I was sitting at lunch following another successful weekly anti-Trump Rally, when a regular reader of Daily Kos told me Trump would be re-elected.
Sometimes, when a rush of counter-arguments floods my brain before I can articulate a single coherent thought, I resort to an old ploy to assert my certainty: “I’ll bet you $20 you’re wrong!”
She took the bet. We even shook on it. I rarely, if ever bet on anything. In Las Vegas I spent more on taxi cab rides than at the tables. I prefer to play games where you don’t have to gamble to make things interesting.
I immediately felt guilty because I figured the odds were nine to one in my favor. Moreover, I knew where her irrational fear came from, and frankly I was exploiting it by shaking hands to confirm the wager, prior to formulating a professorial psychological explanation. I was making a judgment based on what Psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls thinking slow while she was making a judgment based on thinking fast. I prefer the term the probable mind for thinking slow, and the improbable mind for thinking fast. I am no smarter than the woman I made the bet with. All of us have both a probable and improbable mind. However, the improbable mind is our default mechanism. Probable thinking is slower and more difficult, but much more likely to be accurate.
Prior to my passionate incursion into politics, (I’m running for office in South Carolina), I was a Psychology professor. I call myself a Political Psychologist, as the two fields overlap. There is something Psychologists call the Availability Heuristic. This simply means we are far more likely to fear unlikely dangerous events that are seared into our memory, than likely dangerous events that are not seared into our memory. This is why we are more likely to fear an airplane crash, than a car crash, even though flying is actually safer. Airplane crashes make the news. This is why we fear mass shootings more than single shootings. Mass shootings make the news. This is why we fear the corona virus and Ebola more than the flu.
We should remember that in spite of our modern technological wonders, psychologically our brains have evolved to deal with dangers our pre-historic ancestors had to face almost daily. If you lived 100,000 years ago and got mauled by a bear or bitten by a snake, the memory seared into your brain protected you such future encounters. Your own experiences were your best teacher. It didn’t matter how many snakes were harmless or how many bears were docile; your chances of survival increased dramatically fearing all bears or snakes. Like the adage says; once bitten, twice shy.
Yet our brains haven’t had a chance to evolve since the inventions of the telegraph, the telephone, television, and the internet. A child abducted from a front lawn in California sends shock-waves of fear across the country, so that soon a mother in Maine is afraid to allow her children to go outside to play. It doesn’t matter what the mathematical probability of such an event actually is; if we see it on TV or the internet, it is as if it happens all the time right where we live.
This explains all kinds of irrational thinking— thinking that ignores mathematical probabilities. Today, at the Y, I had to get out of the pool after only two of twenty-two laps because someone heard thunder. Never mind it was an indoor pool. Never mind the odds of drowning by swimming laps were far greater than by being struck by lightning. Never mind the odds of dying from a heart attack because of a lack of exercise were far greater than the risk of drowning in a pool. As the life-guard herself explained, she remembered one time lighting did affect an indoor pool even though such an event is extremely rare.
This is why we fear Trump will become re-elected. It doesn’t matter that the odds of his becoming president the first time were one-out-of-six. It doesn’t matter that the odds of his becoming re-elected are even less now. Most all of us assumed he would never be president and it happened. The tragic day he won is seared into our memory. We were angry, distraught and depressed. We were in a state of shock and disbelief. How could this happen?! It was an experience we can never forget, and consequently, a fear we can never shake―until the day he is finally dragged out of the White House kicking and screaming because he lost the 2020 election.
Yet as rational as we all claim to be, we often resort to silly superstitions. We told everyone Trump couldn’t win and he did. Rationally, using the probable mind, we know our saying he couldn’t win didn’t affect his winning. Nevertheless, learning from experience, we want to believe if we now say he will win, then he will lose. It’s sort of like saying “break a leg” to offer good luck, for fear if you say “good luck” it will backfire.
So where did I get the one-out-of-six probability? From Nate Silver who calculated Trump only had a 20% chance of beating Hillary Clinton; and from The New York Times which estimated Trump had only a 15% chance of winning. Figuring the actual odds were somewhere in between, I calculated the odds were closer to16.667%, or rolling a “snake eye” from a single die. (A snake eye is a single dot, representing the number one. In craps, “snake eyes” is rolling two dice and getting a total of two, one dot from each die.)
