighborhood, response times are very long (over one hour), so it’s important that residents have some idea of what to do in event of a fire. So here’s what I learned from our local fire chief.

Obviously, if a home is on fire and you can’t put it out immediately, you should evacuate the home, go to your meeting place and call the fire department from a safe location. But what then? Or what if you arrive on the scene of a home or other building that is on fire? When you arrive on the scene, you will typically find either one of two conditions:

• The fire is contained in the house and you see black smoke on the inside and moisture on the windows.
• There are flames coming out of windows, doors, or other openings in the building.

Don’t Enter a Burning House

In both cases, the first rule for avoiding an accident when you find a house on fire is that you should not enter the building. This is probably obvious in the case where the building is engulfed in flame, but may not be obvious when the home appears to have a slow smoulder that you could put out. The rule nevertheless still applies for two reasons:

• Obviously, you put yourself in danger, and yet you do not have the proper training or equipment to fight the fire and may be overwhelmed once inside.
• More importantly, you may cause serious damage. A burning house will often put itself out. A fire in a modern home with the windows shut will burn as long as there is oxygen, but it will quickly use the available oxygen and become a low-temperature fire. If you open the door, you will introduce oxygen to the home and this will reignite the fire and put both you and the home at risk. This is the main reason fire experts recommend against trying to enter the home to fight the fire. It’s generally much better to wait for the firefighters with breathing apparatus to arrive. They will quickly enter the building, closing the door behind them, and fight the fire from within.

What Should You Do for a House Fire?

If the home is engulfed in flame, you should not approach the house, but there may be things you can do to help the firefighters and to limit damage to the house.

• Do a walkaround looking for hazards. Make quick mental notes of holes, flammable materials, or other hazards. By the time the firefighters arrive, it’s possible they will no longer be able to see these areas and you information could save the life of a firefighter.
• Shut off the electricity. If it is safe to do so, pull the main breaker on the house.
• Shut off the gas. Again, if it’s safe to access the gas shutoff, kill the gas supply to the house.
• Stay on the scene if safe so that when firefighters arrive on scene, you can report the information from your walkaround and whether or not you’ve shut off the power and gas. This alone will make the firefighters very happy.
• If you might get trapped, for example if you live in a forested area where a spreading fire might cut off your safe escape, and the fire begins to spread beyond the initial structure, you should flee the area and let the professionals deal with it.

Fighting A House Fire

Only at this point should you attempt to fight the fire. Remember, if no flames are coming from the house, do nothing for the reasons listed above. If flames are visible, first and foremost, think about what will happen if a gas line or a gallon of lawnmower fuel or lacquer thinnner explodes. You must keep your distance.

If your only tool is a garden hose, you will probably not be able to maintain a safe distance and do anything constructive to fight a serious fire. At best, you can wet down vegetation or neighboring structures to keep them from catching on fire. That should be your first priority in any case.

If there is a firehose or other firefighting equipment available, you can attempt to fight the fire. Remember, it is up to the firefighters to enter the house and try to stop the fire. Your goal is not to stop the fire, but to keep the temperature down and keep the fire from spreading to adjoining structures or vegetation. In other words, your goal is still to contain rather than extinguish the fire. If you have enough water, the fire will "flee" and you will have to keep moving around the building to where the fire is the hottest. In any case, you should focus your attention on monitoring the fire and moving around the house to stop the spread.

Thanks to Chief Jim Wilson, of the Mariposa County Fire Department, for some excellent fire safety training.

So I started out by asking myself why I follow some people and not others and why in the world do I have any followers at all? I’m new to Twitter and obviously not some expert that anyone should heed, but I do like to think about why I do what I do. So in thinking about all this I decided (and that must make it so) that there are four basic Twitter modes: broadcast, network, journal and listen. I don’t know how many modes there were before I decided there were four, but now that I have it’s official and now that it’s official, everyone should understand what they are and in what context they belong. Understanding this is essential to understanding how I understand Twitter, at least for this evening. Understand?

