We Must Not Be Hasty

Aside from the fact that the Ents of J.R.R. Tolkien’s worlds are giant sentient trees, one thing I love about them is their emphasis on hastiness. Treebeard’s reminders to Merry and Pippin of “Don’t be hasty” repeat in my mind frequently. It is an important skill to not be hasty as it can frequently lead to embarrassment through the wrong conclusions, looking unprepared, and most likely a combination of both. I recently had an experience in class where I encountered this and, much to Treebeard’s dismay, I was a bit hasty.

Citrus and Heuristics

I’m currently in a class 100% focused on Citrus. Not exactly my area of expertise, but a good plant physiology class is a good class. The introductory lesson included an online discussion tool to get students interacting. I posted my main response, then read some of the others to figure out which one I would reply to in order to complete the assignment. I read this one which just stuck with me, for a lesson on the history of citrus it was oddly focused on South Africa, which was never mentioned in the lecture and even went so far to state that South Africa was one of the worlds largest exporters of citrus.

Why South Africa? I have never heard of citrus from there. The US and China surely produces more. My brain kicked into overdrive, and I quickly wrote out a response to explain my doubts about their claim. I didn’t save that draft, it was garbage and arguably, no better than you would see in the comments section of a Twitter/X post. Fortunately, despite my hasty response the need to click post always forces a bit of reflection.

I reread and saw it for what it was, a heuristically driven response where somehow, I thought I knew more about global citrus production than this other person who, I am willing to bet is in graduate school studying citrus. The availability bias of the recent lesson we had just went through made me certain that the US or China would be the largest exporter. After all citrus has a long history in that region, and the US has California, Arizona and Florida as major producers. I couldn’t bring myself to click post without attempting to validate these claims.

Production versus Exportation

It was easy, I typed “global citrus production” into a search and found this document from the FAO https://www.fao.org/3/cb6492en/cb6492en.pdf . Table 1, Production by country, I counted it all out and sure enough, South Africa wasn’t even in the top 10 producers. I rewrote the post to include this information and was almost too hasty once again. I almost used a completely different set of data as proof that it couldn’t be possible. Once again, that nagging feeling set in that I was being too hasty.

Sure enough, I kept scrolling and found the exports in Table 6. To my amazement, South Africa exports approximately 75% of their 2,771 thousand tonnes of their production which makes them the second largest exporter of citrus in the world. Turns out many countries produce a lot, but most of it is consumed within the country of origin. My final edit detailed my findings in a much more productive manner than the first draft including more detail than you see here.

Wisdom of the Ents

I thought that given the time and effort I have spent learning the shortcuts that our brains take and moderating my response I wouldn’t have such a textbook example of heuristics and hastiness. But I had just narrowly avoided doing just that not once, but twice in a row. The only saving grace here is that I never actually posted flawed logic. My training and history forced me to double check before posting which revealed these flaws, but it goes to show just how easy it is to mentally take shortcuts when communicating, especially online.

Sometimes a single word makes all the difference, e.g. producer versus exporter. A hasty response there would have been embarrassing, and likely resulted in a bad grade that only matters in class. When communicating outside of the safety of class with others it can alienate and erode trust. Take your time speaking with others, every word matters.

“But I spoke hastily. We must not be hasty” The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

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