Fool’s Errand Attachment: a cognitive bias

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 14, 2022

How about this for a new cognitive bias to add to the 38,407 so far identified cognitive biases: Fool’s Errand Attachment, grasping onto a “solution” where there is no solution; attaching oneself to a policy to the degree of need for a solution, not to the degree of its effectiveness, clinging to a program because there is some perceived desperate problem to solve, not because the program will work. Examples: 

The fears about inflation from the Russian invasion of Ukraine — and the selective sanctions — tell us that we’re incapable of getting off fossil fuels now nor for the foreseeable future, and we all know it. And even if we did give up on the fossil fuel addiction, we’d still be stuck with the current excessive atmospheric CO2 levels for hundreds of years. So if atmospheric CO2 will warm the climate, then it’s already too late to fend off climate change, yet the solution so many have invested in, emotionally, politically and morally, is the goal of zero emissions. That is, we still grasp for solutions where there is none, ignoring the inevitable mitigations that we should be focusing on and trying to solve now when we still can. (The IPCC’s recent report is finally recognizing the inevitability and the need for focusing on mitigation.) In other words, aiming for zero emissions, though it would have other benefits like reducing air, water and soil pollution, is no solution to human-induced global warming. And there are other measures we should all be focusing on but aren’t — like preparing and providing for the inevitable mass relocations of populations who are without the resources in this world of ownership to save themselves.  

Notice which people are attached to this non solution, how strongly they hold it and how narrowly — to the exclusion of mitigations or sequestering programs. Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg are only the most prominent examples of this narrow devotion to a program that will do absolutely nothing to change the climate. 

Another: Even when the research tells us that only KN95 masks are effective, mask mandates still apply to any kind of mask. In this case, the urgent need lies in those who don’t have an effective mask. But we don’t then allow them to walk freely without a mask. Not only do they use useless masks, but we expect them to use those useless masks, rather than accept that those who can’t access an effective mask should just as well go maskless. 

And another: The stubborn insistence on vaccine mandates implies that the promoters of vaccine mandates still believe that they can end the inevitable spread, however slowed even though 80% of new cases are of fully vaccinated patients, the “breakthrough” rate being >10%, and the re-infection rate, the measure of natural immunity, is around 4%, and nowhere in the world the vaccine has reduced the R0 below 1. (A quicker spread of a mild virus like omicron might actually be more effective if immunity is time-limited, but this doesn’t seem to be factored in at all by anyone. The urgent desire to prevent any spread has closed off the understanding that there is no solution to zero spread, and closed off the possibility of reducing the extent of the spread through rapid spread.)

Finally: violent revolutions do not guarantee that they will yield a better regime rather than a worse, more authoritarian and more violently oppressive one, yet many who are most sensible to the injustices of regimes believe that revolution is the best solution rather than the worst. Pervasive injustice cries out urgently for a solution, so there must be one. 

That’s the fool’s errand attachment. I want to offer an explanation for why victims of it exclude any alternative solution, why some kinds of people are victims of it and other kinds not, and what the personality source of it is. 

Fool’s Errand Attachment often intersects with availability bias (we’ve seen pollution effectively reduced so maybe atmospheric CO2 can be reduced), anchoring and sunk cost fallacy (we’ve invested financially or politically or emotionally in masks and vaccines so we have to stand by them), but unlike the sunk cost, the Fool’s Errand chooses a program that is known to be a failure from the start. It’s this counterproductive choice of the useless that is so interesting in the Fool’s Errand Attachment. The cloth masks may be ineffective, but those without N95s can’t just walk around unmasked! So everyone has to mask, even though the emperor has no clothes. That’s a fool’s errand. Zero emissions is not happening, and it wouldn’t make a difference anyway, but that doesn’t matter — there *must* be a solution, therefore there *is* a solution, no matter what the cost, no matter impossible and absurd, including the many counterproductive measures that will hinder the wealth and well-being of the populations in developing nations for the sake of a zero emissions program that serves no climate good at all and harms many. 

So what’s the moral source of this choice and attachment?

Fool’s Errand Attachment vs Conspiracy Theory

Fool’s errand bias contrasts with conspiracy theory. Victims of Fool’s Errand reject all other possible solutions: natural immunity isn’t possible according to them even though the breakthrough rate for the vaccinated is over 10% while the reinfection rate remains around 4%. And Omicron, a mild disease the free spread of which would likely end the pandemic since it spreads quickly enough to provide herd immunity sufficient to sterilize the virus and end its mutations at once, *must* not be the end of the virus, only masks and vaccines can be the solution! Similar narrowness holds with zero emissions rather than mitigation or sequestering.

