Post Hoc Quotes

You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.

Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations." - Steven Novella

Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings

I will tell you the deeper significance of this, which otherwise might seem a banal hydraulic joke. Caus knew that if one fills a vessel with water and seals it at the top, the water, even if one then opens a hole in the bottom, will not come out. But if one opens a hole in the top, also, the water spurts out below." "Isn't that obvious?" I said. "Air enters at the top and presses the water down." "A typical scientific explanation, in which the cause is mistaken for the effect, or vice versa. The question is not why the water comes out in the second place, but why it refuses to come out in the first case." "And why does it refuse?" Garamond asked eagerly. "Because, if it came out, it would leave a vacuum in the vessel, and nature abhors a vacuum. Nequaquam vacui was a Rosicrucian principle, which modern science has forgotten." "Excuse me," Belbo said to Agliè, "but your argument is simply post hoc ergo ante hoc. What follows causes what came before. You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn't. Nature doesn't; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West.

Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification).

Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy. And if you really want to open your mind, open your heart first. If you can have at least one friendly interaction with a member of the “other” group, you’ll find it far easier to listen to what they’re saying, and maybe even see a controversial issue in a new light. You may not agree, but you’ll probably shift from Manichaean disagreement to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement.

The cluster illusion, like other post hoc fallacies in probability, is the source of many superstitions: that bad things happen in threes, people are born under a bad sign, or an annus horribilis means the world is falling apart. When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.

To be less dumb, remember your propensity for post hoc postulation and the power positive permutations of the placebo effect have to pollute your perspicacity.

post hoc, ergo propter hoc” (“after this, therefore because of this”),

Post hoc, propter ergo hoc. After this, because of this.

But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

It's a huge step forward to realize that the worst thing to happen is never the event, but the event and losing your head. Because then you'll have two problems (one of them unnecessary and post hoc).

It’s a huge step forward to realize that the worst thing to happen is never the event, but the event and losing your head. Because then you’ll have two problems (one of them unnecessary and post hoc). The

We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.

Our subjective awareness arises out of our dominant left hemisphere’s unrelenting quest to explain these bits and pieces that have popped into consciousness. Notice that popped is in the past tense. This is a post hoc rationalization process. The interpreter that weaves our story only weaves what makes it into consciousness. Because consciousness is a slow process, whatever has made it to consciousness has already happened. It is a fait accompli. As we saw in my story at the beginning of the chapter, I had already jumped before I realized whether I had seen a snake or if it was the wind rustling the grass. What does it mean that we build our theories about ourselves after the fact? How much of the time are we confabulating, giving a fictitious account of a past event, believing it to be true? This post hoc interpreting process has implications for and an impact on the big questions of free will and determinism

Together, creeping determinism and sampling bias lead commonsense explanations to suffer from what is called the post-hoc fallacy.

Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you'll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas - to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to - then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don't take people's moral arguments at face value. They're mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

People are surprised to learn that if 23 people are in a room, the chances that two will share a birthday are better than even. With 57 in the room, the odds rise to 99 percent. Though it’s unlikely that anyone in the room will share my birthday, we’re not looking for matches with me, or with anyone else singled out a priori. We’re counting matches post hoc, and there are 366 ways for a match to occur.

Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.

We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy.

At one point we would have called these affairs consensual, for they were, and were conducted with my vague understanding that they were happening. Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place. Whatever the current state of my marriage may be, I still can't think about it all without my blood boiling. My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have - the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female.

It’s a huge step forward to realize that the worst thing to happen is never the event, but the event and losing your head. Because then you’ll have two problems (one of them unnecessary and post hoc). The demand on you is this: Once you see the world as it is, for what it is, you must act. The proper perception—objective, rational, ambitious, clean—isolates the obstacle and exposes it for what it is. A clearer head makes for steadier hands. And then those hands must be put to work. Good use.

Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity, according to many scholars. When you look at all three aspects at the same time, you get a view of the psychology of religion that’s very different from the view of the New Atheists. I’ll call this competing model the Durkheimian model, because it says that the function of those beliefs and practices is ultimately to create a community. Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we’ve just done, or to support the groups we belong to.

Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity, according to many scholars.12 When you look at all three aspects at the same time, you get a view of the psychology of religion that’s very different from the view of the New Atheists. I’ll call this competing model the Durkheimian model, because it says that the function of those beliefs and practices is ultimately to create a community. Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we’ve just done, or to support the groups we belong to.

Couples who regularly practice empathy see stunning results. It is the independent variable that predicts a successful marriage, according to behaviorist John Gottman, who, post hoc criticisms notwithstanding, forecasts divorce probabilities with accuracy rates approaching 90 percent. In Gottman’s studies, if the wife felt she was being heard by her husband—to the point that he accepted her good influence on his behavior—the marriage was essentially divorce-proof. (Interestingly, whether the husband felt heard was not a factor in divorce rates.) If that empathy trafficking was absent, the marriage foundered. Research

Long before George Orwell, she understood how language could be perverted for political aims; how noble motives could be ascribed, post hoc, to ignoble actions. ‘When . . . they had wanted to sanction every crime, they called the Government the Committee of Public Safety; thereby proclaiming the well-known maxim, that the security of the people is the supreme law. The supreme law is justice.’ And ‘those guilty of doing harm in every period, have tried to attribute some generous pretext to themselves to excuse their actions; there are almost no crimes in existence which their perpetrators have not attributed to honour, religion or liberty.

In the same measure as the sense for causality increases, the extent of the domain of morality [ Sittlichkeit] decreases: for each time one has understood the necessary effects and has learned how to segregate them from all the accidental effects and incidental consequences (post hoc), one has destroyed a countless number of imaginary causalities hitherto believed in as the foundation of customs — the real world is much smaller than the imaginary — and each time a piece of anxiety and constraint has vanished from the world, each time too a piece of respect for the authority of custom; morality as a whole has suffered a diminution. Whoever wants to increase it must know how to prevent the results from being subject to control.

