Ha-ha, what a stupid dog. Too stubborn to admit that it was wrong, so it wasted all of its energy digging. Ha-ha, funny dumb animals. Look at the top of the comic, though. “Sunk Cost Effect.” That might ring a bell, at least for you behavioral economics junkies. Put succinctly, the sunk cost effect is the tendency for people to continue pursuing some endeavor because they have already invested (“sunk”) a lot of time and effort into it, even if that endeavor is no longer the best option available to them.

Intuitively, it makes sense. We humans like seeing the results of our labors, and we don’t like to just up and discard them. But sometimes, that’s the correct option. The efforts or money we’ve expended are “sunk.” Unrecoupable. We can’t get them back. We can’t un-spend that effort or those dollars. So we should look only to the present and the future, no matter how wasteful of a decision the initial effort was.

“Ugh,” you say, rolling your eyes. “That’s fine, but who cares? I’m not a behavioral economist, and neither are you. You’re just a stuck-up person who likes pretending to be smart by talking about intellectual things like this.”

True, perhaps. But that doesn’t mean what I have to say isn’t relevant. Mosey on over to the other side of the Atlantic, and have a look at our friends in the United Kingdom. The U.K. is currently embroiled in a debate over the infamous issue of “Brexit,” or a British exit from the European Union. The referendum approving Brexit took nearly three years ago. And yet Britain is still paralyzed, caught in a parliamentary deadlock. Reformists call for a second vote on the issue, while hardliners demand an immediate exit – or “no-deal Brexit.” I’d like to focus on this last group, and in particular an argument I often hear in favor of their position.

“We’ve spent 66 billion pounds on Brexit already. We’ve spent so much. We can’t turn back now.”

A classic sunk cost. I don’t seek to support or condemn the no-deal Brexit position. There are legitimate arguments to be made in favor of it, even if I may not personally agree with them. But the “we’ve already spent so much” argument is definitively not legitimate. Those 66 billion pounds are spent, and they can’t be un-spent. You know what “we’ve already spent so much” really means? It means, “we’ve already spent so much, and we’ll look stupid if we change our minds now.” Well, yes. It would look stupid. But if changing course is the best thing to do, then so be it. It’s okay to look stupid, if it’s the right thing to do.

However, I don’t mean to pick solely on our friends across the pond. We are guilty, perhaps more so, in our own political discourse. Recall the 2012 election cycle. (Feels like an eternity ago, doesn’t it?)

(Those are real flip-flops, by the way. You can buy them from some obscure corner of the Internet.)

Critics of all ideological flavors lambasted Mitt Romney for his “flip-flopping,” deciding that disqualified him as a capable leader. While I recognize the need for leaders to be consistent, we simply go too far. Shockingly, it is possible for people to take a viewpoint, learn new information that affects their views, and change their point of view. This is healthy, and in fact necessary in order to have well-informed and flexible leaders. Obviously, we shouldn’t support politicians flipping stances left and right. But when they have a genuine, informed change of heart, we should applaud that. They shouldn’t be afraid of looking weak just because they changed their mind for a valid reason.

One last thing. Do me a favor, reader, and watch the video I’ve attached below.

That’s Marie Kondo, creator of the famous KonMari method for tidying up and self-described “organizing consultant.” Is she out of place in this piece about sunk costs and behavioral economics? Not at all. In fact, I would argue she is one of the greatest behavioral economists of the modern era.

Let me tell you one more story. Suppose you’re just an ordinary consumer. On a whim, you bought yourself some useless kitchen tool that sits in your drawers, collecting dust. It sits there, useless, but out of sight. Now suppose you have another kitchen tool. Throw in a few papers or documents that you keep just because they might be important someday. Newspapers, magazines. Paper clips. Plastic bags. You keep it all because there might be some use for them in the far future. It piles up. You can’t open the drawer or look at your desk without feeling stressed. It’s terrible. But you have to keep it. Selling those objections or giving them away or even throwing them away would be an admission of defeat, an admission that it was a bad idea to acquire the objects in question in the first place. Right?

Wrong, says Marie Kondo. True, the purchase might have been stupid in the first place. But, once again: the money you spent on those things is spent, and it can’t be unspent. It doesn’t matter what happened then, when you bought them. What matters is now. Do those things spark joy? Fine, keep them. Do they not spark joy? Does keeping them around just contribute to the clutter and stress them out? That’s fine too. Acknowledge that they were a bad purchase, and move on.

No, really! It’s okay to be wrong. It’s okay. Normal. Healthy. What matters is that you recognize your wrongness, and that you let go of your attachment to it. Don’t continue to cling on to that wrongness, digging yourself deeper and deeper, just because it’s been a part of your life for so long. Let it go, look forward, and do what’s right. And that goes for everyone. Go ahead and eBay your three avocado slicers, recycle your stack of magazines, donate those clothes that look bad on you and clog up your closet. It’s okay to be wrong. Just don’t be wrong for long.

