This week’s (75th!) TBL features a silly little story with potentially profound implications.
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Profound Implications
Give a listen to Harry Connick, Jr. playing his song, Come By Me, in the video below and see if you can spot something really tricky and interesting he does about 40 seconds in.
I’m guessing that most readers without a lot of musical experience will have missed the import of what happens even with the clue about exactly when it’s coming. So, I’ll explain.
Harry Connick, Jr. is cool. Obviously.
Clapping on the beat (or on “one” and “three”) is decidedly not cool. The audience insists on doing it anyway. So, rather than letting that lack of elegance and discernment continue, and rather than risking insulting his (French!) audience by telling them how uncool they are and demanding they change their ways, Harry simply adds a three-beat tag to his improvisation at about the 40-second mark so that the audience is immediately clapping on the off-beats (“two” and “four”). They don’t even realize they’ve been played.
Brilliant!
For those of us in the know, it’s a terrific inside joke that allows us to bask in our apparent superiority and taste. There are several lessons here, too.
For openers, it’s a reminder that sh*t happens (as the expression goes). No matter how cool Harry Connick, Jr. is, and no matter how well he and his band play, he can’t stop his doofus-mouth-breathing-audience from clapping on the beat.
A wide swath of research shows that we tend to have unreasonably optimistic expectations about the future. That flaw, per Daniel Kahneman, is the planning fallacy, which projects our fanciful and self-serving renderings forward with the idea that the future can somehow be managed — and perhaps controlled — despite the lack of any actual historical support for the notion. As Adam Gopnik sagely pointed out, “[w]hat history generally ‘teaches’ is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they’re making it.” Indeed, “the best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out.”
Secondly, the performance underscores the importance of being adaptable. It’s a small thing, obviously, but Harry adapted and made lemonade when given lemons. He gave us a good laugh and great music to boot.
Now, let’s imagine a hypothetical 60-year-old looking to retire with a 35-year assumed life expectancy, $2 million in savings and investments, and an $80,000 per year income need to be generated by her portfolio. If we run 1,000 lifetime Monte Carlo simulations to stress-test a typical portfolio model in a wide array of potential future markets, we’ll get an incredibly wide range of outcomes – from something like (depending upon the exact portfolio and the program used) running out of money at age 75 to dying with $25 million. And even that’s only to a 90 percent probability.
That variability means any financial plan alone is worthless. Ongoing financial planning – being adaptable as life, markets, and circumstances change – is absolutely crucial to success.
Thirdly, it emphasizes how easy it is for us to miss what’s really going on. I don’t know what percentage of readers figured out what Connick was doing, but I would be beyond shocked if it was half. And I’m guessing that my hint raised that number by a lot.
It’s hard to see everything that’s going on.
That means we should pay careful attention, of course.* However, what we are looking for is highly determinative of what we see. If we don’t know what to look for – Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns” – we’ll miss a lot without even realizing it. As Jesus said, “It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own.”
When Jane Curtin was asked if the person she was mimicking for a screen role knew that she was the source material, she replied, “I used to do my aunt when I was doing improv, and she always thought I was doing my other aunt.” Cluelessness is a human staple.
Eventually the dying man takes his final breath | But first checks his news feed to see what he’s ‘bout to miss | And it occurs to him a little late in the game | We leave as clueless as we came | For the rented heavens to the shadows in the cave | We'll all be wrong someday.
Fixing a problem begins with understanding there is a problem. We humans can be remarkably yet wrongly sure of our own rightness and righteousness, no matter what others might think or what is going on around us.
Roughly to paraphrase the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, Hell is being apart from God. Too, as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” In that way, Hell is having your own way and being stuck with it.
We are all stuck in Hell all too much of the time. We have our own way, sure, but we’re stuck with it.
If only we could be a bit more like Harry Connick, Jr. – adding a little somethin’ and making it all come out right.
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* “Unknown unknowns” are a fantastic argument for experts, of course. However, experts are not in high renown today – often for good reason. The alleged experts said if President Trump withdrew from the Iran deal, it would start a destabilizing war in the Middle East. They said if Mr. Trump moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it would destabilize the Middle East and lead to war. They said since Mr. Trump killed Qassim Solemani, there’d be war with Iran. They said if President Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, there’s no way the Taliban would sweep in.
The “experts” were wrong on each of those counts … and many more. Is it any wonder “experts” have such little credibility?
Mail Call
Two points from a subscriber.
Two points.
(1) This polarization must have an objective cause. It’s not just a question of personal psychology – you’re no doubt familiar with the “authoritarian personality” approach, which grounds everything in the personal psychological deficiencies of the Other Side. I don't have an explanation – above my pay grade -- but I would start with the economic situation of the Republican base, and Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansashas to be addressed here.
And then I would look at the position of America in the world, since 1991 – from Sole Superpower watching its former enemies adopt capitalism and, no doubt, liberal democracy eventually ... the Francis Fukayama vision -- to retreating wounded giant, watching a rising China, and a resurgent Islam (in both Sunni and Shi’a variants) which has defeated our military.
