{"id":32442,"date":"2017-04-12T01:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T05:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32442"},"modified":"2017-04-03T08:47:31","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T12:47:31","slug":"qotd-different-interpretations-of-cause-and-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/12\/qotd-different-interpretations-of-cause-and-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Different interpretations of cause and effect"},"content":{"rendered":"

On December 8, 1979 two Zairean air-force jets approached the airport in Kinshasa, the capital what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The tower radioed the pilots, telling them they couldn\u2019t land; the air-traffic controllers were concerned about low visibility. <\/p>\n

But when the pilots were told that they \u201ccouldn\u2019t land,\u201d they didn\u2019t think, \u201cI can\u2019t land right now,\u201d they thought, \u201cI can\u2019t land, ever.\u201d So they ejected from their planes, letting two perfectly good Mirage jets crash into the Atlantic Ocean. <\/p>\n

These men weren\u2019t fools. Idiots don\u2019t fly jets. It\u2019s just that, for an instant, they were thinking according to an entirely different set of rules about how life works. \u201cCan\u2019t\u201d means \u201cnever, ever, possible\u201d according to these rules \u2014 not \u201cwait an hour,\u201d or \u201cfind a different runway.\u201d And so they hit the eject button. <\/p>\n

Longtime readers may recall I got this story from a great book, David Lamb\u2019s The Africans<\/em>. Lamb went on to observe that many Africans have a slightly different interpretation of cause and effect. In the West, the lesson the average person would take from a near-fatal car crash at high speeds on a hairpin turn would be \u201cMan, that was close. I better not try that again.\u201d But in Africa, Lamb writes, \u201cif an oncoming car has to swerve off the road to avoid his vehicle, and there are no collisions or injuries, the African does not say, \u2018Next time I\u2019d better not do that.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard similar stories about drivers throughout the developing world, particularly in Latin America, where traffic accidents and fatalities are much higher than in more advanced nations \u2014 even though the rate of car ownership is much lower.<\/p>\n

Jonah Goldberg, “Is Trump Really the Anti-PC Warrior His Fans Make Him Out to Be?”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2015-08-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On December 8, 1979 two Zairean air-force jets approached the airport in Kinshasa, the capital what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The tower radioed the pilots, telling them they couldn\u2019t land; the air-traffic controllers were concerned about low visibility. But when the pilots were told that they \u201ccouldn\u2019t land,\u201d they didn\u2019t think, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,41],"tags":[123,111,562,262],"class_list":["post-32442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-quotations","tag-aircraft","tag-cars","tag-congo","tag-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8rg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32443,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32442\/revisions\/32443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}