 

 

 

 

 

P.S.: Just for fun, another one of those comics. It’s called “Behavioral Economics for Dogs,” written by some folks at Duke University. Check them out!

Hi all. Hope you’re doing alright. I’ve got a bit of an unconventional offering for you today. It’s a medium-length, experimental short story. It’s a little weird, but hopefully it makes you think a little bit.

Here’s a link to it on another page, since I felt it didn’t quite fit in with the tone and style of my existing entries. Happy reading!

In the Supreme Court case Abrams v. United States, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dissent contained a famous phrase: “the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” The idea is that free speech will lead the public to find and accept the truth, since they will weed out incorrect ideas in favor of more correct ones. Untruths are “outcompeted” by the truth, in a process more commonly known as the “marketplace of ideas.” A noble idea, and one that many free-market economists would be proud of, I’m sure. However (and you will excuse my ideological biases in advance), also a dangerously flawed one. There is a reason that the laissez-faire economics of presidents like Herbert Hoover failed to address the Great Depression. The answer lies in the nature of free markets. A market is capable of adjusting itself in the long-run, true. But this holds only under ideal circumstances. In our case, “ideal” means that consumers are actually attempting to sort through ideas and pick out the truth – in other words, competition must be occurring. A simple, feel-good model.

“Alright, Mr. Economist,” you say. “I can accept that. But who cares?”

Glad you asked. Here’s your answer.

Look familiar? For any U.S. reader (and I suspect a great deal of people outside the U.S.), it should be. That’s the infamous “MAGA hat,” symbol of supporters of the American President, Donald Trump. I don’t want to examine the consumption of the hats themselves. Rather, I would like to examine the consumer movement behind the idea the hats represent. “Make America Great Again.” Why Trumpism? Why did we, as a nation, choose to consume that idea?

Wait, what? You thought that was Trump’s thing, didn’t you? And yet here we are: “Let’s Make America Great Again, Reagan ‘80.” It turns out that this idea is older than Trump. Reagan used it in his 1980 presidential run, responding to voters who were anxious and unsettled after the economic struggles of the 1980s. “MAGA” is a reassurance. It is a call for a return to simpler times, when America was great and had nothing to worry about. Simplicity. That was the watchword in 1980, and it is the watchword in Trumpism. We can see the same thing in his most prominent policy proposals. Border security issue? Build a wall and make Mexico pay. Problems with China? Tariffs. Government corruption? Drain the swamp, drain it all. What matters is not the practical execution of each policy. In each case, actually – the reality has not been what the President promised. Mexico did not pay for the wall, the China-U.S. trade war is hurting U.S. consumers, and Robert Mueller has been doing more swamp-drainage than the administration. But that doesn’t matter. The idea is what matters. They are solutions that feel right, if you let yourself relax and be unconcerned by practical realities. They feel comforting. Of course we should build a wall. Walls have always worked. Walls help. Simple.

Why this focus on “simple?” We are in an era where science is more advanced than it ever is. We are surrounded by nigh-infinite information that we can access with a swipe and a few keystrokes. We, as global citizens (since populism extends beyond just the U.S.) should be more able to engage with complex ideas than any other generation in the history of civilization. We should be able to reject falsehoods, dismiss oversimplifications, and root out the truth. So, why? Why “simple”?

Take a look at the infographic above, a guide to spotting fake news from the International Federation of Library Associations. “Well, alright,” you say. “That’s fine, I can do that.” Yes, you can. I have no doubt that you are an intelligent and capable person, reader. If I gave you an article, you would knock the task out of the park. Source evaluation, author-checking, bias-checking. You’d tell me confidently whether it was credible news or not. But imagine if I gave you 2 articles. Or 4, or 8, or 16, or 32, or 256. Imagine if I told you you had to spend every waking hour following those steps above, constantly evaluating everything you read, because you couldn’t trust anyone. You’d be exhausted. You’d want out.

And yet that is precisely the reality we face today. Let’s suppose that people start off curious, wanting to seek out the truth. We tell them there’s a way to pick out the truth, but it is difficult and requires a lot of thought. We keep piling more and more sources of information for them to sort through, some of which are willfully and intentionally misleading. For patient people, perhaps they sit through the whole process. But for many others, it’s simply too much. And I don’t blame them. This is not to excuse the racist undertones in many of the policies advocated by Trump and the people around him. But that racism, I feel, is a part of the desperate desire for “simpler times.” And for many people, “simpler times” means more mainstream acceptance of discriminatory ideologies.

So how does this take us back to the marketplace of ideas? Recall Justice Holmes’s words: “the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” In theory, this works fine. But it relies on people wanting to test different ideas to find the truth. If the comforting oversimplification is worth more to consumers than the truth, then the “competition of the market” doesn’t occur. The marketplace fails. This is not helped in the slightest by the existence of echo chambers, as I wrote in an entry a while back. But in essence, we live in a world where the marketplace of ideas is obsolete. “Post-truth,” they call it. A frightening notion, no?

I’ve been dancing around the issue of politics throughout this entire entry. I suppose, as a person on the Internet, I’m obligated to provide my opinion. I think Trumpism has run its course. The consumer wave has passed. I’ll even echo the words of pollster Sam Wang in 2016 and promise to eat a bug if Trump wins again. But that doesn’t mean the angst that propelled his rise is gone. Sooner or later, our frustration with the lack of easily accessible truths will reach a boiling point, and another Trump will rise. I don’t have an easy solution. But it starts with trust. If we can learn to trust information media, even just a little bit, maybe we can work toward reconstructing the truth in America.

Do you remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books? I certainly do. They’re written in the second person, with the reader as the main character. Every few pages, they present you with an opportunity to make a decision. “If you choose to take the red pill, go to page 37. If you choose the blue pill, go to page 139.” Like that.  Back in elementary school, they were an endless fascination for me. I loved the concept so much! I could explore so many different endings to the story, all contained in one book. The best part? I was in control of where the story went. I could spend hours flipping through one of those books, trying to find all of the endings. I smiled at the good endings and winced at the bad endings, but quickly flipped away from them to find a new path. My favorites were the books where you could reach the same ending sequence through several different sets of choices. To my naive second-grade self, that was a feat of writing beyond comprehension.

Nevertheless, the joy I could get from those books was only finite. After all, there were only so many of them, and only so many possible sequences per book. Eventually, I lost interest and moved on to some other childhood obsession. Still, reading those books left a lasting impression on me.

With that in mind, you might know about Black Mirror. It’s a Netflix sci-fi series (often bordering on horror) that explores the potential consequences of future technology. There’s some lightheartedness from time to time, but it’s generally quite serious. Recently, Netflix released Bandersnatch, a movie-length special edition of Black Mirror. The special part of Bandersnatch is viewer interactivity. At critical junctures in the plot, the show pauses and gives the viewer the option to make decisions for the protagonist.

Seems familiar, no? I was skeptical of Bandersnatch at first, but I quickly realized how similar it was to the Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to love so much. Motivated by nostalgia, I sat down on a lazy Saturday and opened up Netflix. The program was top-quality as usual, and I enjoyed the nostalgia of choosing the direction of the plot. Eventually, I reached an ending. Without providing spoilers, it wasn’t exactly the happiest end for the protagonist, Stefan Butler. Instead of the joy I felt from discovering new endings in Choose Your Own Adventure, I felt guilty. Though I knew Butler was only a character, I felt personally responsible for his “bad ending.” The endings of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch carried a feeling of permanence that the Choose Your Own Adventure books didn’t.

Exacerbating my sense of unease were some of the comments that Butler makes as the film progresses. Butler repeatedly remarks that he feels like he’s being controlled by some outside force. Consciously speaking, I knew it was just a part of the Bandersnatch experience. Of course Netflix included those lines! It’s more engaging that way, after all. Yet despite that knowledge – that it was all just part of the show – I still felt uneasy. After a bit more experimenting with endings, I closed down Bandersnatch. I haven’t tried to open it again.

Part of the reason Bandersnatch bothered me so much was its similarity to another piece of interactive fiction I’ve explored before, a free computer game called Doki Doki Literature Club. If you Google it, you’ll discover that the game is a bright and bubbly visual novel with a Japanese anime art style. Gameplay consists of writing poems in order to befriend and perhaps even become romantically involved with other members of the title Literature Club. From time to time, you can make choices in dialogue which in turn affect later events in the game. Sounds like a light-hearted break from the weightiness of Bandersnatch, doesn’t it? Let’s take a look at what the game’s download page has to say about it.

The page doesn’t lie. Doki Doki Literature Club is by far the most horrifying piece of media I have ever encountered. It starts as innocently as you’d expect. However, as the game progresses, the tone becomes more serious and then suddenly becomes extremely dark after a certain tragic event. After this, the game begins behaving erratically. Error messages pop up in the middle of dialogue. Characters’ in-game representations are pixelated and distorted. The music cuts in and out or plays at discordant pitches. The game loops back and goes through previous story events but alters the dialogue or adds disturbing imagery. At times, the game program itself shuts down and reopens itself without player input.

All of these changes center around one of the characters named Monika. At one point, you have the option to choose one of the club members to spend some time after school with, and the game presents you with a list of names. Again without player input, the cursor begins moving on its own toward “Monika”. If, despite this, you manage to click another name, the screen goes white and all the options are replaced with “Monika.” Take a look. Unsettling, isn’t it?

 

Shortly after, Monika reveals that she is aware of her status as a video game character. She then confesses that she has fallen in love with you. Not with the character you’re controlling, but with you: the player. She declares that you (the player) are the only real thing in her world, and that she is surrounded by a bunch of soulless programmed automatons. All of the strange distortions and horror elements were her attempts at altering the game’s code to neutralize her competition (the other club members) for your affections. Perhaps the eeriest moment is when Monika calls you by your real name, based on the username of the account on your computer.