Were Nate Silver and the New York Times wrong? Not necessarily. If a weatherman predicts only a 10% chance of rain, and it pours, it doesn’t mean the weatherman was wrong—providing this occurs only about one time in ten under the same conditions. The reason Trump won was he was lucky enough to beat the odds. Had James Comey not come out with an eleventh hour investigation of Hillary Clinton, or had a couple of thousand popular votes gone the other way in one or two states, Hillary Clinton would have won the Electoral vote as well as the popular vote. Many critics contend Clinton didn’t work hard enough for votes in key states like Michigan and Wisconsin. They have a point. It is easy to become complacent when the odds are greatly in your favor, even though such complacency has the effect of shifting the odds against you.
It is not that optimism isn’t good. What matters is how people deal with either optimism or pessimism. If a college student is optimistic about an upcoming exam and consequently studies long and hard expecting a good grade, such optimism is positive because it leads to more studying. If another college student is pessimistic about the exam, and thus doesn’t study figuring he can’t pass anyway, such pessimism is bad. However, the reverse is also true. If a student studies a great deal because they are pessimistic they will flunk if they don’t, the pessimism is good, because it results in more studying. Yet if a student doesn’t study enough because they are so optimistic they will do well without studying, then such optimism is counter-productive. Neither optimism nor pessimism is the controlling factor that affects grades; the controlling factor is how much the student studies.
This week Trump was acquitted as all but one Republican Senator were too chicken-shit to put the well-being of our country ahead of their own personal political ambitions. To make matters worse, Trump added insult to injury with despicable comments about the Democrats efforts to impeach him. Instead of feeling contrite or sorry after impeachment (like Bill Clinton) or acting less volatile and belligerent (like Andrew Johnson), Donald Trump has only become more arrogant, more obnoxious, more abusive, and more dangerous.
In spite of the fact Nancy Pelosi was reluctant to impeach Trump for political reasons, and the fact the Republicans insisted the only reason for the impeachment was for political reasons; Fox News Fiction yesterday declared the Democrats made a political miscalculation. Really? Did the Democrats really think Trump would be removed by his sycophantic cronies in the Republican Senate? The Democrats did the right thing, and they did so courageously and eloquently. Even so, in the wake of Trumps bogus claims that the entire impeachment was a political witch-hunt, it is normal for us to feel disappointed and depressed.
Consequently our improbable thinking becomes unrealistically pessimistic. If Trump can survive this, he can survive anything—including his bid for re-election. This, I believe, is the reason that in a two-day period after his acquittal, three different Democrats who loathe Trump stated matter-of-factly to me that Trump was going to be re-elected in 2020.
I could write an entire diary explaining why Trump is even less likely to win in 2020, but I have already read a couple here at Daily Kos who have said so better than I could. Yet remember, such analysis is based on probable rational slow thinking, and as human beings, we are far more prone to improbable emotional fast thinking. And when the fear factor kicks in, we fear Trump will win again repealing our democracy and replacing it with dictatorial tyranny.
In my previous diary I mentioned that I had “won” $1650 playing my game of computer solitaire over a series of 200 games. At that time my recent experience all but convinced me I finally was able to win this game one-out-of-four times, even though thousands of times before that I only won an average of one game out of five. My improbable mind expected to keep winning, and everything I had studied about regression to the mean faded from my memory.
What does regression to the mean mean? It simply means that in the short run, and even 200 hundred games is a short run, results can
seemingly defy the odds, but eventually they will return to the mean average. I was reminded of this statistical principle when I had lost everything I won in the next 80 games.
The point is, recent experiences trump reasoned calculations. Last night I was driving through downtown Greenville where there were a dozen traffic lights in a row. Luckily, I hit seven green lights in a row. Even though this seemed to defy the odds I expected the next light to be green. When the eighth light was red I wasn’t just disappointed; I felt something must be wrong. The reverse is also true, if you get seven red lights in a row, you expect the eighth light to be red, even though you want a green light. Perhaps this was the point of the play Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern are Dead, where, flipping a true coin, heads comes up 78 times in a row. Of course, as a playwright, Tom Stoppard can write a script where a coin always comes up heads, but watching the movie or play we, the audience, soon expects the coin to keep coming up heads despite the odds.
So my friends, fear not. Providing optimism doesn’t turn into complacency, and in spite of Trump’s seeming ability to get away with any outrage; this coin is going to be face-down in the mud in 2020. Do I know this for certain? I wish I did, as if he doesn’t lose, we all lose. But I am willing to bet on it.
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Greenville, SC. 29607