Broadcast Mode

This is the "you" mode, meaning that when I tweet in broadcast mode, it’s about you and when you tweet in broadcast mode it’s about me. If you want lots of followers, you need to be in broadcast mode, which means your updates are for me, and in return you get a soapbox that matters. But if your updates are for you, you’ll never get that soapbox and that’s where most people trying to use Twitter for marketing mess up. They think they’re in broadcast mode, but really they’re in a me mode, which can’t be broadcast mode. Think of it like this: if the major TV networks ran nothing but ads, they wouldn’t really be broadcasting, except in the technical physcial sense of sending their waves out indiscriminantly in hopes that some intelligent alien civilization would receive their message and decide that earthlings should be easy to conquer, because few if any actual earthlings would be watching that drivel. People like me can’t even stand to watch network TV because I find a 7::1 ratio of "you" programming to "me" programming (ads) too low, but it seems to be good enough to draw a large audience. 1::7 is not, yet time and again I see Twitterers attempt to use it that way.

If I’m in broadcast mode, the tweet should be for your benefit seven times out of eight if I want to match the ratio of network television, which is aiming pretty damn low. One time in eight, it can be about "me", but that’s a maximum. If you’re in broadcast mode, you have to ask yourself three questions:

• Am I being interesting and helpful rather than self-promotional?
• Is this update for people who don’t know me except through Twitter?
• Am I really a big enough deal to be in broadcast mode?

Only a few people can meet the last criterion. Oprah is in broadcast mode no matter what, because people will follow her no matter what. Oprah could burp and post "Whoa! Onion rings for lunch. Biggest belch of my life!" and people would be around the photocopier saying "Did you hear about Oprah’s burp?"
"No, where’d you hear about that."
"It was on Twitter. You should follow her."

Everyone else with aspirations of broadcasting should try to meet the first two criteria in 90% of their posts. Badbanana is a good example of a broadcaster. My friend Rand posts a quote or two each day. That’s a perfect broadcast mode usage — he’s offering content that I want. I see this person regularly, but we aren’t networking via Twitter. I’m a consumer of his content and he’s a broadcaster.

Network Mode

Networking is the us mode and it sits between journal and broadcast. It’s not so much to get your word out there, but to get yourself out there and to connect with other people. You can test for network mode with a couple of questions:

• Can I think of a specific person other than myself whom this is for?
• Would I welcome @replies and reply back?

You might have one or six dozen people that you hope will enjoy this particular update, but if it’s six dozen, you can think of one right away who is among the six dozen. If you try to pull one name from your list of followers and draw a blank, you’re probably not in network mode. If you’re not reading and replying to your @replies, you’re definitely not in network mode, you’re broadcasting. Did you mean to broadcast? Is it interesting enough to broadcast? Most often, I’m in network mode, but a huge proportion of my network mode posts are for my wife.

Journal Mode

Journal mode is the opposite of broadcast mode. It’s the me mode. Sometimes I’m in journal mode. I just want to remember something so I tweet it and then mark it as a favorite. When I first started on Twitter, I was in journal mode most of the time, but I’ve been kind of surprised at how quickly this diminshed and how I was soon mostly in network mode and mostly writing for my first two followers (a friend and my wife). If you’re in journal mode, write what you want, when you want. Just don’t expect any followers. Unless you’re an astoundingly interesting person, if you spend too much time in journal mode, even your best friends will abandon you. If what interests you turns out to interest tons of other people, you may get lots of followers, but you may still be in journal mode. You can figure this out easily enough with these two questions:

• If I had no followers, would I write this anyway?
• Am I okay with everyone unfollowing me, even my spouse and best friend, because I’m so fricken boring?

If the answer is yes, you’re in journal mode. Why does it matter? A lot of people spend a lot of time in journal mode, but they would be disappointed if everyone quit following them. Their Twitter stream looks like this:

8:24: having my morning coffee
8:39: threw in a load of laundry. Decided to just mix whites and colors.
8:55: hmm. ruined my white shirt.
9:26: going out shopping for new white shirt.