Eventually, Monika alters the game so that all the other characters disappear and your only gameplay option is to talk with her. You lose access to the game’s save/load option, preventing you from returning to any previous point in the game. The only way to proceed from here is to enter the game’s folder on your computer, navigate to the file corresponding to Monika’s character data, and delete it. As the file deletion occurs, Monika (in-game) begins pixelating and slowly vanishing, all the while describing how painful her “death” is.

So: “Psychological Horror”. The most terrifying thing in Doki Doki Literature Club is the loss of control. It stops behaving like a video game, really. Of course, it incorporates jumpscares and other more traditional horror elements too. But what makes the game psychologically horrifying is that loss of agency. Consciously, you know it’s all part of the game. Monika isn’t really self-aware. But in the moment, it feels like you are dealing not with a game but with something alive.

Even the horror-themed Choose Your Own Adventure books didn’t scare me, not even when I was a timid lower elementary schooler. Even if the characters met with some gruesome fate, I could just turn two pages over and get back on track for a good ending. It was all just words on a page, anyway. Bandersnatch was a bit more intense. Video feels more “alive” than text, certainly. And Butler’s suspicions about being controlled by an outside force made the fourth wall feel quite tenuous. Doki Doki Literature Club, however, was plainly alarming. I felt a very real loss of control, and that was terrifying. Having to “kill” the supposedly self-aware Monika did not help matters at all.

There’s an interesting trend here. Technology affects interactive fiction like no other genre of media. Making choices becomes more streamlined while the characters themselves feel ever more real. Whether it’s horror or sci-fi, the interactive fiction becomes that much more powerful. As a final aside, I was thinking about Monika just a bit more. Obviously, she doesn’t actually have the power to alter the game as she claims – it’s all pre-programmed. But it’s not an inconceivable notion, especially considering technological progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Could characters become advanced enough to be considered sapient? Could they hate us and resent us for our choices? Or, perhaps worse, could they come to love us, like Monika? The possibilities are fascinating and chilling all the same.

“And that’s our final result from the proof. Any questions?”

 

Q: “What should we title this section of the notes?”

Q: “Will we have to know this for the AP?”

Q: “When we use this test, we don’t have to write out all the steps, do we? It seems like once you simplify the root enough, it’s pretty obvious.”

 

Don’t panic! I’m here to translate the math. (You shouldn’t be too surprised – I did promise “Literature, history, mathematics, and disorganized thoughts,” after all.) What you’ve just read is a little excerpt from calculus class. We’re learning about infinite series – in a nutshell, infinite sums of numbers that follow a pattern. (1 + ½ + ¼ + ⅛ + 1/16 + 1/32… is a good example). In calculus, a main concern is finding whether that series converges (approaches some finite value as you write more terms of the sum) or diverges (never approaches a single value). There are various methods or “tests” used to answer that question, and we’ve just learned one of many. With that context, shall we begin?

The first questioner asks what the notes should be called. To her, learning calculus is like wandering through a library. There exists a canon of “methods-to-find-convergence-of-a-series,” and the test above is one of many items in the archives. She’s taking fastidious notes, appreciating the intricacies of the math involved and the long tradition behind it. Why does she ask about what the notes should be called? Well, math ought to be well-organized. It wouldn’t do to just hastily jot down the theorem (or convergence test, in this case). That would be disrespectful, really. Each theorem has its own unique name, its entry in the mathematical archives, its place in the canon. That’s why she’s so concerned with taking well-ordered notes. It’s a matter of respect for the material. The math is there for her to learn, formulated by the work of countless previous mathematicians, and so she wishes to learn it. She’s a scholar, in the purest sense of the word.

The second questioner asks about the AP exam, and whether this material is required knowledge for the test in the spring. It’s quite a reasonable question – I should point out that the course we’re taking is AP Calculus BC. This second student is not so concerned with mathematical beauty or the richness of the mathematical tradition. She’s there to learn in order to do well on a standardized examination. From there, she hopes to get college credits and accelerate her studies beyond high school. Simple as that – she wants to succeed, and so she asks a question in order to clarify what she should study to best achieve that goal.

From my previous blog entries, you may conceive of me as this lofty wannabe-intellectual who exclusively reads about cognitive science and history in his free time. Perhaps you expect me to disdain the second student for not appreciating the “joy of learning”. Not so! You’d be correct that I don’t share her viewpoint. But I don’t think that’s a reason to deride her question. Just like the first student, the second student has a desire to accomplish something, and so she asks a question to work toward that goal. And that’s admirable.

You might call the third questioner the pragmatist of the group. For him, efficiency trumps everything else. Thus he asks about skipping steps and drawing conclusions based on intuition, because that’s the most efficient for him. It’s not that he isn’t curious, but he doesn’t want to deal with unnecessary work. All he desires is to understand different mathematical problems and how to attack them most effectively. He’s a collector of mathematical tools, adjusting and sharpening them as he goes along. It’s a game of sorts, maximizing effectiveness and minimizing expenditure of energy. He wants to know what he absolutely needs to know to get the job done and move on to whatever topic comes next. Once again, the pragmatist.

