Why Fallacies are False -- 18, the search for causes

I ran a little test on social media and got exactly what I expected. So here it is.

I told a true story about a large estate that got split equally among the children. One of them spent every penny within a year.

And as I expected, somebody tried to come up with a cause for that, including education.

The person who spent all that money has worked for over 30 years as a CPA/CFP, getting all the CEUs after getting a college degree in the field. The idea that education was involved in the spending spree is part of that Enlightenment Era myth that if you educate people, they will base their choices on that education.

I know of another example. Somebody I worked with at one time in federal procurement, had all the same training as I had, all the CEUs and whatnot. But seemingly "that was just stuff I gotta do for work". They procured the same kind of product twice for home use, each with different bells and whistles, instead of writing out a requirements list and sticking to it as they would have to do at work. Even if they could return the first item, it was a waste of time and money out of their own pocket.

The fallacy here is supposedly called the “just world” fallacy, which tries to find a reason for everything.

MAGA does it with conspiracy theories.            

Other people do it by trying to be intellectual or scientific or blaming it on education, or they show wishful thinking and the cognitive bias of exaggerated expectations.

If you watch enough talk shows or news series like 60 Minutes, you get exposed to discussions of criminals with “experts” who may have lots of letters after their names, but don’t understand the fundamental reality about criminals: they are mentally adolescent. History going back ten thousand years at least, has billions of examples of people who got caught in criminal behavior, even if it required circumstantial evidence, but every criminal believes s/he will not get caught. What’s more, every single one of them who does get caught, believes they won’t get sanctioned. But the “expert” cognitive bias exaggerates their confidence in their ability to diagnose.

You also saw TV discussions that tried to assign scientific reasons for insane behavior. Do you realize how nuts that is? It’s called insane behavior because there’s no logic behind it, not even a criminal’s warped logic. We’re still nowhere close to saying that insanity runs in your genes, let alone what genes are sure to cause the problem. But yadda yadda yadda.

We shouldn’t stop asking questions. We shouldn’t stop investigating. We should take a moment to figure out what to do with the answer when we get it. If we identify genes that let people remain mental adolescents, or cause insanity, what are we going to do with them? Are we going to force universal identical thought and behavior? What do we give up?

And of course, the answer comes back: we give up individuality, we give up creativity, we give up invention. Pope Urban VIII would gladly have given up Galileo: would you say the same thing?

Now let’s reason from minor to major (called a fortiori in logic), from that estate breakup to breaking up even larger fortunes. It’s a dead cert that breaking up a huge fortune will distribute the money, and that some of the recipients will dissipate what they get. That money will wind up in the pockets of other people. People who are spending themselves broke now, would have to change their behavior to keep from going broke.

And people don’t change their habits quickly. There was a big news story many years ago about a guy who won a huge Powerball prize or something like that – and lost it all. He got cheated out of some of it. He left a huge amount of it stored in his car in cash, and it got stolen. When I heard the rest of the story, it turned out he did the same thing at least once before: got a windfall and fooled it away or it got stolen.

It's time to look at human history. There is no oligarchy of the past which remains an oligarchy today, unless you count the Royal Family in the UK, and their oligarchy dates back 200 years, not the whole way back to the Norman Conquest. Starting in 1993, they voluntarily paid taxes. All the other famous oligarchs of history have left no heirs, or their wealth was confiscated by socialists and communists. And the commoners of socialist and communist nations were never a penny the richer for the confiscation.

Do what you will about modern oligarchs, you may never be a penny the richer, and if you are, your behavior may put you right back where you are now. Any other conclusion is wishful thinking.

Information about spending behavior has been publicized by consumer reporters for decades – but it also exists in the proverbs and aphorisms of world cultures. It hasn’t changed due to the Space Age, or computers, or the Internet, or the odometer rollover to the 21^st century. There will always be some economic unevenness. Because human nature hasn’t changed in thousands of years, let alone the 200 years since nations began aiming at universal education. 

And that’s why the answers to my example were false.