If you plan to mostly use Twitter in journal mode, updates like that are just fine, but it strikes me that most people with streams like that can’t answer yes to both tests questions. That means they’ve mistaken which mode they’re in. In fact, they want to be in broadcast mode or network mode and they have to think about their updates in those terms.

Sometimes it’s not that different. Today, I tweeted about my morning tea, but I tweeted because I had made my morning tea on my new Trail Designs Ti-Tri stove, which might interest backpackers who care about ultralight camp stoves (significant number of my followers) and I wanted to thank Rand for the stove. So really this was mostly network mode. To some extent it’s also a broadcast mode, since I want to tell everyone about this stove, but realistically, I was looking to tell people I know about the stove and perhaps engage them in discussion about it. So that’s more network than broadcast or journal mode.

Listen Mode

This is an interesting one. In listen mode, you’re reading your stream to see what people you follow have to say, you’re doing searches for stuff that interests you, or you’re actively soliciting opinions. In other words, you might be posting updates in listen mode. So listen mode is not the opposite of broadcast, but might be a complement. Ultimately, though, it’s a better complement to network mode. In many if not most cases, the point of listening is to make contact with others. I might just tweet out "Does anybody know a good cobbler in Berkeley?" A merchant like Zappos with tons of followers might write an update actively soliciting feedback about a change on the website. So it might be conversational, but it’s not social per se. The goal isn’t to make personal connections to people, it’s to get their opinions. But the logical result of listen mode is often to make a connection as a secondary consequence. The test for listen mode is simple:

• Am I trying to gather information or opinions?

A yes answer means you’re in listen mode, even if you’re sending out an update.

Why It Matters

So who cares? Well, if you’re in journal mode, you may be holding yourself back on what you really want to say and record because you think you’re in broadcast mode. More commonly, though, people want to use Twitter for connecting with old friends, connecting with new people who share some interest, or marketing of some sort. In the first case, you’ll likely want to stay mostly in network mode, with some journal mode because your old friends actually care. In the second case, you want to be mostly in network mode. If you’re marketing, be clear on whether you’re trying to really connect with your customers, or just broadcast to them. It may evolve over time. When you first start, maybe you can connect with all of your customers, but over time, you’ll be forced into broadcast mode because you can’t really network with 20,000 people. But remember that broadcast mode is not advertising mode. There is no advertising mode on Twitter yet, but I see so many marketers who mistake broadcast mode for advertising mode, and think that broadcast is the me mode, not the you mode, which is why Twitter does nothing for them except waste everyone’s time.

The most foolish things I’ve done in my life have been for neither love nor money, but simply for free ice cream. One spring, when I was about ten years old, in return for an ice cream cone, I swam out to the ice in Lake Champlain, only about 25 feet, but in water cold enough to kill. Of course, I was ten. But many people do things nearly that stupid for something “free” which could be purchased with about 10 minutes wages.
How does 'free' cloud our judgement » »

We as humans tend to key on contrast and judge value by the relationship of one thing to another. If we can find a comparable, we always do. The way Starbucks got us to buy $4 cups of coffee (er, you, anyway, since I have never bought a coffee a Starbucks, but I have bought a double chocolate cream frappucino) was to make the experience difficult to compare to Dunkin Donuts. Euro-style tables, funny names, funky music, soft lighting, all contributed to an ambiance sufficiently different to make the comparison difficult. Tough economic times, have made people more willing to see coffee as coffee and refuse to pay for the experience (that and, of course, the fact that the Starbucks experience has become mundane itself, just like Dunkin’ Donuts).

We all know that from personal experience, but I have been seeing it a lot more clearly since reading Dan Ariely’s fun book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions and the interesting, though a bit more stodgy Robert Cialdini book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. So here’s where it gets interesting. Savvy marketers know that we judge value by contrast and relationship. So the Economist offers subscriptions for the following rates (or did when Ariely did his study):

1. $59 for the online-only subscription.
2. $125 for the print-only subscription.
3. $125 for the print and online subscription combined.