So why have I bothered telling you this little story? Well, a school is a place of learning, and how better to understand a school than to understand the learners themselves? There are the scholars, who eagerly pursue knowledge to immerse themselves in the great intellectual canon. There are the success-oriented, who seek to acquire skills and better position themselves for future success. There are the pragamatists, who want only to complete the tasks at hand efficiently. I agree with some of their approaches far more than others. And yet I am filled with respect and a kind of awe for all of them. All of my classmates have something they want, and they’ve decided that learning is the best way to accomplish that. A group of people diverse in wants and personal philosophies, united by a common desire to learn… is that not what a school is?

 

Reader, I have a short little test for you. When you’re ready, please study the image below closely.

A simple question. Which line – A, B, or C – would you say is the closest in length to the line on the left? As a matter of fact, head to this link and submit your response.

“Well, that’s pretty simple… wait, what?”

When you opened that link and clicked “C” (like a normal, rational human being), you thought nothing of it. Then you saw the results of the poll, in which an overwhelming majority of respondents chose “B”. Now, I don’t purport to be a psychic, but I’d be willing to bet quite a bit on what your initial reaction was. You paused and questioned yourself. Perhaps you clicked back to this blog page and checked that you didn’t somehow misread the labels on each line. Either way, although you were undoubtedly in the right, there was a split second of doubt there. Rest assured, the true answer is “C”. But what am I getting at here?

In the 1950s, American social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments, including one very similar to what we’ve just done. In his version, he showed those lines to eight different people. Seven of them were actors instructed to give the same wrong answer one at a time. The last person to respond was the true test subject: Asch wanted to see if they would conform to the majority. He conducted several iterations of this experiment, and found that there was indeed a sizable minority of incorrect responses… 33.8%, in fact. That may seem low, but scroll back up again. That task is so simple that nobody should ever respond incorrectly, even if they’ve just listened to seven people saying the same incorrect answer. And yet that figure remains. 33.8%.

I’d like to discuss the effect of the majority on the way we think. A Renaissance logician might call this the argumentum ad populum, or “argument to the people”. You might’ve also seen it as the “bandwagon fallacy” on that snappy little poster sold on yourlogicalfallacyis.com’s merch store. I’m not sure I agree with the terminology here. I hesitate to call it a logical fallacy, per se. Most people don’t barge into arguments outright declaring “a lot of people said I’m right, therefore I am!” However, the underlying psychological causes behind the argumentum ad populum are real and powerful. We are willing to compromise our own rational understanding of the world based on the voice of the majority.

When I said “bandwagon,” perhaps you thought about those songs that everyone seems to like solely because everyone else likes them. Or maybe you’re a sports person, and you thought about those fair-weather fans who are very vocally supportive when the team’s on a winning streak, and mysteriously vanish when the good times fizzle out. These are certainly legitimate examples of the bandwagon mentality. They can be quite annoying in their own right, but they don’t seem to be the end of the world. The deleterious effects of the majority’s opinion seem limited and harmless enough. After all, there will always be some people who say blatantly incorrect things, but they won’t ever constitute the majority. So, unless you unfairly manipulate what the majority belief is (as Asch did), nothing truly bad can arise from bandwagons. Right…?

Enter Facebook. If I search “vaccines” on my Facebook account and look for groups to join, these are the top five results.

The influence of the majority is most insidious when it’s blended together with a dose of confirmation bias. If I hold some vaguely counter-factual belief (such as vaccines being “deadly” and containing “poisons”), it’s very easy for me to construct my own “majority” thanks to social media and the Internet by seeking out groups like the ones you see above. I don’t even have to leap into the most extreme echo chambers right away. I can join a group like the fourth one above, which purports to be “on the Fence” but is really just as bad as the rest. Thanks to the existence of social media algorithms, once I’ve shown interest in some viewpoint, the website or app will continue to provide me with similar content until the vast majority of material I see on that subject reinforces my beliefs. Even if the absolute majority of the population doesn’t agree with my conspiracy theory or pseudoscience or whatnot, it seems like everyone does because that’s all I’m seeing. Whether it’s angry posts from other people or fake news, it’s all the same. This lets Asch kick in: well, everyone I can see seems to agree with me, so I can’t be wrong!

Briefly returning to the semantics point, listening to the majority opinion isn’t a common logical fallacy in the traditional sense. However, in my view, it’s very common in internal decision-making. We use the fallacious justification that “lots of people agree” to be more comfortable with our decisions about what to believe and think. It might not even occur on a wholly conscious level. But it certainly happens.

To conclude, I’d like to offer an optimistic counterpoint. There’s another phenomenon in cognitive science called the “wisdom of the crowd”. The essential point is that large groups of people are extremely good at estimating objective quantities when everyone guesses independently. In the classic example, if you ask a large group of people to guess how many jellybeans are in a jar, the median example will usually be very accurate. The populus are collectively quite good at figuring things out when everyone just says their best guess, without considering what other people think. On the other hand, a study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology found that trying to reach a consensus in group estimation efforts actually lowered overall accuracy.

