The speeds of thought, complexities of problems
Recent scientific evidence shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined. Deliberate thinking, d-mode, works well when the problem it is facing is easily conceptualised. When we are trying to decide where to spend our holidays, it may well be perfectly obvious what the parameters are: how much we can afford, when we can get away, what kinds of things we enjoy doing, and so on. But when we are not sure what needs to be taken into account, or even which questions to pose — or when the issue is too subtle to be captured by the familiar categories of conscious thought — we need recourse to the tortoise mind.
I haven’t read either book, and I’d hope that Kahneman as well as Claxton actually addresses all three speeds of thought. But my immediate point is that the slowest of the three forms of thought is the one that’s best suited to understanding complex, wicked and emergent problems.
And that’s the one that can’t be hurried — the one where the Medici Effect takes effect — and the one which provides Claxton with one of his finest lines, with which he opens his book, a western koan if ever I saw one:
There is an old Polish saying, ‘Sleep faster; we need the pillows’, which reminds us that there are some activities which just will not be rushed. They take the time that they take.
More on that front shortly, insha’Allah and the creek don’t rise.
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Lynn Wheeler:
February 1st, 2012 at 10:49 pm
I’ve read Fast&Slow and its tie-ins with economic decision making are fascinating (author has nobel prize in economics) … also it is much more recent book and compliments Ramachandran’s books. A quote from Fast&Slow: “Since then, my questions about the stock market have hardened into a larger puzzle: a major industry appears to be built largely on an illusion of skill. Billions of shares are traded every day, with many people buying each stock and others selling it to them”
Daniel:
February 2nd, 2012 at 3:06 am
My uni had a major in logic and philosophy of science, which I did along with my math degree. I spent a few courses on logic, critical reasoning, rhetoric, and other related areas. It would make sense that using logic is slower, especially if you actually take logic as the use of correct inference patterns to eliminate ambiguity of natural language. To take some real world argument and break it down takes a lot of work and time. At an informal (critical reasoning) level, you would identify reasons and conclusions of a natural argument and map it out through argument diagramming. Taking it even deeper into formal logic, you could also break down the argument into propositional (P) and predicate (Q) logics (or even further into the modal, or other logics). Again, this takes a lot of time. There is a three step process of turning the natural language into statements and formal structures, then you need to work out if the argument is invalid at that level either through truth tables or (the quicker way) through truth trees. Finally, even if you prove invalidity via P or Q, it doesn’t mean that you have shown a natural language argument to be totally invalid, as there are valid arguments that cannot be captured by P and Q (for instance, modal arguments capturing time or necessity, or logics involving multi-truth values). All this backtracking to make sure you have assessed the argument correctly takes up a huge amount of time and attention that matches up with the slow-style thinking. That’s just formal logic as well, it doesn’t take into consideration inductive natural language arguments (arguments that make use of statistics, or inferences to best explanations), which needs a different analytic approach but still has that slow style of analysis.