Automatic 🤖
"Don't know why I drive so fast. My car's got nothing to prove."
—Country band Alabama
> delusional optimism | vigilance
Over the last 150 years, our knowledge of the human mind has accelerated thanks to exhaustive scientific research and experiments.
- Critical discoveries give us the opportunity to be smarter than our own often irrational, subconscious minds.
- It's an irrational alcoholic mind that gave me a years-long fight. I wanted to quit. But I was under a spell.
Staying sober requires cognitive vigilance. The Nobel Prize-winning psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky said it was okay to trust our intuitions and gut feelings.
But, they added, we must always look for chances to inform and educate those gut feelings and intuitions first. 🍎✏️📚
- Those intuitions and gut feelings are often very wrong without us knowing it.
Even when we're aware that cognitive shortcuts and thinking lapses are a threat to our own intentions, it's difficult to detect and correct for them in real time.
To understand better, imagine a car is drifting into your lane. Your intuitive, unconscious mind compels you to jerk the wheel to avoid a collision and ensure your survival.
Now imagine trying to consciously stop yourself from jerking the wheel once you've detected the drifting nearby car.
It’s hard to grasp the prevalence of such automatic responses and behaviors, such as your automatic jerk of the wheel.
It's extraordinarily difficult to consciously "see" and control them. These mental processes must operate quickly and quietly to serve their purpose or we’d be paralyzed with indecision.
- I wonder every day how cognitive biases and lapses are distorting my interpretations of you and everyone else around me.
Is my behavior at the Tulsa coffee shop where I work different when the customer is a cop? A woman? Wearing a "Jesus Loves You" shirt? Black? Elderly?
The answer is yes. And if I answered with anything else, I'd be a liar.
So would you.
- next time "Political attack ads work even though we claim to hate them."
- listening City of Caterpillar "Fucking Hero"
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