Wednesday, I was clacking away on a project that was taking longer than I’d thought it would, and feeling vaguely guilty about it, since others were waiting on my being done. El Jefe stops by the desk to chat on his way out and notes (accurately enough) that I’d rather badly overestimated my writing speed, to which I reply that for whatever reason, this is slower going than other things I’ve written. “So this is taking longer, per word, than, say, one of your columns?” I barely have to think about it: “Absolutely, by far.” And I got to pondering: it is a little odd. For a column, you have to pick a topic, come up with clever turns of phrase, construct a coherent argument, all of that. What I’m working on is pretty much straight reportage: look at the facts, pick the important stuff, and string it together in reasonably fluid sentences. It takes some thought, but we’re not talking about brow-furrowing intellectual effort here. Mulling it over, I was struck — not for the first time, I suppose, but struck nevertheless — by the way in which it’s sometimes easier to do something harder. That first effort of having to grapple with some problem, or figure out how to frame an argument in a compelling way, gives you a certain momentum that carries you through the rest, almost effortlessly. Or anyway, less-effortly. I recall a metaphor from my hippie days that the band Phish picked up from Carlos Santana — “the hose uncoils,” that feeling that you’re just getting out of the way and letting something come through you. (Not, as anyone who’s read them can tell you, that my columns for Laissez Faire are as inspired as this way of talking might lead one to believeâ?¦)

Maybe a less romanticized analogy is to doing certain kinds of tricky proofs in logic. You’ll be sitting there not sure how to proceed, and suddenly something clicks, and you’re writing down the next line, and the next, and somehow — even though you can’t see the whole 20-step progression, or even the next few pieces — you know unerringly how to proceed, you’re sure that the next inference is a right and necessary step on the way to your final, dimly glimpsed goal. It doesn’t work with certain kinds of writing that, on face, ought to be easier because that fitful way of doing it relies on some kind of pre-existing organic unity to the task, a confluence between what you’re doing and the way your brain works that allows you to go on almost automatically. Ah, but what determines which kind of writing you’re doing? You’ve got a task within certain rough boundaries, of course, but if you can find some kind of theme to tie together what would otherwise be a series of discrete facts to report, maybe it’s possible to lend to it some of the automatic character of “inspired” writing.

This dovetails pretty neatly with a classic result in evolutionary psychology. You give a random set of people a problem of the following kind:

You have four cards before you, each with a letter on one side and a number on the other. You’re asked to test the rule: “If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other” for cards inscribed “D”; “F” ; “3”; and “7”. Which do you have to turn over to confirm or falsify the rule?

Now, if you’ve had a lot of logic beaten into you, you might get it right — the answer is “D” and “7”. But almost everyone, even people with logical training, intuitively picks “D” and “3”, forgetting that a conditional is only falsified when the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. Turning over the “3” isn’t a test, because you already know the consequent is true: anything on the other side would be consistent with the rule, whereas if there were a “D” on the other side of the “7” card, you’d have found the rule not to be satisifed. If you got it right, congrats, if you didn’t, join the overwhelming majority.

But things change if you pose the problem this way:

If someone is under 21, they are not allowed to drink alcohol. You’ve got four people in a bar: a 25 year old, a 17 year old, someone drinking milk, and someone drinking a gin tonic. Which do you have to check to see if the rule is being followed?

Everyone gets that right, but the problems are logically identical. It doesn’t matter that we’re familiar with the rules of legal drinking, either. The same result obtains with totally fanciful examples and fictitious rules, so long as the problem is framed as one of “spotting the cheater.”

The upshot of all that is that our brains are wired in certain ways. A problem that’s difficult, that people have trouble getting right, when its framed one way becomes easy when you set it up in a way that engages certain evolved circuitry. Folks who teach statistics will tell you that they see the same thing when the same problem is framed as being about frequencies rather than percentages. Now I want to see if I can take advantage of this trick to get certain kinds of things done more quickly. Of course, since El Jefe reads this blog from time to time, I may just get more projects to compensate for my newfound fluidity…