If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process. Yes, you can decide to go on a diet—and we know a lot about the variables that will enable you to stick to it—but you cannot know why you were finally able to adhere to this discipline when all your previous attempts failed. You might have a story to tell about why things were different this time around, but it would be nothing more than a post hoc description of events that you did not control. Yes, you can do what you want—but you cannot account for the fact that your wants are effective in one case and not in another (and you certainly can’t choose your wants in advance). You wanted to lose weight for years. Then you really wanted to. What’s the difference? Whatever it is, it’s not a difference that you brought into being.

But if that were the case, then moral philosophers—who reason about ethical principles all day long—should be more virtuous than other people. Are they? The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel tried to find out. He used surveys and more surreptitious methods to measure how often moral philosophers give to charity, vote, call their mothers, donate blood, donate organs, clean up after themselves at philosophy conferences, and respond to emails purportedly from students.48 And in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers or professors in other fields. Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification). Schwitzgebel still has yet to find a single measure on which moral philosophers behave better than other philosophers.

And this, too, is something that the pagans understood. Consider the word integrity. It does not mean sincerity; that and a really fine pumpkin patch won’t get you much. The man of integrity is integrated. He does not make his moral decisions ad hoc, reckoning up advantages, or gauging his feelings. He sees, too, that all of the virtues are related to one another, and are meant to inform the whole life of a man. He therefore would no more cheat a customer than he would commit adultery. He would no more lie under oath than he would flee from his post in time of war. He would no more spread rumors about his enemy than he would sprinkle rat poison upon a beggar’s dish. His honesty is brave; his chastity is generous; his great-heartedness is clean. But the divorce regime teaches and rewards dis-integrity. And one can no more build a great nation or even a good, solid town upon dis-integrated people, than one can build a town hall out of straw, or a church out of dust. Again, the evil principle is that the sexual gratification of adults must be met; no customs or laws may stand in its way. The principle is a universal solvent. Nothing can contain it.

Мы не видим мир таким, каков он есть на самом деле. Мы располагаем лишь его моделью, точной настолько, насколько позволяет наш мозг с его восемьюдесятью шестью миллиардами нейронов и триллионами связей между ними. Возможности разума огромны, но не безграничны. Сам я стараюсь придерживаться принципа под названием “бритва Хэнлона”, который гласит: “Никогда не приписывайте злому умыслу то, что вполне можно объяснить глупостью”. В формулировке Виктора Пелевина он звучит так: “Миром правит не тайная ложа, а явная лажа”. Мы перестали искать монстров у себя под кроватью, когда осознали, что они внутри нас. Чарльз Дарвин Смех убивает страх, а без страха нет веры. Потому что кто не боится дьявола, тому не нужен бог. Легче одурачить людей, чем убедить их в том, что они одурачены. Марк Твен Если ты не будешь контролировать свой разум, это будет делать кто-то другой. Джон Алстон Люди лишь по той причине считают себя свободными, что свои поступки они сознают, а причин, их вызвавших, не знают. Спиноза Увы, находясь исключительно среди единомышленников, мы часто утрачиваем критическое отношение к реальности и к самим себе. Как и голуби в экспериментах Скиннера, люди в повседневной жизни часто совершают ошибку post hoc ergo propter hoc, или “после этого – значит по причине этого”. Любая достаточно развитая технология неотличима от магии. Артур Кларк “Память – это своего рода страница в Wikipedia. Вы можете изменить ее. Но это могут сделать и другие люди” Возникает так называемый каскад доступной информации: чем больше люди говорят о чем-либо, тем убежденнее они в это верят. Магическое мышление основывается на двух принципах. Первый из них гласит: подобное производит подобное или следствие похоже на свою причину. Согласно второму принципу, вещи, которые раз пришли в соприкосновение друг с другом, продолжают взаимодействовать на расстоянии после прекращения прямого контакта. “Одно из неприятных свойств нашего времени состоит в том, что те, кто испытывает уверенность, глупы, а те, кто обладает хоть каким-то воображением и пониманием, исполнены сомнений и нерешительности” …Я сочинял “ложные воспоминания”. Разница между ними и подлинными такова же, как между фальшивыми и настоящими бриллиантами: фальшивые выглядят более естественно и ярче сверкают. Сальвадор Дали ксеноглоссии. Так называют явление, когда человек вдруг начинает разговаривать на каких-то существующих языках, которые никогда не учил и знать не должен глоссолалии. Этим термином обозначают произнесение людьми непонятных сочетаний звуков, бормотание на несуществующем языке, которого и сам говорящий не знает, в приливе религиозного вдохновения или в состоянии религиозного же экстаза Иногда ошибочные умозаключения порождают довольно странные обряды и обычаи. Тихоокеанские островитяне архипелага Фиджи строили взлетно-посадочные полосы и деревянные самолеты в натуральную величину, а рядом в специальной хижине сажали “диспетчера” в “наушниках” из половинок кокоса с бамбуковыми палочками, торчащими в качестве антенн. Такое поведение объясняется тем, что во время Второй мировой войны на Фиджи располагались американские военные базы. Островитяне видели, как к солдатам прилетали самолеты с полезными вещами. После войны самолеты прилетать перестали – и местные жители решили повторять действия белых людей в надежде, что это вернет ценные грузы. известен синдром искаженного восприятия сна – парадоксальная бессонница (инсомния), когда люди считают, будто вовсе не спят, хотя это не так Наша картина мира продолжит уточняться, если мы будем честны: не станем игнорировать неугодные нам данные и постараемся учесть известные источники ошибок. Таким образом, знание – не то, что доказано с математической точностью, а то, что наиболее вероятно в свете имеющихся данных.

As already noted, courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study. As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right.

Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings. Explicit philosophical statements regarding the grounds for and nature of ethical behavior, stated in a verbally comprehensible manner, were not established through rational endeavor.

Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. If

And this takes us back to perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of cognitive dissonance. It is precisely those thinkers who are most renowned, who are famous for their brilliant minds, who have the most to lose from mistakes. And that is why it is often the most influential people, those who ought to be in the best position to help the world learn from new evidence, who have the greatest incentive to reframe it. And these are also the kinds of people (or institutions) who often have the capacity to employ expensive PR firms to bolster their post hoc justifications. They have the financial means, in addition to a powerful subconscious urge, to bridge the gap between beliefs and evidence, not by learning, but by spinning. It is the equivalent of a golfer hitting the ball out of bounds and then hiring a slick PR company to convince the world that it had nothing to do with him, it was a sudden gust of wind!

