Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

C.J. Cregg, Cowboy Hats, and Recency Bias

President Bartlet: “C.J., on your tombstone, it's gonna read, 'Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.'”

C.J. Cregg: “Okay, but none of my visitors are going to be able to understand my tombstone.”

-The West Wing

Perhaps you have been pondering the following question:

“How has Josh written seven issues of Moneyball Judaism without making a single reference to The West Wing?”

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Honestly, I was saving it, like a fine wine.

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    But this week’s issue is a perfect opportunity to take you back to the beginning of my favorite television show.

In season one, episode two, C.J. Cregg, the White House Press Secretary, tells President Josiah Bartlet

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that he lost the state of Texas during the General Election because the he made a joke about hats (presumably, cowboy hats).

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    At this point, President Bartlett introduces C.J. to the logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc (“post hoc”), which is Latin for, “after, therefore, because of it.”

Many people assume that if two events occur in sequential order, they must be causally related.   However, the post hoc fallacy establishes that this is hardly ever true, and we have numerous examples where two events occur in sequence but have nothing to do with each other.   

Returning to The West Wing, President Bartlet essentially implies to C.J. that her only evidence that the hat joke resulted in them losing Texas is that one event followed the other (i.e. “post hoc, ergo, propter hoc”).   That said, perhaps the hat joke was still not funny?

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However, we should be not surprised that people are tempted by a post hoc argument because of the way our minds try to link events together.

Recency Bias

One of the classic questions from the story of Noah, which we read this past Shabbat, is whether or not Noah was an all-time hall-of-fame tzaddik (“righteous person”), or merely righteous “in his [Noah’s] generation” (i.e. he was the best of a lousy bunch).   In reality, this is an impossible question to answer,

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because we know very little about Noah other than the rest of his generation was terrible, and he was somehow “blameless.”    

However, people love to compare how events from the present compare to events from the past, even when there is no answer.  Consider the following questions: 

1. Why is someone of my generation likely to say that Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time, but a 20-year-old is likely to say it is LeBron James?

2. Why does every generation of adults say that this generation of teenagers is out of control, dating back to at least the colonial period (at least)?

3. Why do politicians say that each election is the “most important election of our lifetime.”   And, more importantly, why do voters believe them?

The answer to each of these questions is the recency bias, often called the “availability heuristic” or “availability bias,” the tendency to “overweight new information or events without considering the objective probabilities of those events over the long run.”

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Sometimes, recency bias leads people to assume that the present is much worse than it actually is, only the person making that claim wouldn’t know it (because they did not live through the previous event).   Other times, recency bias leads to what in sports is called the “hot hand fallacy,” where we assume that an athlete or professional can get “hot” and repeat a positive performance indefinitely.

Or consider the Jewish people…

Simon Rawidowicz famously called Israel “the ever-dying people,”

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because every generation of Jews believes they will be the last generation to practice Judaism.  This is also the recency bias; each generation assumes that their challenges are far worse than the generation before them, just because the challenges are happening to them.

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For organizational leaders, always be wary of recency bias; too many leaders I know try to solve problems using the exact same formula their predecessors tried. And predictably, these leaders fail like those before them.   

This is why George Santayana famously warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Notice he uses the word “condemned,” as in punished or censured.    If a leader does not respect the lessons of the past, they deserve exactly what they get. The alternative must be trying to solve the unsolvable problem by making different decisions and choices than their predecessors.

Scarcity

The other reason we cannot answer the question of whether or not Noah was an all-timer on the righteousness scale is that the Torah acknowledges that righteous people were scarce.    Scarcity transformed the moral landscape, and thus Noah’s relative place in that environment will forever be debated. 

Scarcity is an underrated driver of many human events, and economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldan Shafir argue in Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much that how we understand many problems, including crime, politics, mental health, etc. can be transformed if we look at these problems through the lens of scarcity.    They argue that “because the focus on scarcity is involuntary, and because it captures our attention, it impedes our ability to focus on other things.”

Take poverty.    

The authors write that “The poor are not just short on cash.  They are also short on bandwidth.” Poor people must juggle all the things most adults juggle, only poor people have fewer resources to make everything work, and greater consequences if they get something wrong.    

Therefore, people stuck in a cycle of poverty are not victims of their own laziness; it’s actually the opposite.   People living in poverty are overwhelmed with unforgiving needs in terms of finding food, shelter, etc. that they simply cannot properly focus on other aspects of human flourishing.  As Earnest “Earn” Marks, played by Donald Glover, says in Atlanta, “poor people are too busy trying not to be poor.”

