In my first post on intuition I mentioned how it fascinated me how often our intution is wrong. This fascination started with the natural sciences, but when it comes to social and political science it becomes even more fascinating. Mostly because it stops being personal and reliance on intuition across the population I think leads to bad policy decisions.
I thought it would be interesting to touch on some cases off the top of my head where intuition leads us (or has led us) down mistaken paths.
Availability of pornography increases sexual crimes. I was reminded of this one this week when I saw an article (http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/) on this topic citing a study that found the opposite. It's not the first study I've seen referenced that found the same. Same goes for violent movies/games/music and crime rates.
Constantly praising kids will raise their self esteem. We went through quite a period of "all kids need to win" which I think was a real problem. I've read a lot in recent years about how the opposite actually is true. Kids know when they're being gamed, and the praise is devalued if they know they didn't do much to get it. They lose their incentive to try harder. They will also give up earlier on hard problems because they don't know what it means to be challenged. This is an area that seems to be correcting, and the Pixar movie The Incredibles did a great job on this theme. Self-esteem is important of course - and more important is earning it. For some reason our intuition was that we could create self-esteem out of thin air.
College financial aid makes college more affordable. Intuitively it makes sense, if you ignore (purposely or not) fundamental dynamics of economics. Means-tested assistance does make sense, but the system we have has clearly gotten out of control. College education inflation has persisted over time well above the general inflation rate because it has turned into a government subsidized industry. I actually think this one will change. It might be painful, like the real estate bubble bursting, but by the time my daughter is of college age (17 years!) I expect this to be much different. Technology will eventually undercut the traditional model, and I think you're starting to see that.
The price of real estate will always go up. We're living the effects of that mistaken intuition (or maybe just what was previously a massively-shared assumption), but how can you not mention it?
Our neighborhoods are more dangerous now than when I was a kid. To see the levels of protection applied to today's kids you'd think so anyway. In second grade (7 years old) I walked more than a mile to school, along and across major roads, in a city. Now we have parents in the suburbs waiting with their kids for the bus at the end of their driveway. Of course I think we mostly know that it's the availability of information about bad things happening that has actually gone up. We're bombarded by media that sells us the fear that is mostly what we'll respond to with buying.
Paper money is worth something. Maybe this is less an intuition, and more a shared scam we've mostly bought into. But all past fiat currencies have been hyperinflated out of existence.
The heads of our government are less greedy than the heads of our corporations. I think we have this intuition because we naturally want to believe the someone is looking out for us, and that government (or at least our US government) is automatically benevolent. The reality is that people are mostly all the same. This intuition causes us to not be critical enough of the power government assumes for itself.
I want to finish up with the punchline - why I think we live under a tyranny of intuition and why it's probably inevitable (which, admittedly, is disappointing). It's this:
* Most people are fine not looking past their intuitions;
* They will elect representatives who cater to those intuitions;
* In many cases these intuitions are wrong.
As a result, the major policy decisions that contol the ways we live our lives and limits our freedom are and will continue to be mainly driven by the mistaken intutions of the majority of the population.
It's not a happy story, but it's a conclusion I've been coming to more and more these days. Could I be wrong? I'd actually hope so. Is my intuition that most people are fine not looking past their intuitions wrong? My experience says no - and the level of discourse of recent policy discussions that I've witnessed reinforces this for me.
Well, at least I got that off my chest.
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