In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification)

Post-hoc rationalization The action-reflex obtained by propaganda is only a beginning, a point of departure; it will develop harmoniously only if there is an organization in which (and thanks to which) the proselyte becomes militant. Without organization, psychological incitement leads to excesses and deviation of action in the very course of its development. Through organization, the proselyte receives an overwhelming impulse that makes him act with the whole of his being. He is actually transformed into a religious man in the psycho-sociological sense of the term; justice enters into the action he performs because of the organization of which he is a part. Thus his action is integrated into a group of conforming actions. Not only does such integration seem to be the principal aim of all propaganda today; it Is also what makes the effect of propaganda endure. For action makes propaganda's effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is now obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable. He is obliged to continue to advance in the direction indicated by propaganda, for action demands more action. He is what one calls "committed" — which is certainly what the Communist party anticipates, for example, and what the Nazis accomplished. The man who has acted in accordance with the existing propaganda has taken his place in society. From then on he has enemies. Often he has broken with his milieu or his family; he may be compromised. He is forced to accept the new milieu and the new friends that propaganda makes for him. Often he has committed an act reprehensible by traditional moral standards and has disturbed a certain urder. He needs a justification for this — and he gets more deeply involved by repeating the act in order to prove that it was just.

With shaken confidence in the consistency and legitimacy of what they take to be scientific research, people revert to ancient and erroneous habits of thought-post hoc ergo propter hot- reasoning, reliance on anecdotal evidence, false analogy, and simple rumor chasing.

Salve, Regina Salve, Regina, mater misericordiæ, vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Hevæ. Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle. Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte. Et Iesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exsilium ostende. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria. Amen. V. Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genetrix. R. Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.

Viewpoint One is an avatar in a simulated world. It has its own representations of past, present and future, and its own ideas about how to act. So do Viewpoints Two, and Three, and Four. Thinking is the process by which these internal avatars imagine and articulate their worlds to one another. You can’t set straw men against one another when you’re thinking, either, because then you’re not thinking. You’re rationalizing, post-hoc. You’re matching what you want against a weak opponent so that you don’t have to change your mind. You’re propagandizing. You’re using double-speak. You’re using your conclusions to justify your proofs. You’re hiding from the truth.

concluded instead that: • The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life. • People sometimes have gut feelings—particularly about disgust and disrespect—that can drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication. • Morality can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role than rationalist theories had given it.

In this chapter I tried to show that Hume was right: • The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant. • You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn’t change his judgment. • The social intuitionist model starts with Hume’s model and makes it more social. Moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people. That’s why I say that “intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” You’ll misunderstand moral reasoning if you think about it as something people do by themselves in order to figure out the truth. • Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed.

Now, let us review what we have discovered in our analysis of the first creation covenant. Yahweh’s covenant with Adam contains in seed form everything that will go into the other covenants in the Scriptures. There will be some important changes, of course, after the fall of man, but the post-fall covenants are not ad hoc, novel arrangements, but renewals of the creation covenant. Our outline of the form of God’s covenant includes five dimensions: As covenant Lord, Yahweh takes hold of His creation in order to do something new with it. The Lord effects a separation. What God grasps is then transformed from one state to another, from the old to the new: a new creation. This new union (dirt and life-giving breath of Yahweh) receives from God a corresponding new name, which implies a new hierarchical relationship. There is a covenant head (Yahweh) and there are those who are dependent on that covenant head (human creatures). A new verbal communication of stipulations is expressed by the covenant Lord, a way of life fit for the new covenantal situation, a gracious enumeration of how to live fully and joyfully in this new covenant. The Lord offers His covenant partners a fellowship meal. He gives the gift of signs and seals of the covenant (two trees) together with a setting forth of blessings for grateful faithfulness and curses for ungrateful disobedience. The Lord arranges for the future succession of the covenant, which in this covenant involves marriage and children.

In the words of Jonathan Haidt,* ‘The conscious mind thinks it’s the Oval Office, when in reality it’s the press office.’ By this he means that we believe we are issuing executive orders, while most of the time we are actually engaged in hastily constructing plausible post-rationalisations to explain decisions taken somewhere else, for reasons we do not understand. But the fact that we can deploy reason to explain our actions post-hoc does not mean that it was reason that decided on that action in the first place, or indeed that the use of reason can help obtain it.

We chose what to share. Through composition I reduced my life, burned fat, filed edges. The editing process let me veto post-hoc the painful, boring or irrelevant moments I lived through.

Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” Ned said, and Imogen and I stared at one another in confusion. He continued. “It means ‘after it, therefore because of it,’ and speaks to the mistaken assumption that just because one thing follows another in sequence, the second happened because of the first.

My early Jeffersonian dual-process model. Emotion and reasoning are separate paths to moral judgment, although moral judgment can sometimes lead to post hoc reasoning as well.

We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.

Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)   CHAPTER OBJECTIVES After reading this chapter, you should be able to Use one-way ANOVA when the dependent variable is continuous and the independent variable is nominal or ordinal with two or more categories Understand the assumptions of ANOVA and how to test for them Use post-hoc tests Understand some extensions of one-way ANOVA This chapter provides an essential introduction to analysis of variance (ANOVA). ANOVA is a family of statistical techniques, the most basic of which is the one-way ANOVA, which provides an essential expansion of the t-test discussed in Chapter 12. One-way ANOVA allows analysts to test the effect of a continuous variable on an ordinal or nominal variable with two or more categories, rather than only two categories as is the case with the t-test. Thus, one-way ANOVA enables analysts to deal with problems such as whether the variable “region” (north, south, east, west) or “race” (Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Asian, etc.) affects policy outcomes or any other matter that is measured on a continuous scale. One-way ANOVA also allows analysts to quickly determine subsets of categories with similar levels of the dependent variable. This chapter also addresses some extensions of one-way ANOVA and a nonparametric alternative. ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE Whereas the t-test is used for testing differences between two groups on a continuous variable (Chapter 12), one-way ANOVA is used for testing the means of a continuous variable across more than two groups. For example, we may wish to test whether income levels differ among three or more ethnic groups, or whether the counts of fish vary across three or more lakes. Applications of ANOVA often arise in medical and agricultural research, in which treatments are given to different groups of patients, animals, or crops. The F-test statistic compares the variances within each group against those that exist between each group and the overall mean: Key Point ANOVA extends the t-test; it is used when the independent variable is

