A professional goes home at night.

    Once, years ago, I had the chance to spend some time with Garry Marshall, the TV icon — creator of "Happy Days"  and "The Odd Couple"— and movie director, most notably of "Pretty Woman." 
      He was visiting Northwestern University, his alma mater, and he met with students, as he liked to do. The kids were putting on the Waa-Mu Show, the school's musical and, trying to impress Marshall, told him how they had been up all night, working on the sets.
      "If you were professionals," he told them, "you could go home at night."
      That always stuck in my mind. Not that some evenings you don't have to work late. Not that, at times, work doesn't demand you be away from home—I once spent six weeks abroad for a book. But as a general rule, you do your work, you go home. That's what being a professional means. You do your work when you need to, then you stop working until it's time to work again.
        We forget that with all our devices and constant, 24-hour on-line access. But if you don't pause from working, from time to time, then that will be all you do. Besides, your work suffers then, you burn out, and then you're no good anyway. You lose the thing you're trying to hold onto. 

Photo: The Bar D Wranglers performing at the Bar D Chuckwagon in Durango, Colorado. 

Handy concept #5: False equivalence

Intellectual Toolbox Week concludes with a concept ripped from the headlines. 

    Did the Civil War actually occur?
     Well, on one side, there is an enormous mass of historical documents—letters, photographs, diaries, books—describing the war in enormous detail.
     And on the other side, there aren't any movies of it—you'd think there would be, some news footage of battles, somewhere, if something like a four-year-conflict had actually ripped America apart Nor does any American living today remember it... 
      I could go on, but you get the point. It's stupid, my objection about the movies based on ignorance: motion pictures weren't developed until decades after the Civil War ended.
     But we tolerate other, less obvious ignorance-based arguments. Why? One reason we can dismiss Civil War Denial so easily is there aren't a passionate band of advocates arguing otherwise. Here is where people, who are fair at heart, to a fault, especially the media, screw up, because they accept an argument where none exists. We give the benefit of doubt too easily to crazy people.
     Holocaust denial is the classic example of this. Approximately 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II through methodical extermination, a fact completely documented, but also one that is uncomfortable for anti-Semites, who don't like to be confronted with the natural result of their hate, nor recognize an event that tends to create sympathy for a group of people they despise. So they argue the whole thing is a lie, scraping together what inconsistencies they can dig up, variance in testimony, in evidence, faltering specific logistics of certain camps, strained arguments, fabrications and speculations. Being able to lie on such a grand scale themselves, it's easy for them to assign the ability to others.

Plaque at the Harvard Museum of Natural History

     For a long time, they got a more respectful hearing than they deserved, from a world used to listening to historical re-evaluations seemingly based on fact. If not respect, then a certain tolerance. An undeserved tolerance; Holocaust denial is not a field of scholarship, but a symptom of anti-Semitism. The media seems to get that, now, generally, and is pretty good about not taking the bait. But it took a while.
    Not so far along are subjects such as evolution, a fact like the Holocaust, as undeniable as electricity. Yet we have serious attention paid to creationism, a fancy word for Biblical doctrine, supported by no evidence at all, whose major rhetorical point is a misunderstanding of the word "theory." 
    Nevertheless, they would teach creationism in public schools, and some places in America actually do. Those who push the creationist viewpoint -- i.e, push their own religion -- try to pretend that these are just different opinions of equal weight, varying theories all worthy of consideration, and that to dismiss their view for the simple reason it's completely untrue by any standard of evidence is narrow-mindedness. Many people buy that.
    We saw false equivalence during the government shut-down, which was engineered and created by the Republican Party. But to say so smacked of the partisan boosterism that is so unattractive on Fox News. So many reputable news outlets -- and I'm guilty of a little bit of this too -- drifted toward "a plague on both their Houses" false balance where none was merited. This is such a problem with the non-right wing media that some have coined the term "fairness bias" to describe it
    Not everything has two equal sides. Sometimes the two sides are the right side and the wrong side. That this mirrors the absolutist logic of deluded zealots is unfortunate, but the alternative -- give folly more credit than it is due out of some misplaced idea of fairness— is even worse. Treating everyone the same only works when there is a certain sameness or when differences are of style, not substance. A roomful of 5-year-olds should be treated equally, their merits and deficiencies set aside, temporarily, in the name of entry-level education. Outside kindergarten, however, in the real world, we are allowed to favor what's true and dismiss what's bullshit. In this case, politeness is overrated. 

Handy concept #4: Pattern recognition

     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues with a phenomenon which inspires a great deal of American nuttery.

