PicoBlog

President Bartlet: “C.J., on your tombstone, it's gonna read, 'Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.'”

C.J. Cregg: “Okay, but none of my visitors are going to be able to understand my tombstone.”

-The West Wing

Perhaps you have been pondering the following question:

“How has Josh written seven issues of Moneyball Judaism without making a single reference to The West Wing?”

Honestly, I was saving it, like a fine wine.    But this week’s issue is a perfect opportunity to take you back to the beginning of my favorite television show.

In season one, episode two, C.J. Cregg, the White House Press Secretary, tells President Josiah Bartlet that he lost the state of Texas during the General Election because the he made a joke about hats (presumably, cowboy hats).    At this point, President Bartlett introduces C.J. to the logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc (“post hoc”), which is Latin for, “after, therefore, because of it.”

Many people assume that if two events occur in sequential order, they must be causally related.   However, the post hoc fallacy establishes that this is hardly ever true, and we have numerous examples where two events occur in sequence but have nothing to do with each other.   

Returning to The West Wing, President Bartlet essentially implies to C.J. that her only evidence that the hat joke resulted in them losing Texas is that one event followed the other (i.e. “post hoc, ergo, propter hoc”).   That said, perhaps the hat joke was still not funny?

However, we should be not surprised that people are tempted by a post hoc argument because of the way our minds try to link events together.

One of the classic questions from the story of Noah, which we read this past Shabbat, is whether or not Noah was an all-time hall-of-fame tzaddik (“righteous person”), or merely righteous “in his [Noah’s] generation” (i.e. he was the best of a lousy bunch).   In reality, this is an impossible question to answer, because we know very little about Noah other than the rest of his generation was terrible, and he was somehow “blameless.”    

However, people love to compare how events from the present compare to events from the past, even when there is no answer.  Consider the following questions: 

The answer to each of these questions is the recency bias, often called the “availability heuristic” or “availability bias,” the tendency to “overweight new information or events without considering the objective probabilities of those events over the long run.”   

Sometimes, recency bias leads people to assume that the present is much worse than it actually is, only the person making that claim wouldn’t know it (because they did not live through the previous event).   Other times, recency bias leads to what in sports is called the “hot hand fallacy,” where we assume that an athlete or professional can get “hot” and repeat a positive performance indefinitely.

Or consider the Jewish people…

Simon Rawidowicz famously called Israel “the ever-dying people,” because every generation of Jews believes they will be the last generation to practice Judaism.  This is also the recency bias; each generation assumes that their challenges are far worse than the generation before them, just because the challenges are happening to them.

For organizational leaders, always be wary of recency bias; too many leaders I know try to solve problems using the exact same formula their predecessors tried. And predictably, these leaders fail like those before them.   

This is why George Santayana famously warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Notice he uses the word “condemned,” as in punished or censured.    If a leader does not respect the lessons of the past, they deserve exactly what they get. The alternative must be trying to solve the unsolvable problem by making different decisions and choices than their predecessors.

The other reason we cannot answer the question of whether or not Noah was an all-timer on the righteousness scale is that the Torah acknowledges that righteous people were scarce.    Scarcity transformed the moral landscape, and thus Noah’s relative place in that environment will forever be debated. 

Scarcity is an underrated driver of many human events, and economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldan Shafir argue in Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Muchthat how we understand many problems, including crime, politics, mental health, etc. can be transformed if we look at these problems through the lens of scarcity.    They argue that “because the focus on scarcity is involuntary, and because it captures our attention, it impedes our ability to focus on other things.”

Take poverty.    

The authors write that “The poor are not just short on cash.  They are also short on bandwidth.” Poor people must juggle all the things most adults juggle, only poor people have fewer resources to make everything work, and greater consequences if they get something wrong.    

Therefore, people stuck in a cycle of poverty are not victims of their own laziness; it’s actually the opposite.   People living in poverty are overwhelmed with unforgiving needs in terms of finding food, shelter, etc. that they simply cannot properly focus on other aspects of human flourishing.  As Earnest “Earn” Marks, played by Donald Glover, says in Atlanta, “poor people are too busy trying not to be poor.”

Scarcity affects nonprofit organizations, as well.   When an organization starts to struggle, there is a temptation from leaders to assume that there is a lack of accountability, hence an obsession with KPIs, dashboards, metrics, etc. But what if the nonprofit is actually suffering from a “scarcity of resources” to enable committed people to do their best work? If the leadership changed their perspective, they might spend less time trying to demand that their underpaid and overworked staff are “held accountable,” and hold the leadership more accountable to break the cycle of resource poverty in the organization itself.

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