categorical and the dependent variable is continuous. The logic of this approach is shown graphically in Figure 13.1. The overall group mean is (the mean of means). The boxplots represent the scores of observations within each group. (As before, the horizontal lines indicate means, rather than medians.) Recall that variance is a measure of dispersion. In both parts of the figure, w is the within-group variance, and b is the between-group variance. Each graph has three within-group variances and three between-group variances, although only one of each is shown. Note in part A that the between-group variances are larger than the within-group variances, which results in a large F-test statistic using the above formula, making it easier to reject the null hypothesis. Conversely, in part B the within-group variances are larger than the between-group variances, causing a smaller F-test statistic and making it more difficult to reject the null hypothesis. The hypotheses are written as follows: H0: No differences between any of the group means exist in the population. HA: At least one difference between group means exists in the population. Note how the alternate hypothesis is phrased, because the logical opposite of “no differences between any of the group means” is that at least one pair of means differs. H0 is also called the global F-test because it tests for differences among any means. The formulas for calculating the between-group variances and within-group variances are quite cumbersome for all but the simplest of designs.1 In any event, statistical software calculates the F-test statistic and reports the level at which it is significant.2 When the preceding null hypothesis is rejected, analysts will also want to know which differences are significant. For example, analysts will want to know which pairs of differences in watershed pollution are significant across regions. Although one approach might be to use the t-test to sequentially test each pair of differences, this should not be done. It would not only be a most tedious undertaking but would also inadvertently and adversely affect the level of significance: the chance of finding a significant pair by chance alone increases as more pairs are examined. Specifically, the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis in one of two tests is [1 – 0.952 =] .098, the probability of rejecting it in one of three tests is [1 – 0.953 =] .143, and so forth. Thus, sequential testing of differences does not reflect the true level of significance for such tests and should not be used. Post-hoc tests test all possible group differences and yet maintain the true level of significance. Post-hoc tests vary in their methods of calculating test statistics and holding experiment-wide error rates constant. Three popular post-hoc tests are the Tukey, Bonferroni, and Scheffe tests.

The Scheffe test is the most conservative, the Tukey test is best when many comparisons are made (when there are many groups), and the Bonferroni test is preferred when few comparisons are made. However, these post-hoc tests often support the same conclusions.3 To illustrate, let’s say the independent variable has three categories. Then, a post-hoc test will examine hypotheses for whether . In addition, these tests will also examine which categories have means that are not significantly different from each other, hence, providing homogeneous subsets. An example of this approach is given later in this chapter. Knowing such subsets can be useful when the independent variable has many categories (for example, classes of employees). Figure 13.1 ANOVA: Significant and Insignificant Differences Eta-squared (η2) is a measure of association for mixed nominal-interval variables and is appropriate for ANOVA. Its values range from zero to one, and it is interpreted as the percentage of variation explained. It is a directional measure, and computer programs produce two statistics, alternating specification of the dependent variable. Finally, ANOVA can be used for testing interval-ordinal relationships. We can ask whether the change in means follows a linear pattern that is either increasing or decreasing. For example, assume we want to know whether incomes increase according to the political orientation of respondents, when measured on a seven-point Likert scale that ranges from very liberal to very conservative. If a linear pattern of increase exists, then a linear relationship is said to exist between these variables. Most statistical software packages can test for a variety of progressive relationships. ANOVA Assumptions ANOVA assumptions are essentially the same as those of the t-test: (1) the dependent variable is continuous, and the independent variable is ordinal or nominal, (2) the groups have equal variances, (3) observations are independent, and (4) the variable is normally distributed in each of the groups. The assumptions are tested in a similar manner. Relative to the t-test, ANOVA requires a little more concern regarding the assumptions of normality and homogeneity. First, like the t-test, ANOVA is not robust for the presence of outliers, and analysts examine the presence of outliers for each group. Also, ANOVA appears to be less robust than the t-test for deviations from normality. Second, regarding groups having equal variances, our main concern with homogeneity is that there are no substantial differences in the amount of variance across the groups; the test of homogeneity is a strict test, testing for any departure from equal variances, and in practice, groups may have neither equal variances nor substantial differences in the amount of variances. In these instances, a visual finding of no substantial differences suffices. Other strategies for dealing with heterogeneity are variable transformations and the removal of outliers, which increase variance, especially in small groups. Such outliers are detected by examining boxplots for each group separately. Also, some statistical software packages (such as SPSS), now offer post-hoc tests when equal variances are not assumed.4 A Working Example The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) measured the percentage of wetland loss in watersheds between 1982 and 1992, the most recent period for which data are available (government statistics are sometimes a little old).5 An analyst wants to know whether watersheds with large surrounding populations have

