I’m afraid of people who’s position is simply that we need some common sense in Washington. Good old common sense conservatism is likely to lead to worse or at least different problems than we currently face.
I’m a great fan of common sense and decisions “made from the gut”. When I was using the formal techniques of Decision Analysis or working with very talented modeling and simulation experts, everyone always realized that there was a gut check that had to be made before accepting the output of a model.
After all, it was not all that uncommon that an error crept into the modeling at some stage leading to the completely wrong conclusion. Â Call it what you will, reality testing or sense checking, no one would follow the analytic techniques blindly. Kind of like letting the GPS unit tell you to drive off the road into a lake or the forest.
More subtly though, one realizes how much bias creeps into these rational analytic decision tools. After all, if we didn’t like the outcome of a simulation there were parameters to fiddle with that might produce “more sensible results”. More troubling was the realization that mistaken but favorable outcomes were not going to questioned. In fact if an error was detected, the error would be defended vigorously trying to preserve a mistaken but desirable belief about the world and the outcome of particular decisions.
As I left the world of analytic decision tools and focused more on mental models I realized of course that our own metaphors for the world had these biases, but often completely hidden to us. In a physiological modeling and simulation analysis at least the underlying data can be examined and all of the model assumptions are explicit. If you understand the methods well enough the biases can be identified and perhaps addressed.
The beliefs we hold about the world aren’t so accessible to us. For example, other people are experienced as mental models of other brains. By analogy with our own thoughts and language use we believe we can understand what some one else is telling us. After all their language is run through the language systems in our brains, transferring thought from one brain to another through the medium of speech phonemes. The sounds themselves are meaningless. Its the process of transfer that is meaning.
Optimism, hopefulness are biases. Prejudice and expectations are biases. They color perception and influence decision making.
Clearly if we have an incorrect model of some one else we can make poor decisions. If my model of that car salesman is that he’s my buddy with my best interests at heart I will probably suffer a financial loss compared to a model that sees him purely as the intermediary with the larger organization that is the auto dealership.
So lets be careful about elevating “common sense” to a status of the ultimate truth. There’s a populism in the US today that wants to ignore the complexities of economics and large inter-dependent systems (banks, global trade, heath care, public assistance) and simply rely on common sense.
I’m convinced that simplifying assumptions are always necessary in models. In fact models that can’t be understood intuitively because of complexity or emergence are not as useful as models that can be internalized as intuition. That’s a big part of what real expertise is all about.
But simplifying must be pragmatic, that is proven to work in the real world across some set of conditions. Simplification that is ideologically driven because some principle or other “must be true” is ideology not pragmatism and is likely to fail. And failure is commonly through unintended consequences.