Conspiracy theorists provide a fascinating contrast. Conspiracy theorists will believe all sorts of theories, even ones that contradict one another. For them the only banned theory is the mainstream one. Fool’s Errand Attachment: “Nothing but this works!”; Conspiracy Theorizing: “Anything but that is true!”.

This difference between Fool’s Errand Attachment, clinging to one solution only, and Conspiracy Theorizing, accepting any and every theory but the mainstream one, predicts that conspiracy theorists are not motivated by a desire for a solution to the problems they identify. That is, the motivation for a Fool’s Errand is always the perceived urgency of a solution. The desperate need for a solution is what causes the desperate attachment. Conspiracy theorists seem to hold the opposite. Give them a solution and they will reject it. Their view seems to be that the problems of the world are beyond solution. At least, these problems are beyond our capabilities to resolve. There are powers running our world far greater than the meagre powers of the common people. We common people are doomed to be victims. 

Victims of the Fool’s Errand Attachment are utopianists, victims of Conspiracy Theorizing are fatalists. Utopianists consider themselves morally superior on the grounds that they are doing good for all. This predicts that victims of the Fool’s Errand Attachment — let’s call them the Fools for short — will be given to virtue signaling. They want to solve the problems of the world, so they are therefore good people by their definition of good. And they have in hand what they think is the only solution. This need for virtue may itself be the source of their narrowness. To signal virtue one must have not only the desire to do good, but to have a solution. *[But see note below.] If there is no solution, there can be no good to be done. Without a solution, signaling virtue is an empty, facile, cheap mockery. “I can’t do anything to help you, but if I could I would sacrifice myself for you. But all I can do is tell you I’m a good person.” So a virtue-signaler — people who want approval for their virtue — need a program to get behind to give their signal meaning. 

And they are also given to authoritarian oppression to the extent that they believe that they possess the good and therefore are justified in imposing their good on all. No one is quite so oppressive as those who believe they are doing good for all. The Good will justify everything and anything. 

This is the utopian profile: the desire to be perceived as good (virtue signaling) imposes a need for a solution, the solution, their solution. And there seems to be a reason why the solution must be the only solution. To doubt the effectiveness of their solution would be to undermine their virtue signaling. And doubt might suggest that there is no solution, and that would end all virtue, all moral superiority, and all doing-good too. If they cannot admit any possible doubt, then their solution must be the only solution. If any solution can be doubted, then virtue-signaling ends and we live in an ambiguous world of hope and experiment where anybody’s solution might turn out to be better than ours, the only signal left, “I don’t know. Let’s try yours.” 

To put it differently, if the goal is to find a truly effective solution, then flaws in a program will be quickly admitted and the proposal will be rejected. But the Fools are not looking for an effective solution. They are looking for a program to provide them their sense of doing and being good and also appearing to be good. So if there is no solution, they will still have to take up some program for their goal of good identity. That implies rejecting all criticism of their program. So they are narrow and intransigent. And they will be all the more arrogant towards their critics, since they see themselves as doing good (and they cannot admit the flaws of their program both for garden variety confirmation bias but also because they desperately need to hold onto their virtue signal) and see their critics as indifferent to that good, that is to say, those who disagree are evil and are looked down upon with indignation as deplorable. *[But see footnote below.]

The conspiracy theorist harbors a different kind of superiority, not superior morality but superior wisdom. While the bulk of humanity accepts the mainstream view of political actions, the conspiracy theorist knows better. Those who disagree with the conspiracy theorist, or believe that there are solutions, are not evil, but frustratingly foolish and pathetically or angeringly naive. The conspiracy theorist does not insist on being good, but on being right. Their response is not moral indignation but anger or impatience. Both conspiracists and Fools share smugness towards their out-group.

Fool’s errand bias thrives on the political left (revolution here in the US is a fool’s errand, for example — it’s assessed by the need for it, not its likelihood of success) because the left wants to solve all the problems of the world, and childishly believe they can all be resolved. They are fervent, earnest but naive utopianists, and the Fool’s Errand Attachment is their holier-than-thou authoritarian prop. Fool’s errand doesn’t thrive on the right presumably because their interests are narrower — their own personal interests only, national interests rather than internationalist, in-group race rather than diversity-embracing — along with the rejection of all those many left utopian solutions because, you know, the left is their out-group “Them”, so they must be evil and all their programs.

The right is vile; the left is insufferable; everyone else is abused, deceived, manipulated and otherwise victimized by both left and right. 