suffered greater wetland loss than watersheds with smaller surrounding populations. Most watersheds have suffered no or only very modest losses (less than 3 percent during the decade in question), and few watersheds have suffered more than a 4 percent loss. The distribution is thus heavily skewed toward watersheds with little wetland losses (that is, to the left) and is clearly not normally distributed.6 To increase normality, the variable is transformed by twice taking the square root, x.25. The transformed variable is then normally distributed: the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic is 0.82 (p = .51 > .05). The variable also appears visually normal for each of the population subgroups. There are four population groups, designed to ensure an adequate number of observations in each. Boxplot analysis of the transformed variable indicates four large and three small outliers (not shown). Examination suggests that these are plausible and representative values, which are therefore retained. Later, however, we will examine the effect of these seven observations on the robustness of statistical results. Descriptive analysis of the variables is shown in Table 13.1. Generally, large populations tend to have larger average wetland losses, but the standard deviations are large relative to (the difference between) these means, raising considerable question as to whether these differences are indeed statistically significant. Also, the untransformed variable shows that the mean wetland loss is less among watersheds with “Medium I” populations than in those with “Small” populations (1.77 versus 2.52). The transformed variable shows the opposite order (1.06 versus 0.97). Further investigation shows this to be the effect of the three small outliers and two large outliers on the calculation of the mean of the untransformed variable in the “Small” group. Variable transformation minimizes this effect. These outliers also increase the standard deviation of the “Small” group. Using ANOVA, we find that the transformed variable has unequal variances across the four groups (Levene’s statistic = 2.83, p = .41 < .05). Visual inspection, shown in Figure 13.2, indicates that differences are not substantial for observations within the group interquartile ranges, the areas indicated by the boxes. The differences seem mostly caused by observations located in the whiskers of the “Small” group, which include the five outliers mentioned earlier. (The other two outliers remain outliers and are shown.) For now, we conclude that no substantial differences in variances exist, but we later test the robustness of this conclusion with consideration of these observations (see Figure 13.2). Table 13.1 Variable Transformation We now proceed with the ANOVA analysis. First, Table 13.2 shows that the global F-test statistic is 2.91, p = .038 < .05. Thus, at least one pair of means is significantly different. (The term sum of squares is explained in note 1.) Getting Started Try ANOVA on some data of your choice. Second, which pairs are significantly different? We use the Bonferroni post-hoc test because relatively few comparisons are made (there are only four groups). The computer-generated results (not shown in Table 13.2) indicate that the only significant difference concerns the means of the “Small” and “Large” groups. This difference (1.26 - 0.97 = 0.29 [of transformed values]) is significant at the 5 percent level (p = .028). The Tukey and Scheffe tests lead to the same conclusion (respectively, p = .024 and .044). (It should be noted that post-hoc tests also exist for when equal variances are not assumed. In our example, these tests lead to the same result.7) This result is consistent with a visual reexamination of Figure 13.2, which shows that differences between group means are indeed small. The Tukey and

Scheffe tests also produce “homogeneous subsets,” that is, groups that have statistically identical means. Both the three largest and the three smallest populations have identical means. The Tukey levels of statistical significance are, respectively, .725 and .165 (both > .05). This is shown in Table 13.3. Figure 13.2 Group Boxplots Table 13.2 ANOVA Table Third, is the increase in means linear? This test is an option on many statistical software packages that produces an additional line of output in the ANOVA table, called the “linear term for unweighted sum of squares,” with the appropriate F-test. Here, that F-test statistic is 7.85, p = .006 < .01, and so we conclude that the apparent linear increase is indeed significant: wetland loss is linearly associated with the increased surrounding population of watersheds.8 Figure 13.2 does not clearly show this, but the enlarged Y-axis in Figure 13.3 does. Fourth, are our findings robust? One concern is that the statistical validity is affected by observations that statistically (although not substantively) are outliers. Removing the seven outliers identified earlier does not affect our conclusions. The resulting variable remains normally distributed, and there are no (new) outliers for any group. The resulting variable has equal variances across the groups (Levene’s test = 1.03, p = .38 > .05). The global F-test is 3.44 (p = .019 < .05), and the Bonferroni post-hoc test similarly finds that only the differences between the “Small” and “Large” group means are significant (p = .031). The increase remains linear (F = 6.74, p = .011 < .05). Thus, we conclude that the presence of observations with large values does not alter our conclusions. Table 13.3 Homogeneous Subsets Figure 13.3 Watershed Loss, by Population We also test the robustness of conclusions for different variable transformations. The extreme skewness of the untransformed variable allows for only a limited range of root transformations that produce normality. Within this range (power 0.222 through 0.275), the preceding conclusions are replicated fully. Natural log and base-10 log transformations also result in normality and replicate these results, except that the post-hoc tests fail to identify that the means of the “Large” and “Small” groups are significantly different. However, the global F-test is (marginally) significant (F = 2.80, p = .043 < .05), which suggests that this difference is too small to detect with this transformation. A single, independent-samples t-test for this difference is significant (t = 2.47, p = .017 < .05), suggesting that this problem may have been exacerbated by the limited number of observations. In sum, we find converging evidence for our conclusions. As this example also shows, when using statistics, analysts frequently must exercise judgment and justify their decisions.9 Finally, what is the practical significance of this analysis? The wetland loss among watersheds with large surrounding populations is [(3.21 – 2.52)/2.52 =] 27.4 percent greater than among those surrounded by small populations. It is up to managers and elected officials to determine whether a difference of this magnitude warrants intervention in watersheds with large surrounding populations.10

Beyond One-Way ANOVA The approach described in the preceding section is called one-way ANOVA. This scenario is easily generalized to accommodate more than one independent variable. These independent variables are either discrete (called factors) or continuous (called covariates). These approaches are called n-way ANOVA or ANCOVA (the “C” indicates the presence of covariates). Two way ANOVA, for example, allows for testing of the effect of two different independent variables on the dependent variable, as well as the interaction of these two independent variables. An interaction effect between two variables describes the way that variables “work together” to have an effect on the dependent variable. This is perhaps best illustrated by an example. Suppose that an analyst wants to know whether the number of health care information workshops attended, as well as a person’s education, are associated with healthy lifestyle behaviors. Although we can surely theorize how attending health care information workshops and a person’s education can each affect an individual’s healthy lifestyle behaviors, it is also easy to see that the level of education can affect a person’s propensity for attending health care information workshops, as well. Hence, an interaction effect could also exist between these two independent variables (factors). The effects of each independent variable on the dependent variable are called main effects (as distinct from interaction effects). To continue the earlier example, suppose that in addition to population, an analyst also wants to consider a measure of the watershed’s preexisting condition, such as the number of plant and animal species at risk in the watershed. Two-way ANOVA produces the results shown in Table 13.4, using the transformed variable mentioned earlier. The first row, labeled “model,” refers to the combined effects of all main and interaction effects in the model on the dependent variable. This is the global F-test. The “model” row shows that the two main effects and the single interaction effect, when considered together, are significantly associated with changes in the dependent variable (p < .000). However, the results also show a reduced significance level of “population” (now, p = .064), which seems related to the interaction effect (p = .076). Although neither effect is significant at conventional levels, the results do suggest that an interaction effect is present between population and watershed condition (of which the number of at-risk species is an indicator) on watershed wetland loss. Post-hoc tests are only provided separately for each of the independent variables (factors), and the results show the same homogeneous grouping for both of the independent variables. Table 13.4 Two-Way ANOVA Results As we noted earlier, ANOVA is a family of statistical techniques that allow for a broad range of rather complex experimental designs. Complete coverage of these techniques is well beyond the scope of this book, but in general, many of these techniques aim to discern the effect of variables in the presence of other (control) variables. ANOVA is but one approach for addressing control variables. A far more common approach in public policy, economics, political science, and public administration (as well as in many others fields) is multiple regression (see Chapter 15). Many analysts feel that ANOVA and regression are largely equivalent. Historically, the preference for ANOVA stems from its uses in medical and agricultural research, with applications in education and psychology. Finally, the ANOVA approach can be generalized to allow for testing on two or more dependent variables. This approach is called multiple analysis of variance, or MANOVA. Regression-based analysis can also be used for dealing with multiple dependent variables, as mentioned in Chapter 17.