Pattern Recognition 

    A twig snaps. You freeze, staring into the darkness. A form gathers itself into a bear. You run and don't look back.  If it turns out to be a bear-shaped bush that sent you dashing across the savanna, well, you'll probably never know your mistake.  You're gone and, like those with the most acute pattern recognition, you live to reproduce, and pass down your sharp eyesight and honed reflexes. Fear is protective. There's no upside for standing there too long, blinking into the darkness, thinking, "Hmmm, now is that really a bear?"
    Thus human beings are good at finding meaning in patterns, and acting on those meanings, even when the meaning is a spurious one. It worked well for tens of thousands of years.
     Doesn't work so well now.  Modern life doesn't serve up many predators to detect lurking in the shadows. But our complex world still deluges us with information, more so than any rain forest, and people still want to find meaning in their half-seen perceptions and passing glances. 
     Often it's benign. Who hasn't felt a frisson of pleasure, detecting bunnies and ducks in the clouds? Who hasn't gazed at an object and suddenly recognized something hidden, such as the cheerful face in the photo of the red Austin-Healey Sprite above?  There's a harmless pleasure in it. 
     Sometimes the pleasure is not so harmless. The Sept. 11 attacks are among the best documented crimes in modern history, but naturally, a few facts among the multitude don't easily fit, or don't seem to easily fit, and to those of a certain twist of mind, it is natural to apply their finely-honed pattern recognition to that bare framework of inconsistency and then stretch the most elaborate fantasies over it. Suddenly, to their eyes, the official version of what happened is a lie, and this flimsily supported fabrication is the truth. It's as if some viewers convinced themselves that giant bunnies were really lurking in the clouds and started demanding that the Air Force shoot them so we could make rabbit stew.
     Why do people conjure up these conspiracies? Epic events — like 9/11, like the Kennedy assassination—create vast volumes of data, enough to provide grist that some people, inclined to reject the standard narrative by an intrinsic suspicion, can stare into the sea of information and recognize whatever pattern or plot they care to find. They find a validation in it, a false power, a way to elevate themselves among the common herd, who credulously believe that World War II actually happened. Thus every smudge in the sky, every blurred light becomes an alien mother ship, every plausible explanation is discarded for a malign one backed by a few scattered twigs of evidence. That there are actual conspiracies, from time to time, only makes matters worse. Those also back up their belief that they have secret knowledge, and they insist that anyone who questions them is being willfully blind and a dupe.
     There is no question: pattern recognition can be useful, leading us to draw valid insights out of masses of random information, recognizing significant designs and meanings. Sometimes there really is something dangerous in the shadows.   
     More often there isn't, and pattern recognition leads us down the road to over-reaction, self delusion and folly. The key is applying rigorous thought to immediate impressions. Before you bolt, ask: what am I really seeing here? Examine all the facts, not just the ones that line up with the dots you want to connect. Is that really a bear? Or is it a bush? Gather all the facts, don't just cherry-pick the ones  propping up your hunch. Are we seeing instances of a new trend? Or is it the "three examples make a movement" lazy lifestyle reporting you see, even in respectable newspapers?
      The key to pattern recognition is to use it, rather than let it use you. Otherwise, one salient detail pops out and suddenly you're fleeing in misplaced terror across the veld. Some people can be set off by a single observation. They see an inverted triangle, and the epiphany hits them: "Oh my God -- Lou Malnati's ... Illuminati! How clearly do they have to spell it out?!?!" There are a lot of people who think like that; try not to be one of them.

Handy Concept #3: Regression to the Mean

     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues with the engine behind many an otherwise inexplicable disappointment in life.

Regression to the Mean

     Let's say you do something excellent: write a best-selling novel, bowl a perfect 300 game, pitch a no-hitter. Congratulations. What do we know about how your next effort might fare? Because you've already proven yourself as capable of something great, will you probably do even better next time? Or will you likely do worse?
     Sorry to report, the tendency is for you to do worse, because of a nagging little reality known as "regression to the mean." It tells us that when there are averages of something -- most books sell crap, most bowlers bowl under 200, most pitchers give up hits during a game—that any exceptional achievement is by definition a rarity and the next attempt will, probably, bend toward the average, as opposed to away from it. A study of more than 4,000 major league baseball players who had batting averages above .300 in a season found that 80 percent did worse the next season.
    The classic example involves military pilots. When trainees would do well in flying exercises, their superiors noticed that if they were praised for their performance, they would do worse on the next outing. So they started criticizing good performances, until they realized that outstanding flying was followed by lesser results whether the pilot was praised or criticized.  
    There is a comforting corollary to this -- just as superior performance will, on average, be followed by something worse, so a really bad job should be followed by improvement, again on average.
    Bearing this in mind helps us grasp specific examples of falling short, which should not be surprises, but expected.

