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Thinking is not enough

I never got around to reading Thinking, Fast and Slow back in the day although I was kinda fooled by the book cover to thinking that this must be a profound, thought-through work:

Thinking, Fast and Slow - Wikipedia

Never judge a book by its cover, I keep forgetting, and in this case an elegant cover wrapped a not-so-interesting book. Replication crisis aside, its system 1 and system 2, I’m not saying they’re a useless model but I’d still categorize both of those systems as similar to each other.

Both are the li’l monologue narrator in your head going “OK, two plus two is four. Seventeen times twenty four is, uh, well, hmm, seven times times six is one-oh-two, and that times four is four-oh-eight”.

I’m more interested in thoughts vs, uh, let’s call ‘em “emotions”. There’s also feelings and sensations and all kinds of stuff. The parts of our heads that “the li’l narrator” doesn’t always know to consult or examine.

Not saying it’s only two halves; maybe there’s three. Teresa of Ávila spoke of seven rooms and Timothy Leary had the eight circuits. It’s a whole tangle of yarn in there, thousands of threads. Every attempt to sort them is just a model.

One “left”, one “right”—brain edition

Sitting

Pretty much everyone—especially those who think this doesn’t apply to them—has this tendency to start by feeling something and then afterwards finding arguments in favor of that, kidding ourselves into thinking that we reasoned our way there in the first place, that the horse was properly in front of the cart and the dog was wagging the tail.

Unreasonable

This has been on my mind a lot lately; both of my previous essays today touched on this; first how liberals can be so biased in favor of market capitalism that they think its flaws are good actually even when it very much isn’t. Second, in an essay about AI punditry, I was tossin a li’l jab at the all-change-is-bad crowd, without being clear enough that that includes me, too. That’s absolutely a bias I have, that change and new things can be exhausting and that, when I’m being self-reflective, I find myself having twisted my reasoning to “logically” try justify resistance to change that’s more based on exhaustion or fear.

Exploitation

AI punditry

and for more on market shortcomings, see also:

The free market is an embarrassment

Many of us might’ve had someone in our lives who was sensitive to low blood sugar, who’d get more easily angry or otherwise be more quick to find fault if what was really going on is that they hungry. Perhaps some of y’all have known someone who initially wasn’t aware of this correlation, even to the point of refusing to believe it at first, and how much easier it was to be with them once they developed that awareness. Or like a li’l kid who’s too tired to realize that they’re tired, that’s another example.

So I guess most grown-up people do know that reason isn’t always reliable and that feelings sometimes have a bigger picture than what we’re consciously aware of.

But that’s not how the discourse goes. Maybe it’s that in nerd spaces there’s a li’l bit of over-belief in rationality and the reasoning mind, an over-trust in “the li’l narrator”, but “nerd spaces” doesn’t just rule computing; it’s all kinds of academia, economics, business, law, and politics.

Becoming more aware exactly how we decide things isn’t done in a flash. It’s a life-long process. But becoming aware that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, that’s step one.

Free Will

Becoming aware of your feelings doesn’t mean becoming ruled by them. It’s the opposite; the less aware you are of them the more they’ll wreck you without you knowing what’s going on. They’re not always right, and making decisions should involve both thinking and feeling. But they’re not always wrong and if you dont’t know they’re there, you’ll mess yourself up. I keep needing to re-learn this lesson again and again and again.

I’ll guess I’ll have to start by making a list.

GTD basics