Impulsive reasoning

If you don’t know that Desdemona is a character in a major Shakespeare play, you run the risk of being called uncultured; still, not knowing it doesn’t cause any great problems. Now, if you don’t understand what you read, then your problem is more serious. That is what’s called functional illiteracy, a very widespread problem in our country according to some studies.

If you don’t know what the number pi means, then you are in the same position as someone who doesn’t know the works of the English Bard. But if you can’t work out the area of your terrace, then you are in danger of buying more tiles than you need, or of having a contractor overcharge you for the job of sprucing up your garden.

That last one is known as innumeracy, a term I became aware of after reading the excellent books of the American mathematician John Allen Paulos, of whom I suggest reading Innumeracy, a classic for understanding this problem.

My recent criticism of Senator Girardi’s mistake goes in that direction, in a sarcastic tone, of course[*].

I’m not criticizing the senator. What I want to highlight is how so many displays of innumeracy pass before our eyes and nobody is amazed, because most people don’t understand numbers, which I consider a serious flaw in people’s intellectual and cultural education.

They say intelligence is the poor relative of understanding, and every day it’s clearer to me that this is true. There is a third obstacle that sits in between the world of letters and the world of numbers, which I am going to call logical dysfunction, or we could also call it impulsive reasoning.

For some reason we draw conclusions based on our feelings, or our impressions of people, rather than on the actions themselves. We all do this, it’s true: “if I don’t like someone, then everything that person says becomes false.”

I have to own up to my share here. I have criticized many people for their actions, and I have judged them to the point of refusing to accept what was true in what they said.

That is what happened with Carlos Osorio in his recent article in Qué Pasa, to such a degree that he has sent a clarifying comment to several blogs about what he said, admitting he wrote it out of anger.

In this particular case, the fact that the comment was copied verbatim onto different blogs makes it lose force and leaves a strange, somewhat uncomfortable feeling. It’s almost as if a robot had generated it, or as if it were an attempt to stay on everyone’s good side.

The bad part is that the consequences of our impulsive acts are hard to reverse. “What’s said is said,” and you have to own it. We must avoid falling into the same mistake later on. Apologizing doesn’t seem to be enough, so we have to do more, and that depends on each of us.

[*] By the way, someone has suggested there should be an HTML tag or element to mark an ironic tone, but as long as that doesn’t exist we’ll have to trust the intelligence of our readers.