This is the specific bit I am referring to:
If it's very uncomfortable to put in the work required to make informed judgments, then maybe that's an argument that people will only make high-quality choices when they are more motivated to do so. E.g. people would start to care about economics during a recession, or agriculture during a famine. The evidence I see contradicts this hypothesis. If anything, we rely more on heuristics and simplistic answers like blaming each other when the going gets tough.
My understanding of his statement = if making informed decisions is merely uncomfortable/hard, then we would expect people to still resort to doing it when sufficiently motivated. For example, people would start making better-informed decisions during crises. This does not seem to match reality, therefore (implied) the premise must be wrong.
My response = you have made a logical error in assuming the people REALIZE they are making simplistic decisions and can choose an alternative when motivated.
If I've misunderstood your point, @ChpBstrd, please do feel free to correct me.
I was bringing up issues related to the two statements brought up earlier, without necessarily proposing an alternative:
(1)
@Luke Warm's statement the vast majority of people are incapable of making "logical and informed" decision, and
(2)
@Metalcat's statement that thinking hard, handling complexity, and arriving at better quality conclusions is more difficult than simply relying on heuristics and biases, yet can still be done (I may be over-summarizing here).
As
@reeshau notes that second point is consistent with psychological research about "fast" and "slow" thinking, and how we only resort to the slower, more deliberative style of thinking when we have to. I.e. when we're motivated to spend the mental energy.
It seemed to me like voters who say they have a lot at stake and care a lot about political outcomes are nonetheless behaving as if the issues of the world aren't worth the expenditure of much mental energy. They are passionate, but not passionate enough to be informed, to study underlying issues, or to engage in an analysis that goes beyond tribalism and empty-minded political slogans.
@Tasse made the point that people might not realize they are operating on the most shallow level of thought and are therefore never in a position to say "maybe I should gather some more information on this subject". The psychologists proposing "fast" and "slow" modes of thinking, like Kahneman, do not generally require us to be aware of what we're doing in order to engage level 2 thinking resources. Rather, deeper processing is triggered by motivation or unexpected confounding information. Still,
@Tasse might be onto an interesting possible explanation for the paradox of motivated voters who cannot muster cognitive effort.
Maybe the abstract political concepts we argue about such as the cause of budget deficits, what foreign policy choices will deliver the best outcomes, or whether climate change is a bigger priority than economic concerns are so divorced from being immediately consequential to our lives that they are processed with the shortcuts of biases, heuristics, slogans, and tribal affiliation.
It is possible to be deeply concerned about climate change, for example, but to spend more mental energy thinking about what recipe to cook for dinner each night. The former is an abstract, distant issue while the latter will have an immediate effect on one's life and absolutely must be managed now. And so a person can be expected to analyze recipes carefully, rather than reading journal articles about renewable energy or the pros and cons of natural gas as a replacement for coal.
Yet macro / political issues have a way of affecting our lives more than the immediate stuff we apply our time and brainpower to understanding. When we apply all our mental energy to immediately-applicable topics and use "fast" thinking processes to cast votes, we can collectively put ourselves in situations more overwhelmingly problematic than any of the problems we actually spent our mental energy on.
The best dinner recipe is no longer the problem engaging people's minds in Venezuela, where voters' choices have led to such deep poverty that the new question is how not to starve. Voters in Turkyie elected leadership for religious-tribal reasons, and those leaders' economic policies led to the rapid collapse of their currency's value. Voters for Brexit found the slogans emotionally appealing and are now watching their quality of life decline as their financial and export sectors whither, just as the analytical types warned would happen. Many voters who liked Putin's image in Russia have received notice that their sons have been killed fighting a war of vanity in Ukraine.
Again and again, 21st century voters are making choices that demolish their quality of life, cede their own freedom, or lead to instability. In theory, they should have been motivated to become fluent in the technical topics of governance, geopolitics, history, economics, epidemiology, or military affairs, but they did not. If anything, elections in recently troubled places are more about low-brow word games and identity politics than they were before.
Now hundreds of millions of people around the world are suffering the consequences of their votes, after applying more cognitive effort to resolving issues in their careers or in fixing their cars than in voting against the clowns that crushed their entire economies.
Perhaps people systematically underestimate the importance of the political process to their long-term well-being? Perhaps the difference made by each individual voter is so small that it doesn't justify an investment of cognitive resources by each individual voter (e.g. one vote out of millions versus what's for dinner tonight).
IDK but I'd like to get to the bottom of it. Not so much because it would help me vote better, but because there are lots of benefits to being the analytically motivated person when no one else is putting in the effort. E.g. If President Trump reduces central bank independence in the U.S, I would invest in anticipation of higher inflation, such as by avoiding or shorting long-duration bonds and banks. E.g.#2 if it looks like U.S. democracy is collapsing, I'd hopefully emigrate before things got too bad, rather than ending up trapped like the impoverished serfs of Venezuela or Russia.
The macro picture may be mostly outside my circle of control, but making the right life decisions definitely requires being in alignment with what's happening, and to do that one has to be engaged in what's going on, and aware of a lot of information. It is a mystery to me how so many people are engaged in the small stuff and largely disregard the big stuff.
