Suppose you see a woman standing in front of a wall with a
picture frame by her feet. She’s holding a high-heeled shoe in her hand, which
she’s banging against the wall. It’s pretty obvious that she’s trying to hang
the picture, but why is she using a high-heeled shoe? One possibility: the
woman is irrational. A hammer is the best tool for hanging pictures, but she’s
sledging away with stilettos nonetheless; what a dunce!—pardon me, “behaviorally
biased agent.” Another possibility: the woman is using her shoe to hang the
picture because there’s something about her environment that, oddly enough,
makes her shoe the best tool for the job. For example, she doesn’t happen to
have a hammer lying around but does happen to be wearing high-heeled shoes.
There’s a good chance that you’ve encountered someone doing
something similar in your own life; perhaps it was even you. Because of this,
it’s easy to see the logic in the woman’s superficially silly behavior. But
what if you didn’t have first-hand experience to draw on—say, like publicly
auctioning off your spouse? What if you were 500 years removed from the behavior
that sounded downright dumb—say, like suing crickets for trespass? What if the
context was foreign, making it nearly impossible to guess the environmental
particulars at play—say, like using trial by poison ingestion to determine
accused criminals’ fate? You’d probably fall back on the excuse that’s easy,
and obvious, and wrong: people are irrational.
The purpose of WTF?! is to gird against this fate—to
help us learn how to see the logic in human behavior that often seems totally
illogical. If we can do that, we have a better chance of understanding each
other and people, past and present, who seem so different from us but are
really not so different at all.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
Lastly
Suppose you see a woman standing in front of a wall with a picture frame by her feet. She’s holding a high-heeled shoe in her hand, which she’s banging against the wall. It’s pretty obvious that she’s trying to hang the picture, but why is she using a high-heeled shoe? One possibility: the woman is irrational. A hammer is the best tool for hanging pictures, but she’s sledging away with stilettos nonetheless; what a dunce!—pardon me, “behaviorally biased agent.” Another possibility: the woman is using her shoe to hang the picture because there’s something about her environment that, oddly enough, makes her shoe the best tool for the job. For example, she doesn’t happen to have a hammer lying around but does happen to be wearing high-heeled shoes.
There’s a good chance that you’ve encountered someone doing something similar in your own life; perhaps it was even you. Because of this, it’s easy to see the logic in the woman’s superficially silly behavior. But what if you didn’t have first-hand experience to draw on—say, like publicly auctioning off your spouse? What if you were 500 years removed from the behavior that sounded downright dumb—say, like suing crickets for trespass? What if the context was foreign, making it nearly impossible to guess the environmental particulars at play—say, like using trial by poison ingestion to determine accused criminals’ fate? You’d probably fall back on the excuse that’s easy, and obvious, and wrong: people are irrational.
The purpose of WTF?! is to gird against this fate—to help us learn how to see the logic in human behavior that often seems totally illogical. If we can do that, we have a better chance of understanding each other and people, past and present, who seem so different from us but are really not so different at all.