Describe Symptoms, Not Causes: Overcoming the Is-Therefore Political Trap
The "Is-Therefore" Trap // Borrowing diagnostic ideas from medicine to help you think better about politics
This post is a companion piece to “The Is-Ought Political Trap”
“Rents are high, because of evil landlords.”
“The subways are crap, because the mayor underfunds them.”
“The city schools have problems, because the education budget is too small.”
If you listen closely to many political conversations, you see that they come in the form demonstrated above, which is:
[Observation of symptom]-->[immediate claim of causation]This is the is-therefore political trap, related to the is-ought political trap: the tendency to jump immediately from an observation to a claim of causation without proper intermediate thought.
People are used to speaking this way about politics and government, but I don’t think many of them are consciously aware of it. They see something, and they immediately pull an explanation out of: (1) no where, (2) their political tribe’s social media messaging, (3) a best guess on the fly.
It doesn’t occur to them to do something in between making an observation and making a strong claim of causation—to think about all the potential causes of their observation, let alone how to validate or falsify any causal claims they’d like to make.
Some people do this on purpose. They know their claims aren’t well founded, but they don’t care for one reason or another.1 But for many—perhaps most—people, it’s just a bad habit. They aren’t used to thinking rigorously about politics, and so their mental hygiene around the subject is poor.
For those looking to build good mental habits around government and politics, I offer this rule:
Describe symptoms, not causes. Focus first on really describing what you’re seeing, and finding out more that you inevitably aren’t seeing. Spend a ton of time on describing things, not explaining them. Really try to get a rigorous picture of all the symptoms. For example: if you see that rents are high, see if they are uniformly high in all market segments. Are they high in rent regulated apartments as well as market-rate apartments? Does high rent correlate with the quality of an apartment—when and how? When you observe high rent, do you see it in old properties as well as new?
Drilling down on the full picture of “symptoms” has two immediate effects:
It inoculates you against the bullshit claims made by ideologues who do not care about finding the truth of the matter. If you get a full picture of something, you will likely have several potent counterexamples to present to any ideologue that would have you for their team.
It trains you to think properly: you spend a lot of time thinking “what is going on here?” and looking for more facts. Inevitably, the accumulation of good observations will allow you to make an educated guess as to causation—what is causing the symptoms you see in the world.
I’ll analogize to medicine to drive the point home.
Symptoms, Syndromes, Diagnoses, and Disease
In the world of medicine, there are four terms with distinct definitions that you can port over to politics with good effect (these are simplified definitions—if you are in the medical field, please feel free to add the nuance in the comments!):
Symptom: an observed feature that indicates some kind of underlying condition
Syndrome: a group of symptoms that tend to occur together, whose underlying cause is not known
Diagnosis: the process of identifying a disease or other condition based on observed symptoms and other information
Disease: a condition with relatively well established causes
You can see how these things fit together. The process of diagnosis requires observing symptoms and taking in information—as much as possible, especially if you’re initially presented with something confusing.
It’s possible that, after observing symptoms and taking in other information like lab tests, you don’t know what’s causing the symptoms in your patient. You still might be able to offer them some palliative treatment for symptoms (ice on swelling, etc), but you won’t immediately be able to address their root cause. If you’re not careful, you could even make things worse.
It’s also possible that, upon observing symptoms and collecting information, you still don’t understand what’s causing them, but you recognize their pattern. You, and the medical field, have seen this collection of symptoms occurring together before—a syndrome. You will likely have a protocol to address the syndrome; it won’t be as good as if you understood the root cause of all the syndrome’s symptoms, but it will be better than making a first try at palliation or treatment.
Finally, it’s possible that you might understand exactly what’s causing your patient’s symptoms. In that case, you can name the disease that they have. In that case, you might be able to offer them a cure! Barring that, you can at least give them certainty about what they’re dealing with.
Treat your politics the way you’d want a doctor to treat you
Would you accept the diagnosis of a doctor who walked into your waiting room, asked you no questions, didn’t look up from their phone, and was listening to something in their earbuds? No? How would you feel about a doctor who presumed to operate that way?
Well how do you think your city or country would like it if you asked no questions and just walked around pronouncing verdicts about what it should do?2
Here are some cutting words from Jane Jacobs, from the introduction of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (see this thread for more)3:
Medical analogies, applied to social organisms [like cities], are apt to be farfetched, and there is no point in mistaking mammalian chemistry for what occurs in a city. But analogies as to what goes on in the brains of earnest and learned men, dealing with complex phenomena they do not understand at all and trying to make do with a pseudoscience, do have [a] point. As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.
I’ve had the great, literally life-saving pleasure of working with fantastic doctors. Similarly, I am well acquainted with an increasing legion of people who think just as well about politics and New York City. If you read this essay and the first thing you think is, “everyone thinks badly about politics, especially the people in the other tribe…” there is a good chance your own thinking has some tendency toward bloodletting in it.
The good news: you can change this at any time. No one will ever do it perfectly. And the good art of politics is all about striving to achieve that asymptotic perfection. The is-therefore political trap is pretty easily avoided, especially with practice.
Oftentimes people at parties (for example) don’t care, because their friends are as poorly informed as they are, and no one actually cares to get at the truth; a social, mutual embrace of anti-concreteness gives them all the shield they need to make whatever claims they want, and get social credit for doing so.
“Pronouncing verdicts” includes uncritically repeating things you see on social media, just because they align with your political tribe.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “Introduction,” p.13 (Vintage Books edition, December 1992).