Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Nine

In part six of my conversation with Marie Snyder I wrote about the importance of group decision-making in the critical thinking process. In this instalment, we go back to this issue but from a different angle. Some of the biggest problems we find with how people reason is because they either suffer from motivated reasoning or outright lying.

Cartoon from xkcd, CopyLeft provision

Motivated reasoning is when one's objectivity gets overwhelmed by an emotional commitment to a specific group, ideology, religion, professional obligations, etc. Unfortunately, this is a very common failing among politicians who become extremely loyal to their political party, either because they are thoroughly indoctrinated into it's point of view, or, because they have built strong, personal connections to the party. Politics is much more about emotion and human connections than it is about facts, which means that politicians are probably worse than the statistical average when it comes to looking at a complex issue objectively. 

The difference between motivated reasoning and lying is whether or not the person arguing for something has the self-awareness to know that their arguments for a position are or are not reasonable. 

The system that Snyder introduces, Sortition, gets around this problem by randomly selecting members of the public to form a committee, instead of allowing politicians to select the members it wants to see on it. This means that the individual decision-makers get selected from a pool of people who aren't nearly as prone to either motivated reasoning or outright dishonesty---simply because they have a lot less "skin in the game".

Cloudwalking Owl · Sortition

Sortition has a long history and probably the example most people would think of is ancient Athens. But as I mentioned to Snyder, people shouldn't think that it has died out since then. Guelph had it's own experimentation with sortition in the late 20th and early 21st century.   

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The problem that the city faced was that scientists had found out that there was a build-up of pesticide residue in some of Guelph's stormwater detention ponds. These are the water bodies you sometimes see in subdivisions. They are engineered by the city to collect the rainwater that comes off things like roads, driveways, parking lots, roofs, etc. The problem is that these sorts of surfaces won't allow rain to seep into them. This means that if a sudden thunderstorm hits, they can create a mini-flash flood that can sweep into a stream or wetland. Not only does this sort of quick flood create erosion problems, the water itself is often a lot hotter than what's already in a stream or wetland---which will create a thermal shock that can kill wildlife. Moreover, it will often have pollution like oil that can poison aquatic life too. The common engineered solution is to dig a depression and channel this water to it. That way, when it rains the overheated, contaminated water can collect in a place where it can cool off, sediment can fall out of the water column, and, micro-organisms like algae can digest whatever chemicals (like fertilizer) are in it before it gets out into either a stream or the water table.

Google calls this a "stormwater detention pond", but there are subtle differences between these sort of things that have profound importance to civil engineers. For the purposes of this article, all you need to know is that it's an engineered low spot in a city that collects rain run off.

What had happened was when scientists looked into the water quality of these ponds they found that they had relatively high levels of certain pesticides, which was not a good thing. Moreover, when surveys were done of homeowners in the city, researchers found out that a surprisingly high amount of pesticides were being used on suburban properties---both by home owners and lawn care companies that serviced them. (I checked my memory by looking through a reprinted journal article that I found on-line:  Environmental Concentrations of Urban Pesticides.) Given the fact that almost all the pesticides that get applied to suburban yards were for cosmetic reasons instead of food production, reasonable people of all political persuasions decided that there needed to be some sort of law reducing their use.

The political problem was that if City Council decided to regulate or even ban the use of these pesticides, it ran the risk of facing a very strong backlash from both lawn care companies and home owners who had a strong emotional attachment to their lawns. 

The way it dodged this sticky trap was by creating a citizen committee using the principle of sortition. That way elected officials couldn't even be accused of selecting the wrong people to sit on the panel. It was formed by randomly selecting fifty Guelph citizens and asking them if they would take part in the process----only six people actually agreed to join, but that was enough.

In addition, six other expert consultants were added to the committee to help the members make sense of the technical issues: three were city staff members and three worked for a hired environmental consulting company. The result was a report that many considered a model of good public policy. (You can see the published report of the committee at this city on-line archive.) 