There’s a takeaway here. Most problems are quite a bit more complex than guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar. But when we’re faced with a decision about our beliefs, we still ought to consider the issues independent of what anyone else thinks. The majority opinion often coincides with “good ideas,” but there’s no guarantee of that. Instead, we should all strive for independence in thought. That way, we can break echo chambers and instead harness the problem-solving power of the majority.

“А у вас негров линчуют.” During the Cold War era, this was the Soviet Union’s favorite response whenever the United States criticized their record on human rights. The phrase roughly translates to “And you are lynching Negroes,” referencing the horrific racial discrimination that occurred in Jim Crow America. Dear reader, I’m sure you see the problem with this supposed refutation. Racism in America was indeed a horrendous and pervasive societal problem. But the fact that America was racist did not somehow excuse Soviet suppression of free speech, imprisonment of political dissidents, and use of forced labor.

This is a fallacious rhetorical tactic commonly known as whataboutism, and its definition is exactly what one might expect. A sub-type of the tu quoque fallacy, whataboutism occurs when one tries to reject an opponent’s arguments by pointing out something else they said or did that makes their argument hypocritical. However, “hypocritical” and “logically invalid” are two completely different things. If a flat-earth theorist were to present a scientific talk filled with data proving that the earth is round, their position is hypocritical considering their past statements but not at all incorrect. Whataboutism can also take the form of a smokescreen which attempts to defend one’s behavior by showing evidence that someone else did the same thing and did not suffer negative consequences. If I were arrested for vandalism for attempting to attack a windmill, the fact that certain knights from La Mancha got away with the same action would not somehow exonerate me. (There are more possible permutations of this, but I think the gist of it is clear.)

Now, you may be wondering why I’m talking about this fallacy, which seems only to exist in the annals of Cold War history and in odd hypothetical scenarios. To answer, I’d like to present the following video. For some context, the speaker is U.S President Donald Trump, speaking in a press conference after the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Many rally participants identified as members of the “alt-right,” a blanket term encompassing several right-wing extremist ideologies. Among these alt-right members is the self-identified white supremacist who drove his car through a group of counter-protesters, resulting in many injuries and one death. The relevant line occurs at 6:14, though if you have time the rest of the video is worth watching.

“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?” This is textbook whataboutism. The President deflects the assertion that right-wing extremists caused the rally to turn violent by pointing the finger at a group he calls the “alt-left.” Even accepting the existence of such a group (a very nebulous proposition at best), this whataboutist argument does nothing to change the fact that self-identified members of the alt-right held up Nazi flags and committed other acts of violence. Whataboutism is unfortunately very much still a part of public discourse.

Now, I’ve obviously chosen one of the more blatant and dramatic examples of whataboutism in the public sphere. I’m well aware that a single example does not a pattern make. I also do not claim that whataboutism is a phenomenon unique to any ideological group. However, whataboutism is a problem no matter who employs it, as it inhibits constructive discussion and fosters division.

However, whataboutism does not always appear in such weighty subjects as race relations in the United States. Most of us all engage in some light whataboutism from time to time. Happily, this is a much easier problem to address. For example, I tend to be a terrible procrastinator. Some of my close friends also tend to be terrible procrastinators, which is perhaps not the best thing. I have more than once justified putting off work with the thought “yes, but such-and-such friend also procrastinates, and nothing bad seemed to happen to him.” Just because it works for that person doesn’t mean it will work for me, and it certainly does not make procrastination a wise idea! We should be conscious of our whataboutism, lest it influences us to make the same bad decisions that we see around us.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a tough habit to break. In decision-making as described above, our natural confirmation bias leads us to “what-about”-style arguments, since they’re comforting and reinforce the convictions we already have. In debate, the whataboutist approach is always tempting: it sounds good and can make it feel like you’ve defeated your opponent. But make no mistake! Whataboutism is shoddy argumentation, and we should strive to fight it in all its forms.

August 1st, 1940. My grandmother’s date of birth, and the point where our story begins. If you think back to your old modern world history class, reader, you’ll remember that this was around the peak of Japanese imperialism in the Pacific Rim. Thirty years earlier, Japan had annexed the Korean Peninsula. As their imperial ambitions grew and grew, they decided that a forceful cultural assimilation program in Korea was necessary for the integrity of the empire and to support the war effort. Among the elements of this program was the policy of sōshi-kaimei, or pressuring Koreans to take on Japanese names.

And so, before her life even had a chance to properly begin, my grandmother was not “Hyun-ja,” the Korean name her parents gave her, but “Yoshiko.” She was too young at the time to remember much, even when the Allied armies swept across the southern half of the peninsula five years later after Japan’s surrender. But my grandmother had survived the ordeal, which was only to be the first of many.

