The Liberal Mind – The Continuing Conundrum of Conditional Contingencies

George Rebane

In this sector of RR we dedicate our efforts to the eternal pursuit and understanding of the liberal mind.  Awakened this morning by NPR’s segment on the November election, and Obama’s strategy for victory, jogged a stream of thought that may shed light on another important aspect of how our ideological opposites cope with the realworld.  That radio segment with correspondents Mara Liasson and Cokie Roberts emphasized that Obama’s electoral fate will depend on the vote of the Hispanics and blacks, and that today only 10% of the electorate remains uncommitted.

I’ll come back to this report in a moment, but first let me offer the latest proposition to 'The Liberal Mind' – liberals don’t do well with conditional contingencies.  Specifically, most left-leaning (and those already toppled) thinkers seem to have a cognitive block differentiating between the likelihood (probability) of X being true, given that Y is true; and the likelihood (probability) Y being true, given that X is true.  In shorthand these probabilities are written P(X|Y) and P(Y|X) respectively.  And the conundrum that liberals, in the aggregate, suffer from is that they believe P(X|Y) = P(Y|X).  The comment streams on these pages are full of propositions, counters, arguments, and observations by our liberal readers that attest to this assertion.  Moreover, the media ‘airwaves’ covering our public forum debates contribute a daily torrent of supporting evidence based on that erroneous equality.

To give a concrete example, let’s examine the ongoing international terror threat (see figure).  When covering public policy that responds to that threat, I (and others) have offered prescriptions that recommend keeping a more careful eye on people professing Islam – in other words, given limited resources, devote a greater fraction of them to the examination of Muslims.  The inevitable (as day follows night) liberal response is, ‘So George, you believe that all Muslims are terrorists.’  And from there the discussion devolves into charges and accusations of racism, bigotry, code words, etc brought on by the firings across all politically correct synapses in the liberal mind.

The cognitive mistake here is believing that P(terrorist|Muslim) = P(Muslim|terrorist).  Equating the two is an error that is easily dispelled with the help of the above graphic.  The greater mystery, perhaps apprehended by clinical studies (here), is why the liberal is continually comfortable with such arguments.  And I’m talking about liberals from the halls of COTUS, SCOTUS, and POTUS down to the local worthies who successfully carry such water to their brethren who can’t or don’t think.

The currently claimed Muslim population is 2.1B (compared to 2.0B Christians), and the active terrorists in the world number in the tens of thousands, say 50,000 - the exact number is not important in this development.  What is important is that the record of terror during the last 20 or so years has overwhelmingly included people of the Muslim faith.  In other words, were we to write down on slips of paper all the known attempts and acts of terror, along with the declared faiths of their perpetrators, and then draw one at random, the probability is close to one (i.e. certainty) that the faith(s) of the terrorist(s) is Islam.  In other words the probability that a person is a Muslim given that he is also a terrorist, P(Muslim|terrorist), equals almost one.  This can be seen from the figure by looking at the magnification of the red rectangle representing all known terrorist acts and attempts, and then seeing what fraction of that rectangle falls over (intersects) the green rectangle that represents all the world’s Muslims.

As we look at the obverse, by putting a slip of paper in for all 2.1B Muslims that also records their terrorist status, then we immediately see, from the relative sizes of the green and red rectangles, that it is very unlikely that a randomly drawn slip will be that of a Muslim who is also a terrorist.  This says that the probability the person is terrorist given that he is also a Muslim, P(terrorist|Muslim), is vanishingly small – on the back of the envelope that probability is approximately 50,000/2,100,000,000 = 0.00002 or two thousandth of one percent.

This example should indicate the magnitude of the brain fart liberals emit every time they (unknowingly) base their argument on maintaining that P(X|Y) = P(Y|X).  And here I want to make clear that this same line of ‘reasoning’ is used when we debate the advisability of policies in healthcare, education, welfare, collective bargaining, … .  That pernicious equality finds its way into more areas of polarized discourse than can be recounted here.

