The great mystery of politics is that it’s one of the few cases in which a person, looking for expert help, selects as their guide someone who is no more knowledgeable than themselves. To illustrate this point, consider an average person needing medical assistance, legal counsel, tax advice, or a car repair.

When hiring a doctor, we don’t search to find someone who looks like us or votes like us, we look for someone who knows the human body better than we do without consideration to appearance or politics.  We want a person who can ‘take us apart’ and ‘put us back together again’ better than we started.

When needing a lawyer, we want someone who substantially understands the law better than we do.  We want someone who’s able to get us out of the trouble we are in, whether that trouble is criminal or civil, and to do it in a way that we couldn’t have done ourselves.  We don’t care about their race, age, or gender so long as this person knows their job.

When we consult with an accountant, we are looking for someone who understands better than we where we can invest our money and what we can claim as an exemption to realize the least tax burden possible.  Whether our accountant is a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim, whether he’s straight or gay, none of this matters as long as he can help.

When our car breaks down, we take it to an expert mechanic.  Whether the guy has a plumber’s crack or didn’t shave this week, whether he has gotten the grease from under his fingernails or knows which fork goes with which course of a formal dinner is inconsequential.  We want someone who knows how to fix the brakes or rotate the tires or figure out why the check engine light is on.

But when we seek to hire a politician, for that is what we are doing when we vote, we suddenly, mysteriously seek to have someone just as dumb if not dumber than we are.  We gravitate to someone who ‘looks like us’ or ‘talks like us’.  If those were the only qualifications, then we should be the ones going to Washington; if we had our act together, it would be we who would be leading.  Instead of voting for someone like us we should be voting for someone who is more politically savvy than we are; someone whose self-interests align with our own but who can ‘play the game’ better than we can.  Why we don’t remains a mystery.

But what isn’t mysterious are the fine columns we have this month.

Typically, the best things in life, in addition to being free, are also multifaceted.  Different qualities and attributes blend and mix to make incredibly important things.  Understanding the correlations and probabilities of these blends is important.  This month, Aristotle2Digital begins looking at multivariate Gaussian distributions, which are, arguably, the most important of all statistical models.

Trends.  There may be good reasons for engaging in a trend because one can enjoy the same things others do.  Then again, there may be excellent reasons for avoiding them because one can see the mob mentality present.  CommonCents looks at a policy pendulum swing that has been happening in our grocery stores and asks why can’t we think carefully about all sides of an issue before jumping on the bandwagon.

Thermodynamics of the 19th century examined macroscopic properties available to everyone via rulers, pressure gauges, and thermometers.  During this same period, the great masters began to connect these properties to the mechanical aspects that lay underneath.  UndertheHood looks at those thermodynamic-mechanical connections found in kinetic theory.