tl;dr: Making sense of things when they don’t make sense.

For a large part of my life, it was as if my right brain didn’t even exist. I looked (and sometimes still look) at the world from the cold, hard lens of logic.

If it didn’t add up, it caused me consternation.

This is the crux of the argument in Does Not Compute and it’s important to keep this in mind when assessing situations we may face.

The author, Morgan Housel, brings up the Battle of the Bulge and the US war in Vietnam to highlight the point.

By all accounts, Nazi Germany was defeated.

There was no logical way that any thinking General would launch in attack in the middle of winter with limited supplies and an inability to reinforce them.

That was the cold analysis of the US generals over Christmas 1944 and thus, they didn’t reinforce their forward positions in the Ardennes forest.

However, their analysis didn’t factor in that Hitler was totally unhinged in his military analysis. He was desperate and desperate people do desperate, often irrational, things.

Similarly, the war in Vietnam. The calculus by the US was that we could create such a high proportion of casualties on the North Vietnamese side through superior weaponry that they would have to give up and give in.

But as Ho Chi Minh said:

“You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, but it is you who will tire first.”

Ho Chi Minh

Housel’s point is that this is how the world works.

Sometimes, the math doesn’t make sense and yet things happen anyway.

“Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.”

Will Durant

Bottom line is that the universe doesn’t care what each of us thinks “should” happen because it’s “logical.” And since the universe is unlikely to change its way of doing things, the choice is ours.

Accept that some things will happen even if they don’t make sense to our left brain.

Or resist it and risk being upset and confused at regular intervals.

So, what do we do when we want things to move in line with our vision?

We don’t belabor with facts and figures.

We tell stories.

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

Richard Powers