    “Regression effects are all about us," Amos Tversky and Daneil Kahneman wrote in their influential 1973 paper on the subject.  "Most outstanding fathers have somewhat disappointing sons, brilliant wives have duller husbands, the ill-adjusted tend to adjust and the fortunate are eventually stricken by ill luck. In spite of these encounters, people do not acquire a proper notion of regression. First, they do not expect regression in many situations where it is bound to occur. Second, as any teacher of statistics will attest, a proper notion of regression is extremely difficult to acquire. Third, when people observe regression, they typically invent spurious dynamic explanations for it.” 
     That has to be of some comfort to guys like Frank Sinatra Jr. 

Divvy Diary: Biking with the mayor

     This was a strange story. At first I was told the press wasn't invited to this ride, but I was, which is the sort of distinction guaranteed to give any reporter pause. On one hand, who'd turn down riding bikes with the mayor? On the other, it's almost like they're saying, "We're barring real reporters, but you're a tool, so you can come along." I don't consider myself a tool, so I went, if only to be there if he pedalled into an open manhole. The whole thing was supposed to be off the record, but I complained enough that parts got nudged back on the record. ("I'm trying to earn a living here," is what I actually said to the mayor). It made it harder to write an interesting piece about a puffball event, but there you have it. The line I use about Rahm Emanuel is that he's so concerned about his image, it makes him look bad. Still, I had a good time, and the mayor seemed at ease. We rode around, and then all had lunch at Revolution Brewing, and he was candid, though also distant, as is his way. Still, compared to the aloof, frozen lock box of a personality of his predecessor, Richard Daley, Rahm is Holly Golightly, so I suppose I shouldn't complain. 

     I had to go to Milwaukee and Wabansia to meet a man.
     Monday was the latest in a string of beautiful mid-October days. A Divvy station is there, so I thought to bike it, my first long-distance — OK, 3 miles — trip on Chicago’s bike system. I left the Mart at 10 a.m.
     The system isn’t intended for long jaunts — you are limited to a 30-minute trip before Divvy starts piling on fees. But I figured, even at my plodding pace, I could make it to Wicker Park in half an hour for my appointment.
     The city was criticized when the program rolled out over the summer for not putting enough stations in the far-flung (and poorer, and minority) areas of the city. But reports from London and Paris, which have similar bike share programs, show that might have been a wise call for Chicago. Paris, which in good socialist fashion scattered its stations evenly around the city’s poorest quarters, is finding big problems with theft and vandalism, problems that London — and Chicago — have so far avoided by keeping the bikes mostly around the city center.
     Heading to meet this guy, I took Orleans north, until it dead-ended at Division Street, then a left, past where Cabrini Green used to be. Times change. Right on Clybourn. I was distracted by a big shrine, pulled to the curb. Photos of a bearded young man, an expanse of plastic flowers stuck into a chain-link fence. "WE LOVE YOU BOBBY" freshly chalked on the sidewalk. A 26-year-old Groupon employee, killed last May, allegedly by a drunken