A NONPARAMETRIC ALTERNATIVE A nonparametric alternative to one-way ANOVA is Kruskal-Wallis’ H test of one-way ANOVA. Instead of using the actual values of the variables, Kruskal-Wallis’ H test assigns ranks to the variables, as shown in Chapter 11. As a nonparametric method, Kruskal-Wallis’ H test does not assume normal populations, but the test does assume similarly shaped distributions for each group. This test is applied readily to our one-way ANOVA example, and the results are shown in Table 13.5. Table 13.5 Kruskal-Wallis’ H-Test of One-Way ANOVA Kruskal-Wallis’ H one-way ANOVA test shows that population is significantly associated with watershed loss (p = .013). This is one instance in which the general rule that nonparametric tests have higher levels of significance is not seen. Although Kruskal-Wallis’ H test does not report mean values of the dependent variable, the pattern of mean ranks is consistent with Figure 13.2. A limitation of this nonparametric test is that it does not provide post-hoc tests or analysis of homogeneous groups, nor are there nonparametric n-way ANOVA tests such as for the two-way ANOVA test described earlier. SUMMARY One-way ANOVA extends the t-test by allowing analysts to test whether two or more groups have different means of a continuous variable. The t-test is limited to only two groups. One-way ANOVA can be used, for example, when analysts want to know if the mean of a variable varies across regions, racial or ethnic groups, population or employee categories, or another grouping with multiple categories. ANOVA is family of statistical techniques, and one-way ANOVA is the most basic of these methods. ANOVA is a parametric test that makes the following assumptions: The dependent variable is continuous. The independent variable is ordinal or nominal. The groups have equal variances. The variable is normally distributed in each of the groups. Relative to the t-test, ANOVA requires more attention to the assumptions of normality and homogeneity. ANOVA is not robust for the presence of outliers, and it appears to be less robust than the t-test for deviations from normality. Variable transformations and the removal of outliers are to be expected when using ANOVA. ANOVA also includes three other types of tests of interest: post-hoc tests of mean differences among categories, tests of homogeneous subsets, and tests for the linearity of mean differences across categories. Two-way ANOVA addresses the effect of two independent variables on a continuous dependent variable. When using two-way ANOVA, the analyst is able to distinguish main effects from interaction effects. Kruskal-Wallis’ H test is a nonparametric alternative to one-way ANOVA. KEY TERMS   Analysis of variance (ANOVA) ANOVA assumptions Covariates Factors Global F-test Homogeneous subsets Interaction effect Kruskal-Wallis’ H test of one-way ANOVA Main effect One-way ANOVA Post-hoc test Two-way ANOVA Notes   1. The between-group variance is

post hoc ergo propter hoc,

George W. Bush’s legacy was a nation impoverished by debt, besieged by doubt, struggling with the aftereffects of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and deeply engaged in military conflicts of our own choosing. His tin ear for traditional conservative values, his sanctimonious religiosity, his support for Guantánamo, CIA “renditions,” and government snooping have eroded public trust in the United States at home and abroad. For eight years Bush made the decisions that put the United States on a collision course with reality. To argue that by taking the actions that he did, the president kept America safe is meretricious: the type of post hoc ergo propter hoc analysis that could justify any action, regardless of its impropriety. The fact is, the threat of terrorism that confronts the United States is in many respects a direct result of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Her “man in the basement,” the part of her experience most suggestive of superego functioning, was envisioned as not really part of her at all, but as an aggressive “other,” who had taken up residence inside her. More a sadistic tyrant than a reasoned standard-bearer, he brought no defined code of ethics, no better course of action to recommend. Although post hoc explanations were supplied by Angela, no clear pattern could be found in his censure to serve as a guide for personal improvement.

In fact, the kind of post hoc interpretation of evidence to fit a God hypothesis could be repeated effectively for the Force or any other suitably vague and yet potent fictional construction. That no one has seen anyone with the ability to manipulate the Force not only ignores (also incredible) claims made by those who believe in spiritual magic powers, say associated with esoteric martial arts, but it could be dismissed simply enough by pointing out that they simply haven't met a Jedi willing to demonstrate the ability. Eastern mystics and their adherents make this exact claim all the time when defending their own outrageous claims, and we have no trouble dismissing what they wish to pass as “evidence” for the phenomena.

moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study.

WHAT WORKS WELL Mornings: I tend to get a lot done in the mornings. Scheduling/ batching: I spend time each month creating and scheduling social media posts all in one go. Project management: I use Asana to manage all my projects. (I moved to it recently after finding Basecamp a truly painful experience.) And I have ready-made projects set up, which means I can ‘set and forget’ and then wait for the alerts telling me what to do each day. Psst: By ‘ready-made projects’ I mean templates that are set up with standard tasks for each type of job I do. Documentation: I have documents for everything. I also have templates for all kinds of project emails, as well as ad hoc things such as interview requests, favour requests and tech issues. Toggl: I use Toggl to track my time (when I remember to switch it on). Typing: I type super fast (one of my superpowers). Bravery: I’m willing to give stuff a go without fear of failure, which means I don’t procrastinate much.