The bottom line and corollary is that the liberal almost always uses anecdotal examples of a low probability event or occurrence to base his justification for policies that affect large aggregates of people whose characteristics are markedly different from those in the presented anecdote.  However, arguing on the basis of aggregate statistics is a sure loser compared to a progressive photo-op showing a poor unmarried black mother with her unkempt children in a disheveled apartment, especially if the audience is largely unread and pre-educated.

And this brings us back to NPR’s report of Obama’s campaign strategy.  The man cannot run on his dismal record, so the only tactics left to him are pandering to the ignorant and creating diversion by painting his opponent with such egregious lies that even fellow Democrats and liberal outlets like the flagship Washington Post are refusing to stand with him.  Here I will just comment on the pandering to the ignorant part.

Obama needs a heavy turnout of Hispanic and black voters.  To attract them he is using arguments and making claims that only land well with the more ignorant contingent of America's electorate.  The President is pursuing that line because he knows that the cohorts of Hispanics and black are made up of a high proportion of those who can’t or won’t apply reason to vet his claims.  The President (reasonably) adopts this tack because he also knows that those minorities have always been on the low end of the educational totem pole, and that during the last fifty years the National Center of Educational Statistics has recorded the enormously high dropout rates suffered by Hispanics and blacks.  From this he correctly deduces that his policies and prescriptions for the country (whether implemented or not) will fall most receptively on such minority minds.

So within our discussion of contingent likelihoods, the President, along with other liberal politicians, naturally tailor a large part their campaign messages to the ‘black/Hispanic’ cohort because they know that there the probability of ignorance given the listener is also black/Hispanic, P(ignorant|’black/Hispanic’), is higher.  And the status of these minorities is likely to remain so given that their political leaders purposely have kept them on the 'government plantation'.

Comments

[Douglas Keachie]

So if we make sure we spend time checking religious status of all those folks who are Muslim but not terrorists, that will be more useful for identifying than carefully looking at all the other signs of a potential terrorist? The time wasted with irritated innocent Muslims will probably prevent the latter activity from going forward at full speed ahead, and the net result may be counter-productive. On the other hand, encouraging good, non terrorist Muslioms, to join in the hunt, instead of antagonizing them, may be very productive.

Now, just what the connection here to Obama's campaign is, I'm not sure. Also, you talk of said campaign in generalities, with no concrete examples of the illogics you claim he is attempting to buffalo and bamboozle the minorities with. Care to list a few? One man's logic is another man's propaganda. Is Romney any different with his lesser educated white religious minorities?

[Todd Juvinall]

George, I said this on another blog but maybe you could expand on the point. I would also like to know how much money we have spent in defending the rest of the planet since WW2.

"The USA taxpayers have paid that military bill since WW2 for Europe and since 50 for the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Yet these countries unhindered by that expense still drove their countries economies into the ground. How is that possible? I think it may be time to let them defend themselves again but hell, what if the Rooskies move west and the Chinese move East?"

The point I think I am making is the Euro-socialist government model was unfettered by the weight of defense and diverted the dollars to "feelgood" stuff. Now the liberal experiment is under the gun because it is shown to be unsustainable and has left them broke and undefended if we pull out. I winder how the resident liberals spin this?

[George Rebane]

DougK 653pm - sorry that I didn't say it well enough for you to understand. You set up a scenario that is both unrealistic and insane, attribute it to me, and then start attacking it. Haven't we circled that barn before?

The connection to Obama's campaign is that the man (and Democrats in general) adopt the described conditional probability, knowing that if Romney (or any Republican counterpart) attempted the explanation of the correct basis for the conditional probability, then they could easily be attacked with the charge that, 'Well, now you're calling all Hispanics/blacks dumb.' And that charge would stick with the overwhelming proportion of the light thinking voters, and therefore such a response as mine would be devastating. Hence no Republican on the national scene will deliver it, and will instead take the pandering hit.

