This is in the news:
I won’t go into detail about what Trump has done about the aircraft carrier launch systems. Read a few of the articles linked above for details.
What I want to focus on instead is a concept in cognitive psychology called processing fluency. (See Wikipedia) There is a well-studied tendency for things that are easier for us to understand, process or mentally visualize to feel more convincing or true. Everybody does this to some degree, but Trump is president, and his decisions about military matters can be enormously consequential.
What may be happening in Trump’s thinking is something like this: steam is visible, mechanical and easy to picture; electromagnetic propulsion is largely invisible and vastly harder for a layperson to intuitively understand.
That’s where understanding this aspect of Donald Trump’s psychology should give us chills — and delight our adversaries. Combine a strong reliance on intuition with his “I know everything about everything” narcissism, and you get a particularly dangerous combination: a president who may mistake what feels obvious to him for what is actually true, even when people who have spent their careers studying the subject tell him otherwise.
There is another concept that fits my argument beautifully: intellectual humility — essentially recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and being willing to revise a belief in light of expertise or evidence. Its opposite, intellectual arrogance, involves overestimating one’s own knowledge and ability to reach correct conclusions.
Add this to Trump’s narcissism and the combination becomes especially dangerous. Processing fluency can make the intuitively understandable feel true; grandiosity can make someone unusually confident that whatever feels true to him actually is true.
The real issue isn’t steam catapults. It’s what happens when the same style of thinking is applied to questions involving war, intelligence, nuclear weapons, public health or the economy. In those areas, the simplest explanation can be emotionally satisfying, vivid — and completely wrong.
And when a president is completely wrong about vaccines, military strategy or tactics, for example, the consequences aren’t merely academic.
People can die.
Regarding yesterday's post about Karoline Leavitt:
There is a meaningful new rebuttal to the Karoline Leavitt AI-photo story.
The New Republic has examined the disputed photograph against the Getty Images archive and reports that the photograph in Leavitt’s farewell post appears to be the genuine Anna Moneymaker/Getty photograph—not an AI-altered version of it. Its headline is unusually unequivocal: “People are accusing Karoline Leavitt of sharing an AI-altered image in her goodbye post. But the photo appears to be real.”
I understand some readers find their email to be overloaded when they subscribe to lots of Substacks. If you’d rather not subscribe, or want to unsubscribe, to A Beta Brain, but still like some of what I post, you can bookmark it and check the stories periodically here:
Update to yesterday’s Substack:
Just now on TV, Trump praised Karoline Leavitt: “Those lips — they move like a machine gun.” Of all the ways he could praise his press secretary, Trump chose to focus on her lips.
Update 2: Having a few hours to think about it, I think this merits a cartoon:
Goes with:
President Donald Trump told a crowd of police officers Friday he’ll “never apologize” for starting a war with Iran that has sent gas prices soaring, while simultaneously applauding himself for how low gas prices would be in a fictional world where he hadn’t embarked on his war of choice.
“You have to pay a little bit more [for gas]. You’re at $4,” he conceded. “It’s OK, I mean, I’m not — I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing.”
He then imagined a world where, “if you didn’t have” war with Iran, gas would be “down below $2 in many states.”
[Editor’s note: We do have a war with Iran, and gas is not below $2 in any state.]
“You just have to remember that what we’re doing is a great service for the world,” Trump said of the conflict that has upended energy supplies and commerce around the world. “And we’re really doing a great job.”
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