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Another example of sortition that readers should be aware of happened in 2006 and involved creating a Citizen's Assembly by randomly selecting one citizen per riding who were then tasked with looking at the evidence and suggesting what sort of system the province of Ontario should use in future elections. Again, the system worked extraordinarily well at sifting through all the information, listening to the experts, and, prepared a good proposal and creating created a document that explained it things very well. 

Unfortunately, I suspect that they did too good a job. It became obvious to me that when their report was published and during the run-up to the referendum, that the Liberal government got cold feet and decided to not fund anything more than a token education campaign. According to a Canada.com article, Elections Ontario only budgeted $6.8 million for this task. 

It's hard to find information about past Ontario elections on line, but what I did find says that the Progressive Conservative Party head office spent a little over $8.5 million in the 2018 election campaign. Please note, this figure only counts what the PC head office spent. What each individual candidate's local campaign spent is added on top of this. Just by way of a comparison, Mike Schreiner's successful local campaign in Guelph spent about $41,500. There are 124 Electoral Districts in Ontario and three major parties. Kathleen Wynn spent about $92,700, Doug Ford about $66,000, and, Andrea Horvath spent $110,500. 

Let's be conservative with our calculations. Let's forget about the Green Party and just assume that there are two of major parties instead of three. (I suspect the average candidate spends less than a party leader. Moreover, in many Electoral Districts there are only two real contenders plus "also rans".) I'll use the Conservatives as the baseline $17 million for the head offices (ie: the Conservative head office times two), and, $16.4 million for local campaigns (ie: Doug Ford's campaign times 124 Electoral Districts times two parties). That comes to $33.4 million spent on promoting political party's messages---and that's what I suspect is an extremely conservative number! 

Given this context, $6.8 million to explain a complex change to our electoral system does seem like a small number. And indeed, according the article cited above, British Columbia spent twice as much as Ontario to do this.

Moreover, in a CBC article, one of the Assembly members, Arita Droog, complained that in a misguided attempt to be unbiased, the public education campaign that did exist didn't explain what sort of benefits would come from the proposed system. 

"It's so neutral, it's so unbiased, that it doesn't say anything … I understand their position that they want to be neutral and unbiased, but in doing so, they went beyond" providing useful information. [sic]

Indeed, if we can believe the above article, only two days before the General Election---which included the referendum---3 million voters didn't even know that there was a referendum on electoral reform. And that was 36% of the total!

To end the suspense, the referendum didn't pass and we still labour under the idiotic first-past-the-post system that we inherited from Great Britain.  😡 

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I think that the lessons we can learn from the above two examples illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of sortition. The system works well at assimilating complex information and coming up with good policy. It also allows elected officials the ability to avoid being personally attacked by extremely polarized members of the community. 

What it isn't able to do, however, is mobilize the citizenry to support whatever decisions it makes. This didn't matter much with regard to cosmetic pesticide use because there already was a very strong support for the ban in the community. But with regard to proportional representation most people hadn't thought much about the issue. It's something that requires a significant understanding of the electoral process---and most people simply don't know enough about that to see how it would be a profound improvement. 

Our old buddy the FUD campaign. Fair Use Provision.

We should also remember that electoral reform is something that the existing political parties don't generally like. That's because the parties who do well in the present system almost by definition like the present system because it gives them power. Conversely, the parties that do like proportionality tend to not have any power at all---because of the present system. 

Because of this fact, none of the mainstream parties were willing to devote any of their resources to encourage voters to vote "Yes". Moreover, the Liberal government---who I suspect were surprised how well the Citizens Assembly did---strangled the process by starving its ability to get the word out to the people. This left the door open for people opposed to mount local Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaigns---which are generally successful in situations where great numbers of people know very little about a complex issue. 

Sortition's Achilles Heel in our political environment is the flip side of it's great attraction---it doesn't involve the creation of political parties. Unfortunately, our representative democracy can't function without political parties. But that's an article for another day. 

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It appears that our latest lock down is ending soon because our disease numbers seem to be declining. But we still have to be careful because the new Delta variant of Covid seems to be a lot more transmissible than the others. Moreover, it seems like the limited protection that one dose of the vaccines gives seems to be significantly lower with it too. So keep wearing your mask and get your shot---both the first and second one---when your number comes up.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!