As you know, in our last posting, we related the bizarre behavior of our cruel master when he blamed the few pathetic sips of water we drink every day as a major cause of his high water bills. After we thought this over, we decided that instead of our remaining in a state of fear and stress over the obviously terrifying mental state of the person responsible for our care, we would take matters into our own paws and offer to help.

We thought the best place to start was to help our master think more rationally by making better decisions. So we got out our books on decision making and started to refresh our memories. As you can see in the photo, Bear is more of a classicist, focusing on the practical and theoretical aspects of standard decisioin modeling and treasuring the venerable Decision Traps and that old standard, Why Decisions Fail. Wolf, on the other hand, is more of a contemporary reader who enjoys the psychological, sociological, environmental, and even genetic causal analyses of decision failures. He finds Predictably Irrational a very stimulating work. And since our cruel master seems to be something of a mental case, the psychological approach might just be the better one. After all, you can lead a human to reason, but you can’t make him think. (That’s one of the ancient proverbs by Caninus.)

So anyway, we were busy with our noses buried in our books when our master walked into the room. “What kind of ghastly infamy are you iniquitous dogs plotting now?” he asked, committing the fallacies of ad hominem and compound questions in one breath (not to mention emotive language). We told him we wanted to help him make better decisions. To which he sneered, “The only decision you two ever make is that you want a cookie.”

Do you see the kind of treatment we must endure? Needless to say, he wasn’t open to any advice, so we finished our chapters and took a nap.