Rationality vs success

I was whining to my girlfriend about how Barack Obama is ignoring the advice of economists who predicted the financial crisis (video), and she said it sounded incredible to her, because he struck her as a rational individual.

That got me thinking about how rational you can be and still be wildly successful. My hypothesis is that in order to become among the very best in the world at something competitive like politics or sports, you have to have a certain ability to eschew rationality when the odds are against you. You have to be willing to gamble a little, to take a few risks.

I’m going to use Obama as an example here, but only to illustrate my point. This post isn’t about him.

Logically, even deciding to run for president of the United States is a very big gamble even for a member of the ethnic majority. There are going to be a whole bunch of guys in the running, several of them will be very skilled and experienced, and chances are many of them are going to be richer than you are. Under those circumstances, putting down the kind of money and effort to even get a campaign off the ground is a huge gamble. At worst, you could end up embarrassed, broke and politically friendless.

In an ideal society, the leaders would be the persons with the best rational decision making ability in matters of economics, foreign relations and crisis management. They’d be the kind of people who could explain to you which scientific theories are most prevalent in their chosen field, and point out the weaknesses and strengths of each theory. In western society, those people are professors, CFOs, company leaders and researchers. They aren’t politicians.

In today’s entertainment-saturated world, where most young people have the attention span of a goldfish and an inflated confidence in their own limited knowledge, successful politicians are the persons with the best connections, the most charisma, the most determination and the strongest political convictions. They are workhorses and charmers, not intellectuals. They are people with the willingness to put rationality and personal beliefs aside in favour of mass appeal.

The best proof of this is that there has yet to be an agnostic or atheist candidate in the US. The US population is highly religious, so the politicians have to claim belief in superstitious nonsense in order to even be considered at all. Not even religious moderates pretend to believe in the crazy stuff, yet if a presidential candidate was honest and said “I think certain passages in the bible are bullshit”, then his campaign would probably crash and burn soon after.

Barack Obama could be the best president that could logically have been elected in our current circumstances. I’m just not convinced that’s good enough.