What’s going on there? Why even bother to offer option 2? Simple. It isn’t clear which is the better deal between $59 for the online subscription or $125 for the print subscription, but there’s no question which is the better deal between the print-only and the print and online option. Because of that and because those two are obviously comparable — different offers at the same cost — we key in on those two options. When Ariely showed the offer to MBA students at MIT, only 16% went for the online-only subscription, none went for the print-only option and a whopping 84% signed on for the combo. The deal was too good to pass up. But, and this is where it gets really really interesting, what if you eliminate the print-only subscription? After all, not a single person wants it anyway, so it’s not really an important part of the offer, right? Well when he offered only two choices, the online version and the combo (options 1 and 3 in other words) to MBA students, with no “decoy” offer, 68% opted for the internet-only option. So in other words, by focusing the comparison on the $125 option, they shifted from a measly 32% willing to pony up $125 to a whopping 84%. That’s the power of contrast! We are just not wired as humans to think in absolutes, which is usually a good shortcut as historically, evolutionarily (and in most life-threatening situations) we have very few choices and choosing quickly has advantages. In the modern marketplace, though, it’s a different story.

Cialdini has all sorts of examples where the contrast principle is used to influence our decisions. Brunswick pool tables instructed salesmen to start by showing the most expensive pool tables “just to see what the high-end features are” and then bring people down the price ladder. Result: a big increase in the amount people were willing to spend because the mid-range tables now seemed cheap. Some clothing retailer figured out that if a man comes in to buy a suit, always sell the suit first and the accessories second. After making the big purchase, what’s another $20 for a tie? But if they choose the tie first, they’ll go for the $10 tie instead.

This is also why discounts, coupons, MSRPs on cars that nobody pays, and “$97 value, yours for only $27″ work even if nobody in the history of humanity would consider paying $97 for the piece of junk that really isn’t even worth $27. Even though in our rational mind we know with certitude that the list prices are absurd and nobody pays them, they anchor us on high prices and we compare the sales price to the high price put in our mind because we are wired to compare. This is so subtle and so powerful that if you simply ask people what the last two digits of their social security number are, this will actually influence how much they are willing to pay for something later. Those with higher numbers are actually willing to pay more because the higher number is still stuck in their mind and that provides the mental anchor at that moment. In the absence of a meaningful comparison, they are simply comparing the last two numbers they have heard and that makes a price seem reasonable or unreasonable depending on what has become set as their anchor.

So as a consumer, you need to really think about what comparisons you make implicitly, without thinking about it. And as a merchant, of course, you need to think about what comparisons your customer is making.

In my last little rant about 212:The Extra Degree, I described how the main thing that offended me about the whole movement was the ill-informed metaphor they use. I hate a bad metaphor based on bad reasoning. That got me thinking of the times I’ve been told that "logic betrays us" by which the person saying it usually means that "common sense" often provides superior information to logic. Let me be the first genius to tell you that a little bit of common sense should tell you that isn’t true. Saying logic betrays us is like saying hammers betray us. Hammers betray us when we try to use them to drive machine screws into sheet metal, but for sinking a nail into a piece of wood, a framing hammer is a damn reliable tool. Logic too is an utterly dependable tool: you can depend on it to bring you to solid conclusions if it is used well and based on good assumptions. You can, on the other hand, depend on it to bring you to the most absurd conclusions if used incorrectly or if you start from faulty assumptions. In this age of American unreason (see Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason or Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science) I guess it’s necessary to point that out.

Malcolm Gladwell made a big splash with Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, a book that argues that often our gut reactions can get us to the same result as considered reflection, but much quicker and with surprising reliability. I don’t refute that and it’s often true, though my favorite book that makes that point is Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear (a great read). In any case, under some circumstances where we have a need to process lots of information quickly (fighting a structure fire, escaping a rapist), our instinct is often a better guide than reason because we may not have time to apply our reason before we get killed, but subconscious processing in our minds often finds a viable solution rapidly. Damn useful. But I see the idea extended in support of unreason and the belief that our gut reactions trump considered reflection (and I don’t blame Gladwell for that). If there’s time to consider and reflect and, more importantly, to test, that’s better. Always.

Logic by its very nature can be neither loyal nor disloyal, and therefore can never betray. Whenever you hear that we cannot trust reason, be prepared because you are about to be fed some bullshit, perhaps innocuous, perhaps dangerous. Reason cannot always provide a satisfactory answer to our questions, our needs and our hopes. It’s not always the solution, but it never betrays us. We cannot always trust to reason, but we can always trust reason.

I remember in particular two cases in particular from my late teens where I was told that logic is a poor guide and I was told this in contexts where you would least expect it: in the preface to a book of logic puzzles and in a philosophy class in college.

The fake syllogism.

I was in a philosophy class taught by a great and inspiring teacher, but not a man whose logical faculties were not highly developed. He was making the argument that the Nazis used logic to show that because Jews were bad, Nazis were good. The syllogism he gave was this one:

Proposition 1: All Jews are bad.
Proposition 2: We are not Jews.
Conclusion: Therefore we are good.

I don’t refute that this is part of appeal of anti-semitism for the Nazis and others, but it has nothing to do with logic. A fundamental aspect of a syllogism is that any terms can be replaced and it still makes sense as long as the propositions are equivalent. Again, logic is neither loyal or disloyal, merely a tool. So that syllogism is the same as this one:

Proposition 1: All elephants have eyes.
Proposition 2: We are not elephants.
Conclusion: Therefore we do not have eyes.

In any undergraduate class, 10% are paying close attention to what the teacher is saying and really understanding it, 10% are utterly confused and lost, and the other 80% are having sexual fantasies. That’s been proven. Miraculously, on the day in question, yours truly was in the 10% who were paying attention. So I pointed out the problem with the syllogism and was told by some very smart people, including the professor and someone who is now a top cardiologist, that I wasn’t getting it. "It’s a simple syllogism" I was told. No, it was a faulty syllogism, and potent as such, but it was unreason that allowed such lies to be perpetrated, not reason. Reason did not betray the Jews, unreason betrayed them.

Of steam and ice.

This one is less harmful and absolutely analogous to the 212: The Extra Degree folly.

James Fixx, who wrote The Complete Book Of Running, a major bestseller in 1970s that helped popularize running, also wrote the lesser-known Games for the Super Intelligent. I owned it, but my pride is not such that I bought it. It was a gift. A joke I think. In any case, that book or its sequel asserted in the preface that fun as the logic games within may be, sometimes logic betrays us and is a poor guide. If I remember right, he pointed out that a cocktail had about 350 calories (I’m making up the number — it may have been, but the principle and the error will be the same). Now, he pointed out that it takes 80 calories per gram to melt ice. So, he reasoned, with a bit of ice in your drink, you would be at break even. With less than five grams, less than a quarter ounce, you should be able to drink cocktails all day long and lose weight like crazy. The logic is ironclad, but alas, in practice, it isn’t so. Logic, thus fails us.

Except, of course, that dietary calories are actually measured in kilocalories. So in point of fact, if your drink has 350 calories, that gin and tonic is actually 350,000 calories. So to balance that out, you would need to eat three kilograms of ice (80 calories per gram to melt it and 37 calories per gram to heat it up to body temperature comes out to 117 calories per gram, divided into 350,000 calories yields 2991 grams). So the not-so-intelligent but nevertheless diligent fact-checkers realize that they’re going to need a hell of an ice maker to keep up with their weight loss program.

But this is not meant as a weight-loss guide. I just want to point out two things.

1. Logic does not betray us. We betray logic by feeding in poor assumptions and by failing to reason logically from otherwise good (or bad, in the case of the Nazis) assumptions.
2. It is the belief that logic can betray us that creates the opening for illogic. If you believe that reason can fail, that gut reactions trump logical arguments, that common sense is a better guide, you create the conditions where you don’t ask the right questions, where you let bad answers stand and, ultimately, you make bad decisions.

If your gut reaction tells you something seems wrong, then you need to question it and put it to the test of reason. But here’s the thing: if your gut reaction tells you that something is right, then you need to question it and put it to the test of reason. That’s what separates research from reverie, scholars from pundits, facts from opinion, staring from blinking and, while we’re at it, creationism from science.