Other motives for accepting a failed solution beside the Fool’s Errand Attachment, and the source of morality

It’s possible that the ordinary believer in the urgency of zero emissions simply doesn’t know that zero emissions will not solve the problem. That’s not surprising given the overwhelming media attention, including social media attention, given to climate disaster on the one hand, and the near total silence on the facts of atmospheric CO2 longevity on the other. Such attention exacerbates the need for a solution, playing to the Fool’s bias. It may be that media focus on disaster because news leans towards the bad, or it may be because it is convenient and morally comforting to point blame. Whatever the reason, media provides a picture that encourages the Fool’s Errand Attachment. 

Since KN95’s are effective, it’s not quite fair to say that masks are ineffective. It’s mask mandates that are a fool’s errand. Studies show that such mandates don’t work.

But not all maskers are Fools. Probably most cloth maskers simply don’t know that their masks are ineffective. I’m guessing most maskers believe cloth masks are effective because they don’t know the differences between masks and they want to mask because of the The Doctor Says So Bias, and especially because they see so many others sacrificing to mask for what seems to be the best of reasons — the Solidarity Heuristic Error, a cognitive consequence of pluralistic ignorance and The Illusion of Explanatory Depth. It’s a rational conclusion: masks must be effective otherwise why is everyone wearing them? And a kind of information market bubble — a rational cognitive symmetry breaking under stress in ignorance. It’s a powerful influence. Look at the tenacity of religious beliefs that are contrary to all evidence. Grice’s maxims have something essential to say about this gullibility too (a post on this is forthcoming). 

Other maskers, probably relatively few, may have succumbed to the Fool’s Errand and its intersection with availability bias, a sunk cost fallacy and biased anchoring, grasping for a solution where there is none. Still, the Fool’s Errand Attachment seems to hold a strong, broad place in cognition. As someone said to me a couple of years ago at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, “What are you saying — we should let people drop dead in the streets?” The answer, of course, is, if you can’t prevent them from dropping dead in the streets, then yes, you have to let them. When I tried to explain this to someone recently — that if someone is dying and you can’t do anything at all to prevent it, you have no moral obligation to try to prevent it — he looked at me incredulously as if I were Hitler. I doubt it would have helped to say ‘possibility must precede necessity’. Human beings do not generally think with logic. They think with familiar schemas and biases and peer group consensuses and above all approval-seeking from their chosen peer group. Logic is way down on the list of influences on cognition and judgment. 

Offering a non solution may make yourself look good or make you feel better about yourself, but it doesn’t help anyone else. Of course, making oneself look and feel good is a primary motivator of morality — we are after all a social species and create our identities, like it or not, aware of it or not, in response to those we surround ourselves with. When you hold the door for someone coming behind you, you know you’re not providing some important help, especially when that person quickens their pace to prevent compelling you to hold longer. In that case you’re actually inconveniencing that person, not helping. And most everyone for whom we hold doors can open doors by themselves anyway and do so constantly every day. We hold the door largely because we are afraid that if we shut the door in their face, they’d be justified in judging us as a douche. Our self-identity is a function of our perception of others’ perception of us. We want to appear good to them, more than to be good, although we also like to be good so as to feel superior or justified. Being good is mostly a self defense. As a social species, we need morality, and natural selection has given us a variety of emotions that conduce to social behaviors, approval-seeking one among them, and the one that probably most influences our public moral behavior. There are other motivations or incentives, including the warm feeling that you get from the smile in response to holding the door or any such polite gesture — also likely a natural selection emotion that contributes to social cohesion — and the simple convenience of conforming to social norms and habits. None of it is solving a problem for anyone but oneself. 

I revert to my very first thought about the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Global poverty has been so broadly alleviated that we are convinced for the first time in history that we can save everyone, so there’s no justification for giving up. We recognize our moral obligation given to us by the strength of our technology. We have the resources, surely our elected officials can save us all. Previously in human history, poverty was so pervasive, there was no possibility of saving everyone. “Finish your dinner. People are starving in India” was a common U.S. mom’s refrain in the 1960’s. It was a recognition that not everyone could be saved. Things have changed. The elimination of starvation is within sight. And in morality, possibility implies necessity, in other words, obligation; if we can save the world, then we are obliged to do so. But, unfortunately, we are deceived by our own wealth and technology. Eliminating a highly contagious virus is still beyond our capacity without unsustainable sacrifices.

Further questions about this cognitive bias

If the Fool’s Errand Attachment differs from other cognitive biases in not being universal across all persons but applies more to utopianists than to non utopianists and fatalists, examining it may give us further insight about cognitive and emotional differences between such different groups.