As far as she can recall, the years immediately following the liberation of Korea were a relatively calm time. The country had been split across the 38th parallel as part of a U.S-Soviet treaty, with a Communist-dominated North and a democratic capitalist South. While neither government acknowledged the legitimacy of the other, they maintained an uneasy peace. My great-grandfather was a civil servant in the southern city of Jeonju, and the family was able to live reasonably comfortably. Life seemed as if it were settling down, until June 25, 1950.

On that day, Chinese- and Soviet-backed forces from North Korea rushed across the border. As they advanced against the poorly-equipped South Korean army, the Communist Korean People’s Army (KPA) boldly announced they would capture and execute all South Korean government officials. In a panic, the family resolved that splitting up was the safest thing to do.

My great-grandfather fled by himself to Busan, the southeastern port city in the map above, while my great-grandmother took two of the children and escaped into the countryside. This left my grandmother, at just nine years old, with an older brother and a college student who had been staying with the family. The rag-tag trio decided to run for the college student’s home, in the countryside surrounding Jeonju.

My grandmother remembers the journey vividly. She remembers walking for hours on end, day after day. She remembers riding on the college student’s shoulders when her legs were so sore she couldn’t go on. At night, they would hide in barns or sheds or any shelter they could find. Even during the day, the group would all scatter behind nearby bushes and trees when they heard the rhythmic clomping of a KPA patrol unit’s boots. As the North Koreans pressed further south, patrol units appeared more and more often, forcing them to cut through mountain passes. Most of all, my grandmother remembers being hungry, and savoring the little brown chestnuts they managed to forage as if they were the finest food in the world.

Against the odds, the three made it to their destination, finally having access to proper food and shelter. But even there, the war was an ever-present menace. Brigades of darkly-clad North Korean soldiers would rap on the door. It was the same routine every time, my grandmother remembers. When it was opened, they would demand food and supplies, brandishing their rifles and shouting if they didn’t receive it fast enough. My grandmother was still too young to understand the political background of the war, but she knew very well that these strange men with their strange clothes and strange weapons did not mean well. When she heard that one of her older sisters had passed away while escaping, the residual stress and exhaustion reached a breaking point. She fell seriously ill, with what she now reflects was likely tuberculosis.

My grandmother doesn’t remember much of the following months. She remembers lying in bed, too weak to move, missing her father. She also remembers her host family going to extreme trouble to give her an egg every day in the hopes it would aid her recovery, despite how difficult it was to find any fresh food at all.

In one of those odd little serendipities, my grandmother’s condition began to improve just as South Korea’s military hopes began to do so as well. The UN counter-offensive led by Douglas MacArthur began to push back the KPA back north. With his life no longer in imminent danger, my great-grandfather came to visit. When her father stepped out of the Jeep wearing his dark green UN-humanitarian-aid jacket, my grandmother remembers feeling happy, properly happy, for the first time in months.

Though the fighting did not end until 1953, my grandmother’s family managed to reunite. They stopped by their old home in Jeonju, but there was absolutely nothing to see there. North Korean soldiers had ransacked the house and torn out anything of remote value, from clothing to the wooden furniture. With nothing left, the family headed for the capital Seoul, where my great-grandfather once again took up work as a civil servant.

My grandmother remembers the next few years as a blur. Her father worked hard and sent her to Kyunggi Girl’s Middle and High School, to this day considered some of the most elite schools in all of South Korea. Though her illness and the war meant she was behind in many subjects, she worked diligently and earned admission to Ewha Women’s University, once again one of the top Korean educational institutions. From there, she graduated and found work at the Bank of Korea, where she met and fell in love with my grandfather. With everything stacked against her, my grandmother had persevered and built a happy life for herself.

Now, there are still more stories to tell. There’s one particularly amusing anecdote involving a straw hat which I would very much like to tell sometime. But it was at this point that my grandmother stopped and asked if I had any questions for her: not questions about her life, just questions for her. I asked if she had any advice for me and other people of my generation. Her response, translated as best as possible, goes as follows.

“Know the history of your country, of your parents, and of your grandparents. After the war, the older generation had to work extremely hard to bring this country out of the ashes. Remember this when you consider how to deal with North Korea and other current issues. Understand where you come from so you can know where you’re going.”

To my shame, I knew little about the realities of Korea in the mid-1900s beyond a simple textbook level. Speaking with my grandmother helped me realize the tremendous degree of suffering many war survivors went through, and gave me a new appreciation for their resilience and perseverance. Times change, but stories like this should not be forgotten.

 

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is, first and foremost, a wonderful read. Her prose is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Every sentence is packed with meaning, and they flow wonderfully, never feeling awkward or superfluous. That said, it’s certainly more than just pretty rhetoric. Wharton bases her writing on her own upper-class experience during America’s Gilded Age. Think Carnegie, Tammany Hall, Standard Oil. Society in this time was built on transactions, monetary or otherwise. The marketplace was the law of the land, and Wharton captures this in her writing.

