Absurd Decisions

The first place Morel looks is inside the reasoning itself. Human beings, he argues, do not reason like flawless logic engines, and the flaws are not random — they are patterned, predictable, almost mechanical. We latch onto an initial interpretation and then read every new piece of information as confirmation of it. The Eastern crew decided the problem was the light, and once that frame took hold, the descending altitude simply did not register as relevant. The mind had already filed the situation under the wrong heading.

One recurring trap he describes is what might be called reasoning by analogy gone wrong: we treat a new situation as if it were an old, familiar one, and apply a solution that fit the old case and not this one. Another is the tendency to prefer a coherent, satisfying story over a messy, accurate one. A group facing ambiguity does not tolerate the ambiguity for long; it converges on an explanation that feels complete, and the feeling of completeness gets mistaken for correctness.

Groups, one might hope, would cancel out individual error — more eyes, more objections, more chances to catch the mistake. Morel finds the opposite. Groups frequently amplify error, because the social dynamics of a group work against the very disagreement that would save it. His most striking material concerns not what people say in meetings but what they leave unsaid.

He describes situations where a majority of people in a room privately doubt the decision being taken, yet each keeps quiet, assuming the others agree. Everyone reads everyone else's silence as consent, and a plan that almost nobody believed in sails through unopposed. The group ends up committed to a course that no single member actually endorsed. Morel treats this not as cowardice but as an ordinary product of how status, deference and the fear of looking foolish operate among people who work together.

Stepping back, the deeper puzzle in Morel's work is not why absurd decisions happen but why they persist — why organizations that have every incentive to correct these errors keep reproducing them. His answer is that the machinery is self-reinforcing. The cognitive shortcut, the group's silence and the organization's rules do not merely coexist; they lock together into a loop that resists the very correction it needs.

Rules are where this becomes clearest. After a disaster, the natural response is to write a procedure so it never happens again. But Morel shows how rules, layered indefinitely, curdle into their opposite. A checklist meant to catch errors becomes so long that people stop reading it. A safety procedure grows so rigid that following it to the letter produces the accident it was designed to prevent. The fix becomes the fault. And because the rule now carries institutional authority, questioning it looks like negligence — so the absurdity is protected by the very seriousness that surrounds it.

The Eastern crew over the Everglades were not fools. They were experts, doing the reasonable thing, right up to the moment the swamp came through the windshield. That is the whole of Morel's point, and the reason his book unsettles more than it accuses. The gap between their competence and their catastrophe is not a scandal to be blamed on anyone in the cockpit; it is a structural feature of how minds and groups and institutions decide. The light bulb was never the danger. The danger was everything that happened around it.