Hopefully Interesting

There are lots of ideas and concepts from psychology that I wish more people knew about.  I was reading the first post  of a new blog recently, and I was struck by a thought.  The post talked about two propositions that were both pretty reasonable, but were seldom both believed by the same person because they had different implications for policy.  Someone only believing one or the other could go about their lives believing that their actions were perfect and had no downsides, but believing both meant that you would have to live with having made a trade off, whatever you did.  It occurred to me that this was a perfect example of what a psychologist would call  Cognitive Dissonance  and that since situations like this were so common that the human bias towards trying to resolve cognitive dissonance by changing one's beliefs was actually more problematic than I'd thought. So what is cognitive dissonance?  Well, its when you have two beliefs that, when combined, make you feel ba

Its always seemed to me that complexity is one of the greatest impediments to good government.  This might just be my bias as someone who's studied computer science but not law, but it seems that the two have a lot in common in that you're writing down instructions to be followed in a variety of situations, and the more rules you create the less well you'll be able to predict the consequences of any change, since there are so many possible interactions.  That's a very general critique, though, and thankfully the fact that so many of the pages of law that Congress generates each year are special cases or exemptions means that any two pieces have less chance of interacting than you might suspect at first glance. But I'm not writing this post to talk about complexity and lawmaking in general, I'm here to talk about complexity and democracy, and the special challenges you get in a democratic system when the system of laws becomes more complex. On one hand you ha