Over at Statistical Modeling, Casual Interference, and Social Science blog, there’s a blog post discussing the VP’s marketing techniques sent via email to help pass the administration’s health care reform (here):

———- Forwarded message ———- Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:06:43 -0400 From: Vice President Joe Biden Subject: You’ve got to read these

A few weeks ago, President Obama asked you to share your personal story about how the health care crisis has affected you and the ones you love. Hundreds of thousands of stories poured in from every corner of the country. The President and I have read through many of them ourselves — and now I’m encouraging you to do so as well.

Read these powerful, personal stories from people in your area and around the country:

http://healthcare.barackobama.com/stories

And after you do, please forward this note on to as many people as you can.

For folks who don’t yet understand why health care reform is such an urgent priority, these stories make the case far better than any statistics ever could.

What’s interesting to note, is that this kind of thinking, pushing anecdotes instead of solid science, should rightfully seem irrational to most people.  However, the truth is the more people to follow Mr. Biden’s advice, the more adherents to his beliefs on health care reform he is likely to have.

He is basically exploiting a known human weakness in critical thinking.  A consistent issue all humans have to deal with is an inability to compare any one thing to all things possible.  That is, we have a poor ability to see things in a rational statistical manor.  For instance, we are scared of things that are statistically improbable, while at the same time we can have heightened sensitivities about things that are highly improbable.

We do this by making any comparisons against what we know or have seen, instead of comparing things against what’s possible.  This was demonstrated in the book Freakamonics, wherein the authors discuss the difference in the fear of parents possibly sending their children to other homes where guns might exist (1 in 1 million chance of death), juxtaposed against the indifference most parents have with sending their children to homes with pools (1 in 11,000).

When’s the last time you saw a news item on recent pool deaths?  When’s the last time you saw a news item about gun violence?

This is also demonstrated when polling people with questions about how many deaths they think are caused by various possibilities.  The consistently overestimate the number of deaths on causes which are very infrequent, but on TV more often (swine flu), and underestimate the number of deaths on causes which are much more frequent, yet never on TV (asthma).

This helps explain why polls currently show things such as; 45% of respondents are somewhat or very satisfied with the current health care system, yet 80% of respondents are somewhat or very satisfied with their personal health care.

This thinking also helps explain why all sort of new, completely unproven vitamins, homeopathic remedies, special healing diets, detoxes, and the rest continue to have solid adherents, but absolutely no proven track record or even any attempt to come up with a testable hypothesis.

The truly awful thing is that this thinking has not only invaded seriously complex debates such as health care, but also scientific thinking, such as grant funding from the National Institutes of Health:

I was on an NIH panel a couple of years ago with about 25 other scientists…

The highlight–or, I should say, lowlight–was when we were reviewing a proposal involving the study of the carcinogenic effects of hookah (water pipe) smoking. I asked if this was really such a big deal, and one of the panel members told me that smoking tobacco through a hookah is something like 10 times worse than smoking a cigarette. If so, the public health consequences could be pretty serious, even if not so many people did it. I said this sounded like a reasonable point to me. Then this guy across the table from me spoke up and said that he knew somebody who was 80 years old, had been smoking with a hookah all his life and was none the worse from it. At this point, I blew up. I couldn’t believe that the “my elderly aunt smokes and she didn’t get cancer” argument could be brought up at an NIH panel!

So in a real sense, if you could get people to read hundreds of anecdotes, you can effectively change someone’s comparative model if they aren’t deliberate in their thinking.

I think we need to be reminded or one of my favorite speeches by the esteemed physicist Richard Feynman, titled Cargo Cult Science In it, he addresses science majors that while ethics classes aren’t an express part of a normal science education, they should all learn that the cumulative effect of their science education should be the ability and responsibility to ignore pseudoscience.  They should see through their many classes that utilize the scientific principles of analysis, that science should always be a vehicle in which we strive to find the truth.

You combine the fact that humans use internal anecdotal evidence when making most of their comparisons, with pressure from cognitive dissonance helping people to fall for confirmation biases; it seems intuitive that serious and well meaning people can end up believing all sorts of things that simply aren’t provable in any real sense.

Of course understanding this is only the first step – admitting the problem.  We should next expect better out of our government and our elected representatives.  We should expect more from news organizations and TV personalities who wish to push an agenda.  We should expect more out of researchers and any organization that publishes things labeled as “science”.

In the end though, we should really expect more out of ourselves.  We should always be vigilant in seeking the truth through the obfuscation of effective propaganda which plays on our weaknesses.