It’s a good question what the basis of the difference might be. We’re all familiar with studies that show correlations between liberalism and conservatives in their feelings about disgust, for example, but how and why someone becomes the one or the other isn’t so clear. Neither is it clear which is the cause. Is it the inclination towards conservatism or liberalism that causes a greater or lesser inclination to be disgusted, or vice versa — levels of disgust causing a political position — or are they both reflexes of some other underlying disposition. The popular assumption is that levels of disgust causes the politics, but there’s an older tradition that says otherwise, expressed in W.S.Gilbert’s wicked silly joke:

How Nature always does contrive

That every boy and every gal

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative!

The joke, of course, is not that it’s so absurd to think that we’d be born with a politics. The joke is that it’s so true.

And it not only shows how absurd we are as political partisans, but also how utterly absurd politics itself is. To put it bluntly, the choice of politics is mostly identity, not deliberation. The deliberation, as we all now know having learnt the lessons of behavioral psych, applies only to confirming the views we’ve already chosen, or attacking the ones we didn’t choose, even if these were selected already in our childhood identities. It makes one wonder whether politics might be the one area of human interests where algorithms would work better than human deliberation. 

The Fool’s Errand Attachment and confirmation bias

I heard yesterday Richard Wolff explaining to Lex Fridman why reformists usually win against revolutionaries: revolution is scary and violently dangerous. He made no mention at all that revolution is risky, that in most circumstances there is no guarantee that a revolution will result in an improved regime or progress of any kind. More likely, the winner will be the possessor of the superior force and weaponry and there’s no reason to believe that the most and best weapons and good regime should be aligned. The opposite is more likely. It is reasonable to expect the winner of a revolution to be the more violent and therefore be less needy of popular support, less caring of that support, and more oppressive, since the weapons that won the revolution are easily turned to maintaining authority. Nevertheless, many on the Left still insist on discussing revolution as if it were a solution even where appropriate conditions of success are not even remotely available. But there must be a revolution because if not, there’s no solution to the urgent injustices we live with and our comforting position of knowing what’s better would be lost. 

I notice that revolutionaries in the US are full of detailed complaints about our current society, but they never discuss how to manage a revolution or work on tactics and strategies, and almost all of them spend no thought on solutions or alternative means of structuring a society, and when they do, they do not examine the unintended consequences, look for the flaws or consider the possible failures. It’s all confirmation bias — accepting any cheap support for the view of what the world should be and blindness to any criticism. It’s not surprising that Marx’s Capital, lengthy as it is, provides no details on how a society should be structured. It’s all criticism of capital. Likewise, libertarians have endless criticisms of socialism, but don’t seem to understand the most obvious flaws in an unregulated market. It seems that everyone understands the enemy in detail, but accepts an absurdly simplistic view of what they themselves support. Want to understand capitalism? Don’t ask a libertarian supporter of capitalism. Their understanding is superficial and pollyanna-ish. Read Marx, if you want to understand capital. Want to understand communism or socialism, don’t bother with Marx. Read a libertarian. They’ve a got a grasp on every possible failing of it, and to understand those failings they need to understand the system deeply. 

* [A friend points out that many virtue signals include no solution, for example a rainbow flag or Black Lives Matter banner on one’s lawn. This shows an interesting intersection between virtue signaling and identity or partisanship signaling, and implies that Fool’s Errand Attachments may also be mere identity signaling. Consider two neighbors, both white and heteronormative, one displaying a MAGA banner and an American flag, the other a rainbow flag and a BLM banner. Both are signaling partisanship-identity, but only one is viewed as signaling virtue. The signals of the Left purport to reflect a kind of excess of thoughtfulness, on the one hand thinking beyond the in-group interests to think about the Other’s interests and embracing the out-group, with an added sophistication of hypocrisy, thinking more about how those thoughts will be evaluated by others than the value of the thoughts in themselves. The signals of the Right are routinely viewed as an absence of thought, patriotism often described as “blind”, accepting positions for the sake of in-group loyalty rather than deliberation, giving little thought to those positions and even less thought to the out-group interests. The difference between Left identity virtue signaling and Fool’s Errand Attachments may simply amount to signaling an acceptance of the out-group (whatever it may want for itself) versus having a solution to an impending problem for the in-group and out-group both. So embracing the Other is another way to signal virtue, one that does not require any specific solution, and offering a solution might even be viewed as odious paternalism to be avoided by the signaler. Nonetheless, paternalist or not, promoting gender non conformity in early schooling and defunding the police are solutions promoted by Left partisanship-identity signalers.]