More of a bad thing

There's a classic situation that plays out in tourist hotspots across the world. An English-speaker is trying to talk to someone who doesn't speak English. "How much is that?", they ask. The non-English-speaker looks confused; they don't speak English. "How", the English-speaker says, "Much. Is. That?" Still nothing. "HOW", wild gesticulating. "MUCH", spittle flying. "IS", face turning red. "THAT", indiscriminate shouting. Tragically, despite the continual increase in volume and emotion, comprehension is not achieved. What happened here?

I think of this as an example of abstract and construct gone awry. In many cases, speaking louder does help if someone hasn't understood you. If it's a loud room and you're speaking too quietly, or you have a propensity to mumble, or your conversational partner is not paying much attention. However, the relationship between volume and understanding is not so simple; we abstracted (more volume -> more comprehension), and the resulting construction (maximum volume at unsuspecting foreigners) is the caricaturish result.

But this particular sub-pattern applies to a lot of situations. For example, it's common to punish dogs far too harshly because of a lack of understanding of dog psychology; all a dog usually needs is a minor punishment delivered in the correct way at the correct time. Instead, we try the wrong minor punishment, and when it doesn't work decide that the punishment must be too small. It is true that too small a punishment is not effective, but somehow that small correlation dominates any other understanding. Instead of trying to figure out a better way to punish, we just find a harsher way to punish.

You see similar things in particularly heartless suggestions for social policy. There's less incentive to be poor if being poor is more miserable, so we should make being poor as miserable as possible! Illegal immigrants won't want to come here if we treat them terribly when they arrive! If every crime got the death penalty, there'd be no crime! You can see in all of these a small kernel of truth, that in many circumstances better or worse treatment does incentivise behaviour. There is such a thing as being too soft on crime, too laissez-faire on immigration, too willing to shield people from the consequences of bad decisions.

But that simple understanding completely ignores the fundamental mechanics of the situation. You might equally say "if we shoot everyone who can't levitate, everyone will learn how". It's true that impending death would motivate people to try to levitate, but not true that levitation would be the final result. Human mechanics also come into play; you aren't likely to get good results saying "I'll shoot anyone who doesn't live a carefree, low-stress lifestyle". The weekly stress inspections/executions may turn out to have the opposite effect, even though the incentives are all in the right direction.

So why do we do this? Why, when something doesn't work, do we ignore the possibility that we don't understand it well enough and instead just do the wrong thing harder? I think the answer is that we like things to be easy. We have a strong bias for simple answers, which at its worst means superficial answers. If we have a simple answer that looks right some of the time, we will hold on to that answer as long as we can, far past the point where it stops predicting reality. And the simplest answer of all is just a linear correlation.

But if we can abandon that clear, simple and wrong solution, maybe we can find a more complex solution based on deep understanding. And if we gain that deep understanding, maybe we can stop shouting so much.