Without awareness of common pitfalls such as confirmation bias, positive-outcome bias, and subjective validation, a person trained in logic and fallacy detection is easily deceived into thinking that he or she has acquired invincible armor against assaults of unreason. Expressions like post hoc ergo propter hoc and false cause, should be informed by knowledge of evolution and how the brain works to jump to conclusions about causal connections.

Sense for morality and sense for causality in counteraction.—In the same measure as the sense for causality increases, the extent of the domain of morality decreases: for each time one has understood the necessary effects and has learned how to segregate them from all the accidental effects and incidental consequences (post hoc), one has destroyed a countless number of imaginary causalities hitherto believed in as the foundations of customs—the real world is much smaller than the imaginary—and each time a piece of anxiety and constraint has vanished from the world, each time too a piece of respect for the authority of custom: morality as a whole has suffered a diminution. He who wants, on the contrary, to augment it must know how to prevent the results from being subject to control.

and that we care more about looking good than about truly being good.2 Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. We lie, cheat, and cut ethical corners quite often when we think we can get away with it, and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others. We believe our own post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our own virtue.

research university that primarily awards master’s degrees and PhDs, JNU saw the number of seats offered to students wishing to enroll in a master’s or a doctoral program plummet by 84 percent, from 1,234 to 194 in one year.101 Furthermore, admissions committees were made up solely of experts appointed by the JNU vice-chancellor, flouting university statutes and guidelines followed by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which stipulate that academics should be involved.102 This made it possible to hire teachers from Hindu nationalist circles,103 with few qualifications,104 and some facing charges of plagiarism.105 In particular, several former ABVP student activists from JNU have been appointed as assistant professors even after being disqualified by the committee in charge of short-listing applicants.106 The vice-chancellor replaced deans in the School of Social Sciences without following appointment procedures, cutting the number of researchers by 80 percent and ceasing to apply rules JNU had set to ensure diversity through a mechanism taking into account the social background and geographic origin of its applicants.107 The new recruitment procedure strongly disadvantaged Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs, who used to make up nearly 50 percent of the student intake and who now accounted for a mere 7 percent. The vice-chancellor also issued ad hoc promotions, nominating recently appointed faculty members to the post of full professor. Conversely, the freeze on promotions for “antigovernment” teachers who should have been promoted on the basis of seniority prompted some of the diktat’s victims to take the matter to court.108 However, even after the court—taking note of the illegality of the rejection procedure—ordered a reexamination of the claimants’ promotions, the latter were once again denied.109

I can’t believe this!” Halyard said. “A few seconds ago you told me you’re not suicidal and now I find out that actually you have a long history of suicide attempts.” “Attempt.” “This proves I’m right.” “What do you mean?” “You say the reason you want to die is that there’s no other adequate response to what’s happening with the animals. But you didn’t start caring about the animals until pretty recently. And yet your desire to die predates that by years and years. So that proves what I’ve been saying—all this stuff about the animals is just a rationalization, it’s just ornamental, non-loadbearing, post hoc bullshit. You tried to kill yourself once, but the whole experience was a bit shambolic and demeaning, so instead of making a conventional second attempt you waited until you could come up with a gimmick that suits you better, meaning it’s some ridiculously elaborate Nietzsche Dostoevsky Master’s in Neural Systems occult ritual martyrdom thing that nobody else would ever have thought of. And this explains your whole ‘extinction is worse than the Holocaust’ manifesto. You put a low value on human existence because you put a low value on your own.

One important reason that philosophers should take Nietzsche seriously is because he seems to have gotten, at least in broad contours, many points about human moral psychology right. Consider: (1) Nietzsche holds that heritable type-facts are central determinants of personality and morally significant behaviors, a claim well supported by extensive empirical findings in behavioral genetics. (2) Nietzsche claims that consciousness is a “surface” and that “the greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to [non-conscious] instinctive activity,” theses overwhelmingly vindicated by recent work by psychologists on the role of the unconscious (e.g., Wilson 2002) and by philosophers who have produced synthetic meta-analyses of work on consciousness in psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Rosenthal 2008). (3) Nietzsche claims that moral judgments are post-hoc rationalizations of feelings that have an antecedent source, and thus are not the outcome of rational reflection or discursiveness, a conclusion in sync with the findings of the ascendent “social intuitionism” in the empirical moral psychology of Jonathan Haidt (2001) and others. (4) Nietzsche argues that free will is an “illusion,” that our conscious experience of willing is itself the causal product of non-conscious forces, a view recently defended by the psychologist Daniel Wegner (2002), who, in turn, synthesiyes a large body of empirical literature, including the famous neurophysical data about “willing” collected by Benjamin Libet.

A story is always an artificial, post-hoc fabrication with dubious correspondence to the past.

Then he or she grants to that small number primary causal power, while ignoring others of equal or greater importance. It is most effective to utilize a major motivational system or large-scale sociological fact or conjecture for such purposes. It is also good to select those explanatory principles for an unstated negative, resentful, and destructive reason, and then make discussion of the latter and the reason for their existence taboo for the ideologue and his or her followers (to say nothing of the critics). Next, the faux theorist spins a post-hoc theory about how every phenomenon, no matter how complex, can be considered a secondary consequence of the new, totalizing system. Finally, a school of thought emerges to propagate the methods of this algorithmic reduction (particularly when the thinker is hoping to attain dominance in the conceptual and the real worlds), and those who refuse to adopt the algorithm or who criticize its use are tacitly or explicitly demonized.

In 1968, Bradlee was named executive editor of the Post, and he took on the Nixon White House, allowing the ad hoc investigative team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to dig deep into the Watergate scandal.

post hoc ergo propter hoc. In other words, there would be no causal

the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy

In the same measure as the sense for causality increases, the extent of the domain of morality [ Sittlichkeit] decreases: for each time one has understood the necessary effects and has learned how to segregate them from all the accidental effects and incidental consequences (post hoc), one has destroyed a countless number of imaginary causalities hitherto believed in as the foundation of customs — the real world is much smaller than the imaginary — and each time a piece of anxiety and constraint has vanished from the world, each time too a piece of respect [Achtung] for the authority of custom; morality as a whole has suffered a diminution. Whoever wants to increase it must know how to prevent the results from being subject to control.

post hoc ergo propter hoc…after this, therefore because of this.