Wharton’s protagonist, Lily Bart, is a penniless socialite who stays afloat in high-class society using her charms and stunning natural beauty. She enjoys plenty of privileges, attending parties and other gatherings with the elites of New York society. Exciting and grand as her life seems, the omnipresent hand of the marketplace bears down on her just as it did to the entirety of Gilded Age American society. Lily’s struggle is the fact that she perpetually falls into the role of the debtor. She always owes something to someone else.

In the most obvious examples, this takes the form of money. Lily’s extravagant lifestyle means she has to spend every spare dollar to “pacify her dress-maker” or perhaps “to use it as a sop to the jeweller.” In her desperation, she eventually turns to Gus Trenor, entering a nebulous relationship with him. He provides her with much-needed cash injections, but expects an intimate physical relationship to return. This is unpalatable to Lily, who cuts off the dubious “partnership” and plunges herself irreversibly into debt.

But Lily’s “debt” extends beyond just the monetary. Her membership in the upper class is in itself like a loan. Financially speaking, Lily has no business associating with the wealthy businessmen and the other rich people who make up New York’s nouveaux riche elite. Every second she spends in their company without money of her own is borrowed time. Yet loans come with interest payments, and Lily is no exception. She remarks that she feels like “a mere pensioner” partaking in “the luxury of others.” She discusses playing cards with her upper-class friends and calls it “one of the taxes” she must pay to stay in the upper class. Wharton’s use of fiscal terms is no accident: the true cost of Lily’s privileges comes from her being forced to constantly accommodate the expectations of her social creditors.

Much like a real debtor suffering from the compounding of interest, Lily’s social interest payments only grow more burdensome. Lily participates in a tableaux vivant, a recreation of a painting using human actors. She recreates the painting below (Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Lloyd), using her looks to her advantage. Observers like her relative Ned van Alstyne ogle Lily, accepting her beauty as another interest payment on her borrowed membership in the upper class.

As her situation worsens, Lily escapes to Europe on a cruise with fellow socialite Bertha Dorset. There, her friend Lawrence Selden observes that she has become a kind of social chameleon in her attempts to remain in the good graces of high society. She had become “‘perfect’ to every one,” acting “subservient” to Bertha’s social ambitions, “good-naturedly watchful” to Bertha’s neurotic husband, and “brightly companionable” to other members of the group. Eventually, though, this burden becomes unbearable. Bertha Dorset has an affair, and enlists Lily to distract her husband and cover it up. When Lily fails at this task, Bertha exiles her from the cruise ship, humiliating her publicly. Lily has finally run out of means with which to pay interest. When Bertha “calls in” Lily’s debt by expelling her from the company of the elites, Lily has no recourse, and falls to social ruin.

As a high school student as yet unaware of the hardships of the “real world,” I relate more to Lily’s figurative social debt than her literal monetary debt. Lily’s initial social strategy is to stay in her hosts’ good graces by playing cards and being an entertaining guest, by adopting their lifestyle. I see this very much in my day-to-day school life. Everyone has a “crowd,” so to speak. I tend to find myself in what you might call the “nerd crowd,” which manifests in my competitive high school as a group of motivated students eager to learn and succeed academically. There’s an expectation that everyone has similar interests. Instead of sitting together and playing bridge, we argue about the treatment of androids in science fiction novels or how brutally difficult that last economics test was. To be sure, I actually enjoy these discussions. But there’s always the feeling that they’re a requirement in order to belong. As high schoolers, we have to adapt ourselves to the standard of one group or another or risk being left behind.

During darker times in my life, I’ve questioned why people bother to associate with me at all. After all, I’m not particularly tall nor particularly attractive nor a particularly charming person. In the past, I concluded that people valued me as a kind of service-giver, especially in terms of help with schoolwork. People kept me around because I adapted to their needs and helped them out when needed. If I stopped “being useful,” I would be cast aside, just like Bertha Dorset does to Lily. I know now that this was an immature mindset. I do have true friends who value for who I am. But the spectre of that question remains.

On my earlier post about my rolling backpack, I received a few comments, one of which struck me as particularly pertinent. The blogger who runs “tiradeswithtommy” referenced how tribalism is built into human history and observed that “people are often eager to sacrifice comfort for social acceptability.” We all sacrifice a bit of our individuality in order to fit in with the group. We are all debtors to the security that our groups or tribes, as tiradeswithtommy might put it, provide.

One last issue remains, then. What is it that keeps us high schoolers going? Why do we not go the way of Lily Bart? The answer is honesty. Lily does not truly belong in the upper class. She has numerous opportunities to escape her financial woes by marrying a rich suitor, but sabotages or rejects each one. In her heart of hearts, she does not want to become just another Bertha Dorset, but she pursues upper-class life nonetheless. Thus her social obligations become unbearable, compounding on themselves like interest and crushing her. We high schoolers must also constantly pay for our membership in our social groups. But by being honest and surrounding ourselves with people we actually care for, we bear the load together and persist.

Ask me anything in the comments!