Mercedes driver. The rider was wearing a helmet. Didn't help. Also on the fence, a poem, protected in clear plastic.
     "I don't want to get on my bike," it begins. "But you, Bobby Cann, wouldn't want that. You would want everyone riding whenever and wherever possible."
     That's all you can do. Sitting on your duff can kill you just as readily as cycling can.
     At 10:22 a.m. I reached Milwaukee and Wabansia. The fellow I was meeting wasn't due until 10:45. My plan was to stroll over to the Chicago public library across the street and poke around. But the library doesn't open until noon on Mondays. Hard times.
      A group of young people were assembled, winners of some sort of contest. Their reward: to meet the same guy I was meeting. I asked one of them to tell me about the event, emblazoned on his yellow T-shirt. "I'm not allowed to," said Brian, 29.
     Here's an idea, not a new idea, perhaps, but a good one: free press. You talk about your event, it gets into print. Think about it.
     At 10:51 a.m. Mayor Rahm Emanuel showed up. The plan, as best I understood it, was to ride our Divvy bikes around the Logan Square area. The mayor likes bikes.
     I expected some kind of Potemkin Village sham, with traffic held back and city workers hastily slapping orange and red paint on fallen leaves. But it seemed fairly straight, with the mayor in the lead, and the young people affiliated with the event following.
     We stopped at a small park that will be an entrance to the new Bloomingdale Trail - nobody is going to call it "The 606," and those pushing the digits ought to give up trying. We stopped at the shuttered Congress Theater, where the city's director of historical preservation, Eleanor Esser Gorski, spoke briefly. She also talked at the Illinois Centennial Monument in Logan Square, which was designed, she said, by Henry Bacon, the architect of the Lincoln Memorial.
     "This is why I love the city," said Emanuel, pedaling a blue Divvy bike, helmetless, along Logan Boulevard. He seemed buoyant.
     Emanuel said that Milwaukee Avenue has the most commuter bike traffic of any road in the country, at some 4,000 bicyclists a day. He is pleased that "Divvy" has so quickly become an accepted verb in the Chicago argot. That won't keep branding rights from being sold—he said for $5 million or $6 million—to pay for upkeep and bike lanes. But that whoever buys the rights will keep the "Divvy" part, and so it'll be "Eli's Cheesecake Divvy Bikes" or whatever. (Citigroup, which owns Citibank, locked up naming for New York's bike-share program, dubbed "Citi Bikes," paying $41 million for five years).
     After lunch, I cast a longing look at the L at California, but figured there will be time for that in winter. Hopping on a bike, I peddled south. Chicago isn't supposed to have hills, but there seems to be one on Chicago Avenue. As I approached the paper, my half hour was running out, so I cut down Kingsbury, I was going to check the bike in and get a new one, starting the clock over, like a Pony Express rider getting a fresh mount. But it felt so good to not be on a bike—I figure I rode eight miles—that I decided to walk, stiffly, a cowboy too long in the saddle, back to the paper. New York gives you 45 minutes.

Handy Concept #2 — Cognitive Dissonance

     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues, with a concept that is something of a flashlight, to help understand a woefully common condition. 

Cognitive dissonance

"A man with a conviction is hard to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."
                                   -- When Prophecy Fails

     Cognitive dissonance is why you should never argue with Tea Party members. 
     It is the established psychological phenomenon that, in the face of being shown to be wrong, many will cling to their error even more tightly, and shut out the conflicting information, to avoid the grating clash of having their core beliefs scrape against reality (hence "dissonance.")
     “Presented with evidence unequivocal and undeniable” that a certain belief is mistaken, they nevertheless “frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than even before," wrote three psychologists from the University of Minnesota, Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter in their classic study, When Prophecy Fails. 
     Published in 1956, the book was written by researchers who infiltrated a cult led by an Oak Park housewife, Dorothy Martin, who believed—and convinced her neighbors to believe—that the world would end on Dec. 21, 1954, and she and her followers would be swept up to heaven by flying saucers.  You can read my column about the Oak Park doomsday cult by clicking here.
     The world didn't end, but Martin and certain of her crew believed even harder in the saucers, and in a doomsday that had been postponed. In fact, they worked harder to win new recruits. 
    Why? The personalities of many people are closely intertwined with their fallacious beliefs— their faith, their prejudices, their extreme political positions are accepted as givens and beyond evaluation of question. On the other hand, the non-existence of angels, the desirability of a certain policy of the president's, the need for gun laws, are not ideas they can entertain, because to do so would threaten what they see as the core of their existence. It's a matter of pride, and maintaining inner harmony. They'd rather be wrong than admit to being wrong and adjust their attitudes.
     This is why I stopped debating politics with a lot of people. I am not the Idiot Police, and if someone wants to cling to folly, that is their business, their misfortune. Sure, it's tempting to do otherwise—it's our misfortune too, since they often insist their error become our dogma. When you see someone posting on the dangers of vaccines, you want to say, "Surgery is dangerous, too. People die. All the time. Are you against surgery too? What about car travel?"
     It gets you nowhere. 
     By the way, the flying saucer cult that Dorothy Martin founded, the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara, still operates to this very day, in Mount Shasta, California. Delusion takes on a life of its own. You can't stop it, you can only recognize it and try to give it a wide berth.

Handy Concept: #1. The Self-Selective Group

Intellectual Toolbox Week 

"The Watch," by Hebru Brantley

    "Great minds discuss ideas," Eleanor Roosevelt once said. "Average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." 