The perception of god in the view of scientists and philosophers who do not believe in God is ‘god of the gaps’ which has to be invoked as an ad hoc presumption to bypass material explanations in certain instances where physical answers and explanations are absent for the time being. Their argument is that if a physical explanation can take us back to relying on some finite number of constant values related to forces and energy, then why to invoke god to fill the gap.

courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study. As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right. The most difficult decisions (and often the most important) are difficult precisely because they will be deeply unpopular with the CEO’s most important constituencies (employees, investors, and customers).

We chose what to share. Through composition I reduced my life, burned fat, filed edges. The editing process let me veto post hoc the painful, boring, or irrelevant moments I lived through. Necessarily Julian curated what he told me, and that, too, made me happy. Together we were making something small and precise.

Here are the ominous parallels. Our universities are strongholds of German philosophy disseminating every key idea of the post-Kantian axis, down by now to old-world racism and romanticist technology-hatred. Our culture is modernism worn-out but recycled, with heavy infusions of such Weimarian blends as astrology and Marx, or Freud and Dada, or “humanitarianism” and horror-worship, along with five decades of corruption built on this kind of base. Our youth activists, those reared on the latest viewpoints at the best universities, are the pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected (this time mostly on the political left and addicted to drugs). Our political parties are the Weimar coalition over again, offering the same pressure-group pragmatism, and the same kind of contradiction between their Enlightenment antecedents and their statist commitments. The liberals, more anti-ideological than the moderate German left, have given up even talking about long-range plans and demand more controls as a matter of routine, on a purely ad hoc basis. The conservatives, much less confident than the nationalist German right, are conniving at this routine and apologizing for the remnants of their own tradition, capitalism (because of its clash with the altruist ethics)—while demanding government intervention in or control over the realms of morality, religion, sex, literature, education, science. Each of these groups, observing the authoritarian element in the other, accuses it of Fascist tendencies; the charge is true on both sides. Each group, like its Weimar counterpart, is contributing to the same result: the atmosphere of chronic crisis, and the kinds of controls, inherent in an advanced mixed economy. The result of this result, as in Germany, is the growth of national bewilderment or despair, and of the governmental apparatus necessary for dictatorship. In America, the idea of public ownership of the means of production is a dead issue. Our intellectual and political leaders are content to retain the forms of private property, with public control over its use and disposal. This means: in regard to economic issues, the country’s leadership is working to achieve not the communist version of dictatorship, but the Nazi version. Throughout its history, in every important cultural and political area, the United States, thanks to its distinctive base, always lagged behind the destructive trends of Germany and of the rest of the modern world. We are catching up now. We are still the freest country on earth. There is no totalitarian (or even openly socialist) party of any size here, no avowed candidate for the office of Führer, no economic or political catastrophe sufficient to make such a party or man possible—so far—and few zealots of collectivism left to urge an ever faster pursuit of national suicide. We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully. But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason.

Military education is a major part of this evolution into a MCWW. No new doctrine could have taken hold without the presence of militarily educated warriors. In fact, it has become standard practice for all United States Marines to become thinkers and readers. 11 Required readings encompass the entire Corps, from general officers down to newly minted privates leaving the recruit depots of Parris Island and Camp Pendelton in San Diego. Not only is reading now a fundamental aspect of being a Marine, it is also a socialization process within the Corps itself, for these readings lead to formal and informal discussion groups focusing on various aspects of military history, doctrine, strategy, and tactics. In part, this educational process grew out of the Reformers’ ad hoc meetings for the MCWW development in order get its center of gravity embedded within the Marine Corps. 12

What Pope Benedict XVI failed to specify in 2013 is that the main media outlet responsible for the hijacking of the Second Vatican Council was Time magazine, which acted as the middleman between the CIA (C. D. Jackson was the intermediary employed by both institutions) and double agents like John Courtney Murray, S.J. To this day no one has explored the extent to which this realization led to Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. The one thing we know for certain is that the resignation precipitated Bergoglio’s election as pope. The connection is more than post hoc.

The result is that we are tempted to infer a cause-and-effect relationship when all we have witnessed is a sequence of events. This is the post-hoc fallacy.

post hoc, propter hoc

Although the archaeological record is suggestive, it is also frustratingly incomplete; soon after the Spaniards visited, mass graves became more common in the Southeast, but there is yet no solid proof that a single Indian in them died of a pig-transmitted disease. Asserting that De Soto’s visit caused the subsequent collapse of the Caddo and Coosa may be only the old logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

If we were all equipped with perfectly logical minds, we would see that the number of bad things happening to people who’ve been cursed is the same as the number of bad things happening to everyone else. But that’s not how our minds work. More often, we look for bad things and then work backward. It’s a very old logical fallacy. The Romans called it post hoc, ergo propter hoc, meaning “after this, therefore because of this.” If a piano falls on your head, it’s because you walked under a ladder two weeks ago. Never mind that many people who work in the ladder industry, regularly use ladders, or just happen to walk under them every day manage to avoid falling pianos.

in the back of my mind, as if patiently sitting on a chair in the corner of my subconscious, one thought presents itself: What if this is the curse? What kind of horrible hubris has led me to this point? In that moment I truly understand the power of nocebos—of that old Roman phrase post hoc, ergo propter hoc. If something happens to my child, regardless of the cause, my wife will never forgive me. I will certainly never forgive myself. The curse is no more powerful in that moment than it has been the previous week. It hasn’t caused me to slip and bump my head or weakened my immune system. And it certainly doesn’t have the power to harm my child. No, the real power of a curse is to give cause to a bad event—to give me someone to blame. In this case, myself. That’s how quickly a man of science can turn to superstition.

None of the world’s leading airlines failed to survive COVID. Yet by 2023, Qantas routinely portrayed its survival of the pandemic as a uniquely Joycean feat, while defining 100 per cent of its operational failures as symptoms of an industry-wide phenomenon. None of that is to trivialise the extraordinary injuries COVID inflicted on Qantas, or Qantas’ decisive efforts to achieve hibernation then manage through oscillating lockdowns. But rather than swallowing Joyce’s post hoc rationalisations offered in 2022 and 2023, I have relied in this book on what he actually said and did in 2020 and 2021.

long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.