Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [60]
This is the lesson we learned with optical illusions, and it is the fundamental lesson of inductive reasoning as well: our mistakes are part and parcel of our brilliance, not the regrettable consequences of a separate and deplorable process. Our options in life are not careful logical reasoning, through which we get things right, versus shoddy inductive reasoning, through which we get things wrong. Our options are inductive reasoning, which probably gets things right, and inductive reasoning, which—because it probably gets things right—sometimes gets things wrong. In other words, and appropriately enough, Descartes was half right. Believing something on the basis of messy, sparse, limited information really is how we err. But it is also how we think. What makes us right is what makes us wrong.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that inductive reasoning doesn’t just sometimes make us wrong. It makes us wrong in ways that are a complete embarrassment to our self-image as clear-eyed, fair-minded, conscientious, reasonable thinkers.
Take a story that was told to me by a man named Donald Leka. Back in 1978, when his two children were in elementary school, Don volunteered to help out at a PTA fundraiser. In the interest of earning a laugh as well as some money, he set up a booth advertising legal advice for 25 cents—a sort of lawyerly version of Lucy’s advice booth in Peanuts. The booth was obviously something of a jest, but as a responsible lawyer, Don was careful to staff it with practicing members of the bar. So he was alarmed to learn that a guest had gotten legal advice about a healthcare issue not from a colleague who was among those appointed to give such advice, a man named Jim, but from Jim’s wife. “I grew quite concerned,” Don recollected, “because even though this was lighthearted, I didn’t want people’s wives just going around giving advice. As soon as I could, I located Jim and told him what his wife was doing”—at which point, Jim informed Don that his wife was general counsel of the largest HMO in the city.
Needless to say, this story is cringe inducing. Also needless to say, the person who has cringed the most is Don, who chalked up his mistake to “ignorant sexism” and still winces about it today. But the reason we make mistakes like this isn’t just ignorant sexism. It is also because of the pitfalls of inductive reasoning. Even in 2007, when Don told me this story, only a quarter of the lawyers in the United States were women. In the 1970s, the figure was in the low single digits, and Don’s experiences bore that out. When he graduated from Harvard Law in 1967, twenty-six of his 525 classmates were women—just over 5 percent. When he took his first job, he had one female colleague out of twenty-three lawyers—just under 5 percent. In Don’s experience, 95 percent of lawyers were male. Most of us would be willing to put some money on 95 percent odds, and in essence that’s what happened at the PTA event. Unbeknownst to Don, his brain crunched the numbers and made a bet. As it happened, that bet bit him in the butt. But, for good or for ill, it wasn’t a bad bet—just a wrong one.
This is the problem with the guesswork that underlies our cognitive system. When it works well (and, as we’ve seen, overall it works better than anything else around), it makes us fast, efficient thinkers capable of remarkable intellectual feats. But, as with so many systems, the strengths of inductive reasoning are also its weaknesses. For every way that induction serves us admirably, it also creates a series of predictable