Scarcity affects nonprofit organizations, as well.   When an organization starts to struggle, there is a temptation from leaders to assume that there is a lack of accountability, hence an obsession with KPIs, dashboards, metrics, etc. But what if the nonprofit is actually suffering from a “scarcity of resources” to enable committed people to do their best work? If the leadership changed their perspective, they might spend less time trying to demand that their underpaid and overworked staff are “held accountable,” and hold the leadership more accountable to break the cycle of resource poverty in the organization itself.

Weekly Links

1. Mental Health America: Ok, this is not one article, but an entire section of The New York Times on the mental health epidemic facing the United States.   Do not skim this section; read everything, take your time, and share what you learned with someone else.

2. Fixing A Toxic Work Culture By Encouraging Bystanders: Every time I hear that a Jewish organization is toxic, a part of me cries on the inside.   Here’s an article from MIT on how a key to fixing workplace toxicity is engaging people who are inclined to sit on the sidelines. 

3. Leaders Need Friends: Healthy leaders care about their friends.   Of course, everyone should care about their friends, but friendship is an under-discussed leadership skill.   Here’s some cool research on the attachment style of people who maintain friendships.

4. A Collapse in Small Gifts Poses Threat to Nonprofits: As a fundraiser, I love the small giver, because I think Jewish organizations underestimate how a strategy could be built around a critical mass of small givers, as opposed to a few major ones.   However, recessionary fears mean that the nonprofit world is afraid of a massive drop in small givers; read this article to learn more.

5. The Office Work Debate Continues: Nothing is going to “end” this debate, at least for the foreseeable future.  So you need to stay informed.  Here is an article on some myths regarding in-person work, and a great podcast with Ezra Klein with Nicholas Bloom on what the data is starting to tell us.

1. Bill Simmons remains my favorite writer on sports; I’ve been a devotee since the “Eye of the Sports Guy” days. This question is the equivalent asking how long Bill could go without referencing The Shawshank Redemption, The Wire, or The White Shadow. That said, I doubt that I will ever sell Moneyball Judaism for almost $200 million to Spotify.

2. Also, if you know me well, you know I don’t drink alcohol.

3. WARNING: NERD ALERT. NERD ALERT.

Here’s something I am trying to figure out: President Bartlet on The West Wing was a descendant of Dr. Josiah Bartlett, New Hampshire’s representative to The Continental Congress and one of the signers of The Declaration of Independence (right after John Hancock).   However, as best I can tell, Dr. Bartlett’s name has two ts, and President Bartlet’s name has one t.    What’s up with that?    As a self-described mensa of trivia on The West Wing, call me stumped…

If you think I am crazy, here is a screenshot of Dr. Elie Bartlet’s diploma from Carnegie Mellon University in season 5, episode 16:

And here is an original copy of Dr. Josiah Bartlett’s signature:

Yes, I am an obsessive.   And I’m Ok with that…now you wish I never referenced The West Wing in this newsletter!

4. NERD ALERT, NERD ALERT: Of course, later the show self-contradicts.   In season 3, episode 18, the senior staff are asked to consider not including Vice-President John Hoynes on the reelection ticket; Hoynes is from Texas.   However, one of the reasons that they argue it should be considered is because they cannot win Texas even with Hoynes on the ticket, implying they did win it with him the first time.    Spoiler: They keep Hoynes on the ticket.

5. I remember studying for the GREs and seeing that the instructions in the essay section reminded test-takers never to use a post hoc argument.   I was particularly excited that someone from The Princeton Review had watched The West Wing (or that Aaron Sorkin used a test prep book from The Princeton Review to take the GREs?).   

6. However, lest we forget that impossible questions about Torah are great for at least one reason: They provide ENDLESS commentaries for sermon material!

7. Adam Hayes, “Recency (Availability) Bias,” in Investopedia, 31 August 2022.

8. Simon Rawidowicz, “Israel: The Ever-Dying People,” in Judaism, Vol. 16, Issue 4 (Fall 1967).

9. This came up a lot when I would speak with synagogues about better serving interfaith families.   In spite of the fact that we have documentary evidence that interfaith marriage existed in the Jewish community of colonial times, medieval times, antiquity, etc., there is a temptation to assume that this is an unprecedented “problem” that must be “solved.”   How would we think about this topic differently if we were not so affected by recency bias?