Cloaked and Framed: The Twin Tactics of Deception

 

Let me ask you a question, first associated with the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann. This question is easy, and you should get it right in seconds. But it sounds harder than it is, and therefore many of you probably won’t get it right in seconds. Here it is:

Two trains are 20 miles apart, moving steadily toward one another on the same track. At the very front of one engine, a fly takes off and begins darting toward the other train. As soon as it reaches it, the fly instantly turns around and heads back to the first train - repeating this back-and-forth dash again and again. The little fly keeps this up without rest until the trains finally collide, crushing it in between. The fly maintains a speed of 15 miles per hour, while each train chugs forward at 10 miles per hour. How much ground does the fly cover before meeting its unfortunate end?

The answer is 15 miles. If it wasn’t immediately obvious to you, once I elaborate, you’ll see why it might have been. Each train is moving toward the other at 10 miles per hour, so their combined closing speed is 20 miles per hour. Since they start 20 miles apart, they will collide in 1 hour. That’s an easy calculation. An even easier one is that if the fly is constantly flying at 15 miles per hour, and the trains take 1 hour to collide, then the fly will have travelled a total distance of 15 miles before it gets squashed.

The answer being 15 miles is not tricky. But what interests me here is how an easy question can appear hard due to the way it is worded, where those considering the question become overwhelmed by the extraneous information, by how the question is phrased, and by how the style of the question appears to be asking the reader to sum the converging series of fly movements back and forth rather than just asking a simple mathematics question (see my blog post on the Wason selection task for a similar example).

I believe this observation - and its converse - has practical application in many areas of public discourse. It’s what I observe as cloaking in overcomplexity, and its converse, framing in oversimplicity.

Cloaked in overcomplexity
When people want to deceive you, they often cloak a narrative with unnecessary (but enticing) detail, encouraging the public to reach for a complex approach (e.g., summing an infinite series of fly trips) rather than recognising the simplicity of the situation. The ever-increasing bureaucracies (taxation, regulation, risk, health and safety, etc) are classic political examples of this. The media and its employment of propaganda is another; overwhelming people with irrelevant data, half-truths, or emotionally provocative content, are tools used to obscure what’s often actually a more straightforward set of truths. Likewise, in some branches of philosophy - especially moral philosophy and epistemology - people sometimes get bogged down in edge cases at the expense of a clearer conception of the fundamentals.

And, I think, by far the most harmful cases of this are when it comes to the Christian gospel - where the most straightforward message of God’s love and grace is frequently overcomplicated by intellectual gatekeeping and analytical abstraction. Don’t get me wrong, these deep dives into theological complexity can be fun and informative, but they are best understood when one has got a grip on the basics first, and accepted Christ as Lord, not as an in prospect game of mental gymnastics that seeks to undermine or obfuscate the faith.

At its core, the gospel is breathtakingly straightforward: God loves you. Jesus died and rose again to reconcile you to God. Trust in Him, and you are forgiven, free, and fully loved. We’re not called to dumb down the gospel - just to remove the unnecessary fog and let the light shine clearly. Like Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:2, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Ideally, the best gospel communication comes in simple, accessible and gentle form, before it gets so deep, profound and bold.

Framed in oversimplicity
Just as complexity can be fabricated through cloaking, oversimplicity can be misleading too. Over-simplification is perhaps in the top few human follies, where folk oversimplify intricate systems and lead to poorly thought-out policies or public reactions. And this is not only an interesting dynamic in relation to the cloaking in overcomplexity problem, it actually means that the public is getting misled at both ends. On the one hand, bad agents habitually cloak a narrative with unnecessary but enticing detail to ensure you miss the simplicity of what’s faulty about their claim. Yet often in the same speech, debate article or policy, they get you in the opposite way by using oversimplicity to mislead you in other direction. This means some propositions simultaneously sound logical on the surface, but fail under scrutiny, and sound reasonable under a cloaked narrative, but defective when the rhetorical smoke clears and the proposition is examined in the light of clear reasoning.

The upshot is, being aware of how presentation affects perception helps us evaluate arguments based on content, not just style. And it gives us the language - and hopefully the courage - to pull people up when they’re guilty of cloaking in overcomplexity and/or framing in oversimplicity. Once you recognise the pattern - whether it's unnecessary complication or deceptive simplification - you're harder to mislead.