Addendum to Repairing Ignorance:

Regarding the science in this story, I recommend watching the TED talk by Dan Ariely "Are we in control of our own decisions?" I would link but not sure if that is frowned upon here. I couldn't explain it fully in the text because most of behavioural economics, and Dan Ariely in particular, do not exist in the HP timeline yet! Of course Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky had already laid the groundwork with the referenced concept of framing, which formed part of the Prospect Theory. To explain a little further though:

The environment a person is in defines their decision space and can even make up their minds for them. The classic example is that in countries with similar culture, an opt in system of organ donation results in massively fewer organs donated than an opt out system. The paper to read is called "Do defaults save lives?", which can be found with a simple Google search.

The surprising thing is in each case the citizens feel rationally justified in their decisions, and can even explain why they came to them, when in reality the person who made the form at the DMV made their decision for them. If they lived next door in the next country, they would make a different choice.

The implications are far reaching. How do you view crime if a person can be put in a situation where the majority of people would feel justified in breaking the law? How about someone being successful, if they were in a situation that made the choices to achieve success easy?

Think about how the Stanford prison experiment fits in. Normal people end up brutalizing their classmates because of the situation alone. Think about the Nazis, which in many ways is the origin of modern psychology, as scientists tried to understand how normal people could commit such terrible acts.

This understanding of the role of the environment redirects blame and credit away from individuals and onto systems. The environment is something a society can control, so a society should be held responsible for the ups and downs, rather than looking at each individual action in a vacuum. Each individual still makes a choice to differing extents, but given the right situation anyone will change their position. Like Harry here, risking it all because he had no other option. The Defense Professor would hold him responsible, but should he? Is the society that enforces ignorance not at least partially to blame?

To quote Dan Ariely from the last line of the TED talk I mentioned -

"Are we Superman? Or are we Homer Simpson?

When it comes to building the physical world, we kind of understand our limitations. We build steps. And we build [computers] that not everybody can use obviously. (Laughter) We understand our limitations,and we build around it. But for some reason when it comes to the mental world, when we design things like healthcare and retirement and stockmarkets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations, even though they don't stare us in the face in the same way, we could design a better world. And that, I think, is the hope of this thing (behavioural economics)."

Thanks for reading.