Different Types of Errors, Same Endpoint
Democrats should bear the blame for their stupendous errors and the Republicans for not stopping them. It’s not fair to say everything sucks, but America is certainly approaching terminal suck.
The greatest challenge in governance of a free republic is also its greatest feature and its greatest danger. That challenge can be explained in these two propositions:
Doing something when doing nothing would yield a better result (deciding something is true when it is false - a Type I error).
Doing nothing when action is required to achieve a desired result (deciding something is false when it is true - a Type II error).
Knowing which one of these is to avoid would seem to rest on simple logic and adherence to the basic core principles of our Constitution, yet almost without qualification and with unerring accuracy, our elite political class relies on focus groups and current public opinion, flips a coin, and chooses wrongly in almost every case.
I am a partisan, but that does not mean I ignore the failures of the political party with which I most identify – the Republican Party. At a national level, the two major parties can be identified by the type of error the are most likely to commit.
The Democrats live in a world filled with Type I errors, prone to do things when doing nothing would be better. The Green New Deal, Critical Race Theory, the indoctrination and sexualization of children, Build Back Bungled, draconian pandemic responses, and the American “Rescue” Plan are all examples of things the Democrats have done that America did not need, and yet these types of errors are all they know how to do.
From 1988 until 2016, the GOP allowed the Democrats to take America down this road by living to commit the Type II errors – doing nothing when doing something would be the best course.
Reluctant to act in forceful enough measure when in control, the Republicans always act as if they are the minority even when they have majority power. They simply fear leading the nation because if they do, people will say mean things about them. Since Reagan, there were only two minor breaks in this trajectory, the first was when the GOP, under the guidance of Newt Gingrich in 1994, won the majority in the House for the first time in forty years. The second one came with the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.
I blame Democrats for their stupendous errors and the Republicans for not stopping them. It’s not fair to say everything sucks, but we are certainly approaching terminal suck.
Sadly, with the “election” of Joe Biden, a man whose half a century career in Washington is the poster child for Type I errors, we not only returned to doing stuff when doing nothing would be better, the Democrats have gone for broke by doing things designed to disrupt this nation completely and permanently.
No matter what politicians say, they are motivated by power…not principle. You must be a little arrogant and egotistic to even put yourself forward for what is really the world’s biggest episode of American Idol.
Most of our elected officials are successful and wealthy people already – or they are trained to be. They are lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, etc., so there is only one answer to why they would walk away from contouring in that track and move to a lower paying government job – the accumulation of power. Even those who want “to do good for the little guy” are running to accumulate the power to effect changes that they want to see.
And after they do get elected, the desire to be re-elected becomes an overwhelming motivating force.
The effect of this desire to be elected/re-elected creates a situation very common to any process. Over-adjusting. The temptation of politicians to be swayed by the fad of the moment, their inability to resist when the constituency wants them to “do something!” about every issue, leads to lack of consistency and a herky-jerky motion in our system of governance.
Life is a process, and every process is subject to something called the central limit theorem - that states that the highs and lows all oscillate around a mean - we see this in life. Our lives tend to be ordinary for most of the time with pluses and minuses moving back and forth across what we would call a “normal” day, so much so that we can go all day without a truly memorable moment (can you tell me what you did every minute of last Wednesday?) but we also recognize when we have extraordinary highs or lows, “outliers” or special events – those are what we remember.
Governing a society is no different than managing a manufacturing process. Most of the time life just hums along without intervention, and when it does, we call that common cause variation – life is in statistical control – but every so often an event happens that is so far out of the norm that we do notice it.
Just like with any process, if the event is desirable, we want to adjust to have more of it. If undesirable, the temptation is to adjust the process to prevent the unacceptable variation – but before we give into that temptation, we should understand if that point is an outlier, a one-off event with a special cause, one that is NOT characteristic of the normal variation of life.
If we don’t understand the event, we risk “over-adjusting” the process and thereby making the problem worse. We need to understand if the process is changing or there is an assignable cause because it may not be an indication of a process change or shift at all and left alone, the process, just like life, will settle back to the natural, common variation.
When faced with such a change, politicians and people who are weak in principle will panic, then romp down and twist the control knobs all the way up to eleven and then when the process jumps too far to one side, they yank it back down to zero and the process just keeps jumping back and forth from one extreme to the other – it never stabilizes.
The process remains out of control.
David Polansky, a political theorist and research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy summed up the current condition when he tweeted:
“I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure.”
If we hew to principles, this does not happen. Principles inform us when to act and when not to act. We aren’t swayed by fads and trends. Principles are the steadying force to the process, the controls.
Politicians are swayed by politics, ergo the name.
Politics change, principles do not.
Check out the “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. About reacting to unexpected events. Good read.
““The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.fn1
I push one step beyond this philosophical-logical question into an empirical reality, and one that has obsessed me since childhood.fn2 What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”
Excerpt From
The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It’s like forty Swatted up police taking down a 55 year old pastor. ‘His services are possibly killing people. He’s a murderer. Swat up everyone. We got a bad guy to take down’. Way way way easier than doing something actually important. Like going after fentanyl sellers.