Crazy is as crazy does

This just in: the President of the United States is nuts.  I know, I know, it's a shock.  I mean, we all had no idea, right?  (Shut up.)

Now here's the bad news.  Just knowing he's crazy, that doesn't tell us exactly what his diagnosis is.  You see, there's more than one way of being crazy ... more than one way, even, of being crazy with the exact same symptoms.

To be able to talk about this more clearly, let's drop the word "crazy" and use "irrational" instead.  We call someone's behavior irrational when we think that it is -- in a way that should be obvious to a normal person -- ineffective in getting him what he wants.  In order to draw that conclusion, though, we have to know, or assume, what it is that he does want.  More often than not, we can't know; we have to assume.  Because more often than not, there's more than one answer to that question (what the person wants) that makes sense in the light of his observed behavior.  Faced with this ambiguity, we generally end up assuming that what the person wants is like what most other people want.

For example, suppose the president frequently says things that are so obviously untrue that hardly anyone is going to believe them.  In fact, it's so obvious (that he won't be believed) that we feel that he must be aware of it.  Or at least, he would realize this if he thought about it.

This is puzzling behavior, because, when a person asserts something, we usually assume that he wants to be believed.  This is a pretty safe assumption if he's telling the truth, or thinks he is.  But it's also pretty safe if he's lying.  What purpose could possibly be served by saying something when, not only do you know it's not true, but you also know that you won't be believed?  (Or "should" know: remember, we've already ruled out simple ignorance as the explanation.)

The behavior is puzzling because we usually expect, by default, that people will act rationally, and that doesn't seem to be the case here.  However, it can be irrational in more than one way.  I will mention two.

The first way we could interpret it is to figure that the president doesn't want what we originally thought he did; in this case, that he doesn't want to be believed.  Why wouldn't he?  Maybe he doesn't want to go on being president.  Maybe he's actually hoping that people will notice that he's acting irrationally, and rescue him from the job in which he feels trapped.

Interestingly, this is not just something that "someone might think": it has actually been put forward as an explanation of President Trump's recent behavior.  In the cases I've seen, the writer doesn't explicitly use the word "unconscious" (as in "has an unconscious desire to be removed from the presidency"), but I take it to be implied.  It's certainly more plausible that way.

But as I said, there could be a different kind of irrationality at play here.  This one's a little harder to explain, but that could be merely because we're not used to talking about it in such detail.

Under this theory, if you ask whether he wants to be believed, the answer isn't a simple "yes" or "no."  Instead, it needs to be something like this: generally, he does want to be believed.  And presumably, he would in this case too ... if he took the time to think about it.

But he didn't.  Someone said something negative about him.  That made him feel bad.  Snapping back and contradicting what they said will make him feel better, so he does that.  The reaction is so automatic that he literally never thinks about whether he will be believed.

This is called being impulsive.  And this, also, has, in the real world, been put forward as an explanation of some of Trump's behavior.  I believe that this is what people are referring to when they say Trump acts like he's nine years old (or thereabouts).

For what it's worth, this seems pretty plausible to me: more plausible, in general, than the theory that he has an unconscious desire to be removed from the presidency.  But that's not very important.  What matters is that both theories have some plausibility; each is sufficiently consistent with the observable facts that it can't be easily, and with certainty, ruled out.

So that's what I meant by different ways of being irrational.  Same observable behavior, different possible explanations of what's going on inside his skull.  What to do?

Perhaps we need to fall back to a behaviorist approach, also known as stimulus-response theory.  The basic idea here: since you can't directly observe what's going on inside the subject's head, don't even try to guess.  Just look for patterns in what stimulus produces what response.  If you think you see a pattern, then ideally, you should confirm it experimentally: predict the response to a new stimulus, apply that stimulus, and see whether your prediction was correct.

Here's a really simple example.  First, the observation from which you will be asked to infer a pattern.  (Normally, one would prefer to have many more observations, but in this case it hardly seems necessary.)  Stimulus: Trump learns that a number of people, who interacted with him one-on-one in the White House, have been saying that he's an idiot.  Response: he produces a tweet saying that he's a genius.

Now the test question.  How do you think Trump would respond if he were told that he is suffering from gravitosis (a disease which I just made up)?  The symptoms, we explain, are that the body feels as if the force of gravity were steadily getting stronger.  And it looks that way from the outside, too.  In a case like his, the prognosis is not good: chances are that, in about two months, he will no longer be able to walk.

What's he gonna do if we talk that way?  My own guess: the next morning, he will deliver himself of a tweet announcing that he can fly.

And then ... this is admittedly less certain, but maybe ... he will declare that he intends to prove it.  The following day at noon, he's going to jump out of Air Force One, from an altitude of ten thousand feet, without a parachute.

If this experiment were to be performed, and the result were to be as I have suggested, then what?  Presumably, everybody with half a brain would then agree that the man is not playing with a full deck.  (Um, right?)  And so someone would lead him away to a nice safe place.

What?  You were thinking of letting him go through with it?  You should be ashamed of yourself.