But then things got interesting. Pronin gave the group other people’s words. These were perfect strangers. She asked the same question. What do you think this stranger’s choices reveal? And this time Pronin’s panel completely changed their minds.
“He doesn’t seem to read too much, since the natural (to me) completion of B_ _K would be BOOK. BEAK seems rather random, and might indicate deliberate unfocus of mind.”
“I get the feeling that whoever did this is pretty vain, but basically a nice guy.”
Keep in mind that these are the exact same people who just moments before had denied that the exercise had any meaning at all.
“The person seems goal-oriented and thinks about competitive settings.”
“I have a feeling that the individual in question may be tired very often in his or her life. In addition, I think that he or she might be interested in having close personal interactions with someone of the opposite sex. The person may also enjoy playing games.”
The same person who said, “These word completions don’t seem to reveal much about me at all” turned around and said, of a perfect stranger:
“I think this girl is on her period.…I also think that she either feels she or someone else is in a dishonest sexual relationship, according to the words WHORE, SLOT (similar to slut), CHEAT.”
The answers go on and on like this. And no one seemed even remotely aware that they had been trapped in a contradiction.
“I guess there is some relationship.…He talks a lot about money and the BANK. A lot more correlation here.”
“He seems to focus on competition and winning. This person could be an athlete or someone who is very competitive.”
“It seems this individual has a generally positive outlook toward the things he endeavors. Most words, such as WINNER, SCORE, GOAL, indicate some sort of competitiveness, which combined with the jargon, indicate that he has some athletic competitive nature.”
If the panel had seen my GLUM, HATER, SCARE, ATTACK, BORE, FLOUT, SLIT, CHEAT, TRAP, and DEFEAT, they would have worried for my soul.
Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes:
The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.
This is the problem at the heart of those first two puzzles. The officers on the Cuba desk of the CIA were sure they could evaluate the loyalty of their spies. Judges don’t throw up their hands at the prospect of assessing the character of defendants. They give themselves a minute or two, then authoritatively pass judgment. Neville Chamberlain never questioned the wisdom of his bold plan to avert war. If Hitler’s intentions were unclear, it was his job, as prime minister, to go to Germany and figure them out.
We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.
If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.
1 The one exception was Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. He met Hitler in 1937. He loved him. He compared him to Joan of Arc.
2 The Nazi official Henderson knew even better was Göring, Hitler’s deputy. Henderson would go stag hunting with Göring. They had long conversations. Henderson was convinced that Göring wanted peace as well, and that underneath his Nazi bluster was a decent man. In a memoir of his time in Berlin, written just as war broke out, Henderson said that Göring “loved animals and children; and, before ever he had one of his own, the top floor at Karinhall contained a vast playroom fitted up with every mechanical toy dear to the heart of a modern child. Nothing used to give him greater pleasure than to go and play there with them. The toys might, it is true, include models of airplanes dropping heavy bombs which exploded on defenseless towns or villages; but, as he observed when I reproached him on the subject, it was not part of the Nazi conception of life to be excessively civilized or to teach squeamishness to the young.” (In case you were wondering, that’s what Nazism was really about: tough-minded child-rearing.)
3 The law has since been changed. A defendant must be eighteen years old or above to be sent to Rikers.
4 Two technical points about the dueling lists of 400,000 defendants: When Mullainathan says that the computer’s list committed 25 percent fewer crimes than the judge’s list, he’s counting failure to appear for a trial date as a crime. Second, I’m sure you are wondering how Mullainathan could calculate, with such certainty, who would or wouldn’t end up committing a crime while out on pretrial release. It’s not because he has a crystal ball. It’s an estimate made on the basis of a highly sophisticated statistical analysis. Here’s the short version. Judges in New York City take turns doing bail hearings. Defendants are, essentially, randomly assigned to them for consideration. Judges in New York (as in all jurisdictions) vary dramatically in how likely they are to release someone, or how prohibitively high they set bail. Some judges are very permissive. Others are strict. So imagine that one set of strict judges sees 1,000 defendants and releases 25 percent of them. Another set of permissive judges sees 1,000 defendants, who are in every way equivalent to the other 1,000, and releases 75 percent of them. By comparing the crime rates of the released defendants in each group, you can get a sense of how many harmless people the strict judges jailed, and how many dangerous people the permissive judges set free. That estimate, in turn, can be applied to the machine’s predictions. When it passes judgment on its own 1,000 defendants, how much better is it than the strict judges on the one hand, and the permissive judges on the other? This sounds highly complicated, and it is. But it’s a well-established methodology. For a more complete explanation, I encourage you to read Mullainathan’s paper.
Part Two
Default to Truth
Chapter Three
The Queen of Cuba
1.
Let’s take a look at another Cuban spy story.
In the early 1990s, thousands of Cubans began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They cobbled together crude boats—made of inner tubes and metal drums and wooden doors and any number of other stray parts—and set out on a desperate voyage across the ninety miles of the Florida Straits to the United States. By one estimate, as many as 24,000 people died attempting the journey. It was a human-rights disaster. In response, a group of Cuban emigrés in Miami founded Hermanos al Rescate—Brothers to the Rescue. They put together a makeshift air force of single-engine Cessna Skymasters and took to the skies over the Florida Straits, searching for refugees from the air and radioing their coordinates to the Coast Guard. Hermanos al Rescate saved thousands of lives. They became heroes.
As time passed, the emigrés grew more ambitious. They began flying into Cuban airspace, dropping leaflets on Havana urging the Cuban people to rise up against Castro’s regime. The Cuban government, already embarrassed by the flight of refugees, was outraged. Tensions rose, coming to a head on February 24, 1996. That afternoon three Hermanos al Rescate planes took off for the Florida Straits. As they neared the Cuban coastline, two Cuban Air Force MiG fighter jets shot two of the planes out of the sky, killing all four people aboard.