Rove has a sense of humor because he has to, and he probably understands the same thing I’ve learned in the past few years of working on issues that I deeply care about and things that appear, to me at least, to be vital to our condition.
Chances are, if we can’t laugh at something, we can’t think rationally about it. (The exception to this rule is sports. Sports is about clear wins and losses, and most importantly, entertainment. It’s okay to polarize sports—it’s not any fun if you don’t. The last thing we want to do is think rationally about sports. The stuff that matters, though, is about our livelihoods and the future of our country.)
Laughter is important to a healthy information diet because it has all kinds of incredible health benefits. It turns out laughter increases our heart rate in a good way, increases our cardiovascular health, and burns calories. Some science shows that laughter may cause increased blood flow to the brain and decrease stress (thus boosting our immune systems), may normalize blood sugar levels, and may help us sleep better.
The first way a sense of humor helps is that it makes the truth more palatable. It bypasses our gut reaction for fight and flight, and makes it comfortable to hear what’s going on in a more digestible fashion. Shows like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report help us to find humor in the daily news, but they also tend to feed us small nuggets of truth wrapped in delicious, bacon-like hilariousness. Sometimes, it’s a healthy way of getting some national news exposure without having to take stuff too seriously.
But watching the Daily Show isn’t going to give you a sense of humor, and relying on it solely for your national news information diet is likely to leave you with a point of view that’s just as misinformed as watching FOX or MSNBC. Jon Stewart himself will tell you: his job is to entertain you, not to inform you or even tell you the truth. The difference between Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly is that Stewart is honest about his role as entertainer.
While these shows are funny, watching them isn’t the same as having a sense of humor. We shouldn’t conflate laughter with having a sense of humor. Laughing is important, sure, but being able to see the humor in all things—especially yourself—is even more important.
It turns out that a sense of humor might just be a vital part of our brain’s ability to rewire itself.
Much of what makes us laugh are things that are unexpected. The great jokes are about misdirection and surprise. As we anticipate the punchline of a joke, we’re trying to figure out where it’s going—the joke itself tends to be a buildup towards an expectation, and then comes the punchline: usually something unexpected. That’s what makes it funny.
Take Rove’s letter: he leads with something rather standard—a greeting and formality, but then closes with a killer punchline. It immediately changed my opinion of Rove, unwiring the heuristic in my brain that’s been trained by years of being a democratic political operative to believe that the man is pure, unbridled evil.
Instantly, upon reading that letter, Rove became to me somebody that’s human and very aware of himself. My presumptions about him changed and all of a sudden, I found myself saying in my social circles, “Oh, Karl Rove isn’t so bad. He just has different beliefs than we do.” I’d get jumped on, then pull out the letter and show it off. The power of Karl Rove’s humor softened the hearts of even the most liberal of activists.
It turns out that there may be some science behind this idea. In their book Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (MIT Press), scientists Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams Jr. provide a cognitive and evolutionary perspective for our sense of humor.
They argue that humor could be a cognitive cleanup mechanism of the mind, that nature needed a way for us to constantly check our judgmental heuristics, and reward ourselves for seeking the unexpected. They stipulate that laughter itself is a social signal that demonstrates cognitive prowess—something that’s useful in mate selection—and thus, our ability to laugh spread through generations.
Humor tends to be a useful mechanism for figuring out when you’re overly attached to information, too. If you can’t laugh at something, it likely means you’re not flexible with the information—that you take it so seriously that your mind cannot be changed. While it’s good to have these stances on some topics (say, the Holocaust or slavery), if you can’t laugh at Lebron James jokes, you might be taking your love of the Miami Heat a little too seriously.
Studying humor tends to make whatever might be funny no longer so, so I’ll leave it at this: lighten up.
Chapter 10. How to Consume
“While it is true that many people simply can’t afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we’ve somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the Internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority.”
So now we’ve got our three skills: data literacy, a sense of humor, and a method for training and accounting for our executive function and attention span. The question now is: what is it that we should consume? What kinds of information go into a healthy information diet?
The world of food is littered with advice, and the one we probably know the best comes from the United States Department of Agriculture: the food pyramid. You’ve seen it—it looks like Figure 10-1.
Figure 10-1. The United States Food Pyramid: 1992–2011.
In 2011, the food pyramid was found to be too complicated, so it was distilled into something a bit more simple, ChooseMyPlate.gov, shown in Figure 10-2.
Figure 10-2. The New ChooseMyPlate.gov: 2011–.
There is currently no government agency to monitor information consumption—though former President Bill Clinton suggested creating one in May 2011.[83] He suggested an agency that would regulate our information providers and suggest to us what information we should consume and which we should not—an independent agency run by the government that would determine what kinds of information ought to be released.
I suspect that if this idea gained any serious traction in government, the public would loudly destroy the thought. It’s just not viable: the first amendment prohibits any authority a federal agency could have over speech, and even if that were miraculously overlooked, it’d be a waste of money. The agency would have zero credibility with any consumer of information.
It’d be immediately labeled an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” We can regulate food because neither beef nor turnip greens typically inform our vote. Moreover, it’d be impossible to label and classify all the kinds of information we consume. A nutritional label (see Figure 10-3) would be equally impossible and ridiculous.
But just because there shouldn’t be a ministry of information, it doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be “dietary guidelines” for information. They just shouldn’t come from government. Ideally, they ought to come from science, however you won’t find many neuroscientists clamoring to build the info-pyramid.