Are They Equivalent?

False Equivalence

I had an interesting discussion with Eric, whom I have the privilege to co-instruct together on a Visual Analytics Program. I strongly encourage you to check out his Medium if you have not. :)

Per our many other discussions, we discuss anything under the sun, especially data, data analytics, and Philosophy. I cannot remember what led to this topic but we were talking about the term “false equivalence”. So what is false equivalence?

As mentioned in a previous issue, our brain tends to draw mental shortcuts or create heuristics so as to process information quickly.

While it works most of the time, else your brain would not have established them, but there will be situations where it goes wrong i.e. your brain made false positives or false negatives.

A Lesson from History

Let me give an example. You will be familiar with Aung San Suu Kyi if you have been following Myanmar’s political development. She is a revolutionist who has stood against the junta and was placed under house arrest for 15 years before she was released in 2010. She was seen as the unifying figure for the revolution movement during that time.

After the (previous) junta decided to hand the power back to the people. Mdm Aung San Suu Kyi stepped up to lead her party National League for Democracy to election victory but given the constitution, she can only be appointed as State Counsellor instead of the President. People were celebrating her party’s victory back in 2015! No disrespect but I was pretty worried back then whether Myanmar could recover and catch up to the region’s development. How so?

Here is the false equivalence. Mdm Aung San Suu Kyi started as a revolutionist, as a unifying figure against the junta. But the moment her party won the election and she was made a State Counsellor, she became a politician. While there is certainly some overlap in skills and knowledge between politicians and revolutionists, the overlap is pretty small. Mdm Aung may have shown a good track record to be a revolutionist but she does not have one as a politician, or a policymaker.

History has shown that under her leadership Myanmar was getting better but not enough as per the region, granted it was a short period of 7 years.

Another historical figure who is on a similar trajectory was Nelson Mandela. Similarly, he fought back apartheid and led South Africa after he was released but South Africa did not prosper under his governance.

What is a positive example then? The positive example provided by Eric, and is Che Guevara. He did not take the highest post in Cuba, but instead only took up positions that needed his expertise. History is so full of lessons for all of us, right? :)

Conclusion

The lesson here is we have to be careful with our heuristics and constantly ask ourselves if we have made a false equivalence assumption. If someone is teaching Subject X in a university, does that mean that the lecturer is really an expert in that Subject, or again there is a false equivalence here as we assume that universities will only put someone knowledgeable to teach that subject. The sooner we can discover these false equivalences, the earlier we can prepare ourselves for the things to come and in turn save ourselves time effort, and perhaps anguish down the road.

What are your thoughts on this? Please share them in the comments below.

Here is Eric’s Medium which I strongly recommend especially if you are in the Data Analytics field (https://medium.com/@eric-sandosham)!

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