      That's one of those statements that sound a lot more profound than it actually is. First, much would depend on the particular idea, event or people being discussed.  If the idea at hand is the physical existence of elves, a great mind wouldn't spend too much time pondering that one. Second, the more you consider her remark, the more it seems a half-clever backhand to just about everybody, since human beings, being social, discuss each other most of the time, then interesting events, only occasionally drifting off into the airy abstraction of ideas. When my kids come home from school, I don't say, "What ideas did you talk about in school today?" I say "What happened in school today?" (Not that it matters what I ask. Great teens don't discuss ideas; average teens don't discuss events; small teens don't discuss people).

     Since the idea (woo-hoo, look at me, I'm a great mind, I'm discussing an idea! ) of having a week devoted to a particular topic worked so well in August (fiction) and September (stuff I love) I thought I would veer in the opposite direction from cool things and focus this time on intriguing ideas, but to try to avoid any taint of smug brainy vanity, let's call this week's theme, "Handy Concepts." That has a more down-to-earth feel. More than anything, each is a useful notion to have in your back pocket, like a wrench, a few tools to tuck in the back of mind for future use. An Intellectual Toolbox.

       Years ago I was walking through the men's locker room at the Lakeshore Athletic Club. I must have just read one of the periodic articles about what a fat nation we've become, how a third of American adults are obese. But the men around me weren't obese—just the opposite: they looked pretty fit. Varying ages and body types, but not one true fatty among them. 
      Maybe, I mused, at my locker, the study is exaggerating...
      Then it struck me. Oh, right. I wasn't looking at a random sample of men in American. I was looking at men who belonged to a health club. And by definition, those men would be more fit than was average for two reasons: a) just joining demonstrate concern for the condition of one's body and b) by being a member, they occasionally use the club, and that helps a person be in better shape too. 
     I'd be more embarrassed to admit this lapse were it not so common.  The self-selective group fallacy is a pit we all tumble into, sooner or later. It explains why the opinions of other people in other parts of the country can seem so unexpected and hard to believe. Being surrounded by people we know creates the illusion that that's how people are, generally. My friends live in and around Chicago, we tend to be liberals, so don't, for instance, believe in crazy conspiracy theories or fetishize guns. It's comfortable to believe the world is also like this. We forget that we are forming false judgments based on the incomplete evidence offered by the people we chose to associate with, who are all members of our club. 
     People forget that their cocoons don't represent consensus. Having grown up marinating in their church or small town, they march out into society and incredulously discover that everyone isn't like them. A lot of our political Punch & Judy show is due to people falling prey to the self-selective group fallacy.
     The idea of self-selective groups is also useful in recognizing polling bias. If you interview people at a mall about shopping, your survey is already skewed pro-shopping, because your sample is made up of people who are already at a mall. They're in the act of shopping already. If you take your shopping poll at a library, you may find very different results.
     Or to cite a real, close-to-home example. When former Illinois senator Carol Mosley-Braun ran for mayor of Chicago in 2011, the N'Digo weekly did a poll of its readers and found Carol beating Rahm Emanuel by a vote of 27.4 percent to 22.7 percent. Carol celebrated this as great news. “CAROL MOSELEY BRAUN BEATS ALL MAYORAL CANDIDATES IN LATEST N’DIGO POLL” her campaign trumpeted.
     In the fact-based world, those results would have only been encouraging had the poll been taken of a random cross-sample of all Chicagoans. But it wasn't. The poll  was of N'Digo readers, whom the weekly admitted were mostly African-American ladies.
     "Moseley Braun issued a press release bragging that she bested Rahn Emanuel, barely, among politically active black ladies, nearly a quarter of whom were voting for Emanuel," I wrote in the Sun-Times. "That's like me bragging that I beat Rahm Emanuel 3-2 in a poll of those sitting around my dining room table, if you take the joyous yip of the puppy as a vote for me. Would you view that as a mark of certain Steinberg victory, or a sign that two members of my own family wouldn't even vote for me?" You can read the entire column here.
     Once you realized that Carol barely squeaked ahead of Rahm, even among black women voters, you had a glimpse how thoroughly she was going to be trounced. As it turned out, she received a pitiable 8.9 percent of the vote, which means the bias of the N'Digo poll tripled her actual support. 
     My pointing this out, by the way, inspired Carol's forces to brand me a racist and picket the paper, demanding that I be fired (you can view the video here).  In her closed, self-selective world, the picketing seemed like a good idea that might lead to a practical result. Outside that world, however, it was a cause for astonishment and a mix of amusement tinged with pity. 
     A reminder that being able to think things through, using concepts such as the self-selective group, is not without risk. Many can't make that leap along with you. Many who can't perceive that biases are introduced by their like-minded associates, and so will assign other motives to your belief. They will tend to view your ability to see outside their circle as a kind of malign magic.