[George Rebane]

ToddJ 719pm - You are correct; every country under the post-WW2 American umbrella has not had to bear anywhere near the full cost of their national defense. We have done it for them, and they (some gratefully) admit it.

And further to your point - yes, their so unburdened socialist programs still created economies that could not sustain themselves. Along the way, we started emulating them more and more, and now all of us find ourselves with our tits in the wringer.

[David King]

George Rebane | 09 July 2012 at 09:14 PM
Todd Juvinall | 09 July 2012 at 07:19 PM

Ah yes, the great equalization.

Taxes
Healthcare
Defense
Energy
Patent law

What I can't figure out is why anyone would be enamored with Europe. Could be as simple as jealousy of that which is poorly understood?

They're so enlightened! Lol.

[billy T]

Dr. Rebane, I don't quite understand all the Ps and Ys. Are you saying all dolphins are whales, but not all whales are dolphins? Or are you saying all cactus are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti? Do understand the Xs though. When Huey Long was running for state office back in the day, he went to a rural region where he was quite unpopular. He told the illiterate audience that if they don't like Huey Long, just put a big X by his name to cross him out.

[George Rebane]

billyT 1211pm - A better example is the one that's in the figure. It says that almost all terrorists are Muslims, but that a very small fraction of Muslims are terrorists. So if you're interested in catching terrorists, put most of your effort on checking out people who are Muslims.

Same thing with illegal aliens. Almost all of them are Hispanics, yet only a fraction of all Hispanics in America are illegal aliens. So if the intent is to catch illegal aliens, then devote most of your efforts to checking out Hispanics.

But this is where progressive politics enters the equation. Number one, they don't understand the utility of using the probabilities involved, and second, their concerns for America don't put apprehending terrorists and illegal aliens high on the list. They pretend that avoiding 'discrimination' is the part of 'social justice' for which they are willing to sacrifice the country on its way to the promised fundamental transformation.

However, discrimination is not a concern when the HSA identifies the characteristics of the people who for them represent the biggest terrorist concern. (These are contained in the little white sliver of the red rectangle in the figure.)

[billy T]

Well said Dr. Rebane. Look what happened to former NPR commentator Juan Williams. He had the gall to say that while boarding a plane at the airport, he felt apprehension boarding with two Muslim males in full Arab garb. He was fired. Stating the obvious is a no-no in the tolerate liberal world. Free speech and all that rot. Yep, if you live along the Southern Border, chances are the illegals breaking into our country are from Latin America, or Mexican Nationals to be more precise. Is it ok to say that, or will the thought police lynch me? Sure, Boston is full of Irish Nationals that have overstayed their visas. Libowels think differently. Illegal does not mean race. Illegal means criminal. Is that so difficult to grasp? If I hear another person say that our nation was built by immigrants to deflect the topic off of illegal immigrants, I might toss my cookies. To the libbowels illegal means legal. And where is the outcry by the greenies? Near the border in California is a protected wetlands. The place is full of piles of trash, nay, mountains of discarded water bottles and feces. Ok, if you or I or any US citizen turned a protected wetlands into a big trash can, the outcry and fines would reach the heavens. But, if you are breaking into our country illegally and desecrating our wetlands, then no fines, no problem. I guess that is the real issue here. I said "our" country. To the libowels that word is wrong and racist. They must join hands at the border and face south while loudly singing "This land is my land, this land is YOUR land".

[Ryan Mount]

> Boston is full of Irish Nationals that have overstayed their visas.

Not sure why I loved this comment so much, but I did. +1 billy T.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

Keachie: So if we make sure we spend time checking religious status of all those folks who are Muslim but not terrorists, that will be more useful for identifying than carefully looking at all the other signs of a potential terrorist?

Well your almost there, then you lost it - what would be the #1 sign to be looking for in a terroist - Muslum - you can fill in the rest of the list

Didn't take long for you to prove George's point though and in less than 10,000 words and 4 links - thank you