A loooong time in posting. So long, in fact, I am surprised that I managed to find my way back to this blog (thank you blogger.com for remembering me).

Kool-Aid Konfidential thoughts have been swilling in my head since last post eight months ago, but job searching, grad school applying and and other lame excusing has kept me from putting thoughts to text box. Instead, I've fulfilled my proselytizing urges with overly-eager responses to friends' emails and, worse, Facebook status updates. I return here to relieve my friends of future unsolicitated spoutings.

Today, I am desisting from responding to one such FB thread. Friend Andrew posted a clever image (above) from my new favorite blog simplecomplexity.com, and people got thinking: is this really how information and confusion dance together.

At first glance, it looks about right. Take health care spending. With no information about how our health care system works (or fails to work), one would be expected to be completely at a loss on how bring down runaway spending. Then you get some information: your friend gives you a convincing explanation of, say, defensive medicine and you say, aha! I know how to fix health care: cap medical malpractice suits. Great, no confusion. But then another friend tells you, no, no, no, medical malpractice suits aren't the problem, it's the fact that doctors are incentivized to do more procedures, not necessarily just cure illness. Sounds good, but so now who is right? We are back to confusion. Finally, consider you have a lot of other clever friends who have other likely explanations; that just means you'll get more and more confused.

Of course, Andrew's curve suggests a macro view of this micro example. Considering we aren't just concerned with one question (like health care policy) but have other concerns (the right diet, where to send our kids to kindergarten, what's the meaning of life) we can see there are lots of opportunities to get bewildered.

But, yet, we don't all walk around in a daze of confusion. Is that because we all stopped at "a little learning" and are not taking in new information?

The work of behavioral economists suggests so. It's not exactly the case that we stop taking information in, though; rather we are selective about the information we absorb and how we absorb it. We all have self-serving biases that either make us hear only what we want to hear -or, when a bit of unappealing information slaps us in the face, spinning it to our good fortune.

There comes a time, however, when we get hit with so much information that contradicts our view that we break out of our certainty. What happens then? Do we become open minded? Do we live in uncertainty and confusion, now having learned that hard-held views can be wrong? Unfortunately (or fortunately) no; instead of hanging out in the unknown, we wend our way back to certainty - but this time with our new viewpoint. This can go on for a while, getting us - what I think is - our real confusion curve: