and
All
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Warts and All |
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| Candidate | Age | Cause of father's death | Father's age at death | Cause of mother's death | Mother's age at death |
| Obama | 47 | alcoholism, auto accident | 46 | ovarian and uterine cancer | 52 |
| Mccain | 72 | heart attack | 71 | Still living | (living, age 96) |
| Notes: John McCain has had localized Melanoma, which however has a 100% cure rate in its early stages. He does not have any indications of ischemic heart disease. Main risk cancer. Obama is at risk for addictive disorders and their allied mental illnesses, as well as cancer. Conclusion: I would put both these guys in a high risk pool and see little reason to assume either is much more likely to finish his term alive and compos mentis than the other |
|
Mccain: 133
Obama: 130 (estimate) Notes
Both men certainly have the cognitive ability to be president. But cognitive ability alone is not only of little value, it
may actually be dangerous unless coupled with knowledge to give wisdom.
As Confucius said, "Learning, without thought, is labor lost; thought, without learning, is perilous."
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| Candidate | School(s) | Course of study | Academic honors | Graduated |
| Obama | Occidental College, Columbia | B.A. -- Political Science | None | 1983 |
| Mccain | U.S. Naval Academy | B.S. -- Engineering |
None | 1958 |
| Candidate | Social sciences, literature, humanities | Physical sciences and mathematics | Foreign Languages |
Sports |
| Obama | high | low or none | None | Basketball (high school) |
| Mccain | medium | high | None | Boxing (college) wrestling (high school) |
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Notes:
Conclusion Neither candidate can be considered a scholar, and both show sometimes a deplorable lack of knowledge. Neither appears to have studied economics and neither has very good quantitative reasoning skills, though Obama, owing to his lack of education in such things a mathematics, probability theory, and statistics, is the more innumerate of the two. |
| Candidate | Literate Filter (What?) | Numerate Filter (How much?) | Ecolate Filter (What then?) |
| Obama | Heavy reliance on words and verbal reasoning | Lacking education in the sciences and quantitative methods, rarely considers the quantitative aspects of reality | Very low -- ecolate thinking requires both literate and numerate faculties. Devotion to "principles" blocks thinking on long-term consequences. |
| Mccain | Moderate reliance on words and verbal reasoning | Prefers literate filter but has enough education in mathematics and the sciences to use the numerate filter on occasion. | Low to moderate -- willing to consider long term consequences (e.g. immigration reform) even if at odds with principles. |
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Notes
The fortunate thing here is that either man (like all the rest of us) could avoid folly by cultivating the filters he seldom uses. And remembering Garrett Hardin's First Law of Ecology: "You cannot do only one thing" Conclusion: Obama
The main peril for Obama is making policy based on anecdotes and sob-stories, a danger exacerbated by his legal training, since the law generally eschews numerate reasoning for anecdote, despite its maxim "hard cases make bad law.". This explains why courts fail so miserably when they make policy decisions -- they never get past the literate filter. An example is Obama's interest in banning rifles of various sorts, while being apparently ignorant that rifles are involved (according to the FBI) in about 400 homicides per year, a trivial percentage of the homicides that occur in the U.S. and a nearly infinitesimal proportion of the total deaths (2,400,000) that occur in the U.S. each year. A numerate thinker who wanted to save lives would look at causes of death from most common to least, and address them in that order. Obama's well-intentioned promotion of home ownership for the poor, which had its end in the current subprime lending meltdown is another example of his innumeracy. This showed a nearly incredible lack of numerate and ecolate thinking by Obama and for that matter most of the political establishment, though more so on the Democratic side of the aisle. How true it is, "You cannot do only one thing." McCain
McCain would do well to remember that most Americans prefer the literate filter, and that for most people numbers do not speak for themselves. Because conservatives such as McCain tend to introduce change cautiously, they are less likely to end up making major blunders on the ecolate thinking side. However, a greater emphasis on the quantitative side can have downsides too, though they are usually less perilous than the errors made by ignoring quantitative reality altogether. McCain's sponsorship (with Russ Feingold, a Democrat) of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 is an excellent example of quantitative thinking gone awry, and a lapse in ecolate thinking as well. |