And not to overlook mass Third World immigration, legal and illegal. [And there are worrying potential analogies to post WWI Germany. The chowder-heads of the Left call the Republican base “fascist,” being completely ignorant of what fascism really was. But the potential is there, and there are some very serious, intelligent people who dwell in the American niche for “fascism” who could, if the Left really succeed in opening up America’s racial fracture lines, succeed in giving discontented whites a coherent explanation for what's happening and a program to act to respond to it. Then we would see real “fascism,” or something whose differences with it are close enough to zero to be its equivalent.] The activists among the Right are conservatives-by-disposition, but having an ideology makes life so simple, and in the past they adopted the Libertarian economic ideology, including Free Trade and let-the-market-rule. Trump showed how shallow that commitment was.
(2) Exceptions to the rule may be interesting, i.e., people who are quite partisan, but who seek disconfirming evidence, are willing to hold views tentatively, who don’t ascribe evil motivations to those with whom they disagree, and who don’t see developments in society as the result of a conspiracy of a single small group. I'm a child of the Sixties, and spent the first twenty years of my life as a very serious Marxist, in a group of highly-committed people. I’m not-stupid, and we were people of the book, so I was not unfamiliar with all the best arguments of the other side – the Socialist Calculation Question, etc. And yet I rationalized it all away.
After the Owl of Minerva flew, I vowed never to be captured by an ideology again – no god to replace the one who had failed. There are others like me, including those who have passed from Right to Left, like Michael Lind. (Not all people who have flipped their ideology have adopted a never-again approach – David Horowitz comes to mind.) In any case, a study of very partisan people who nevertheless pay at least serious lip service to the principles of objectivity and the scientific approach to understanding reality might be interesting. I believe people who are highly committed to a certain world view and who seem to be able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, do so because they fear that not believing in one of those things would destroy their whole world-view: believe that Trump could have lost the election, and you then must think boys using the girl’s restrooms, and dropping admissions tests to elite institutions and programs for favored racial minorities, are good things. They know the latter are not good things, so they resist giving up the beliefs which seem welded to resisting these developments.
It’s the overlap between “oughts” and “is’s.” Moral values get intertwined with beliefs about facts. If you think that without God, all things are possible – and you don’t want people to do “all things” given what some of those things can be – then you will resist giving up beliefs in things which should be decided purely on a factual basis.
Another subscriber forwarded TBL widely (Thank you!).
If I have not sent this to you before, my deepest and sincere apologies. It is the best thing I read each week! This week in particular hit me hard as I am guilty of so much of this. I had an ex consulting client once tell someone they called me “Mr. Black and White.” It was not a compliment. And while I do take some perverse pride in seeing things “clearly,” I also know that the world is far more nuanced than I sometimes like to admit, and that compromise and changing our minds can be positive character traits in the right circumstance. Being more open to other viewpoints is extraordinarily hard, especially when we feel strongly about things, and the current trends and division on masks, vaccines, and economic policy threaten to make us all like each other less. I want to be less certain and more happy. I want to have more peace and less strife. This guy’s weekly newsletter helps me with those things by simply calling them to my attention. I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I do. Make sure you click on the links! The articles that I catch here, that I would have missed, are an important part of widening the tight little ecosystem I live in. And the music curation is amazing – things I would have missed that enrich my life more than I can describe. (I cannot remember a week going by that did not include a moment of tears).
Go back and read past letters – the behavioral finance tutorial will be worth it but so will the music and ideas.
Yet another subscriber had a request.
I’m fairly new to The Better Letter, but I'm already a big fan. Are there any past versions that you’re especially proud of or are considered “greatest hits” that you might point out?
Sure. Here’s a Top Ten list of sorts, some from before many of you were subscribers … or readers.
Totally Worth It
“An Afghani interpreter I have come to know well over the years was hung in the streets last night. They melted his DoD ID into his chest. Cut off his arms. And killed his family. His 10-year-old daughter was spared and handed off to leadership,” wrote Jon Lonsdale earlier this week.
“Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support.” That’s how the Survey Center on American Life summarized the results of its spring polling on friendship in American life. The number of men who report having no close friends has quintupled since 1990, rising from three to 15 percent. When Americans do make new friends, it’s most likely to happen at work — the amount of which the center also posits as a cause of what it calls our “friendship recession.”
“The fact is that gossip, rumor, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements in a causal chain.” (Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev).
“The past year was an eventful one in base ball — not in any one way but in every way. Owing to prevailing conditions there was always the possibility of a breakdown of units of organization, a circumstance which might have placed a temporary halt on base ball in general but which was avoided, beyond a few displacements in minor league circles, which is inevitable, by competent and admirable business management on the part of club owners, league officials and national organization executives. The good ship “Base Ball” has weathered many storms and the consensus is that any existing billows are merely the aftermath.” (From the introduction to Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide in 1934).
The same words could have been written in 2021. The good ship “Base Ball” sails on.
Even Michael Moore got one right.
Please contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Don’t forget to subscribe and share.
The following two minutes and 14 seconds: the best thing I read or saw this week.
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Benediction
Malcolm Guite also gets this week’s last word.
Thanks for reading.
Issue 75 (August 20, 2021)