Observe 🔍
"There is a thing as it is and a thing as we know it."
—Immanuel Kant
> godspeed | destructive
We don't fully grasp what it means for a person to be arrogant, lazy, dumb, rude, or thoughtful.
We imagine that our interpretations of these words are objectively shared by everyone else around the world.
But for every adjective or human construct made of air, there are 8.2 billion people worldwide with an individual interpretation of those adjectives and constructs.
Each of them has not one but two abstract minds.💡
- The conscious, analytical mind is slow and effortful. It helps focus our attention on a ballet dancer.
- The intuitive, unconscious mind is fast and automatic. It helps us detect hostility in a voice.
Together, our intuitive and analytical minds are astoundingly beautiful but maddeningly crude.
Many of our behaviors we simply deny even when they’re clearly observable. It's as if two minds are vying for power.
We'd never guess it. But according to neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, we smile more at attractive people. We’re more likely to vote for attractive people. We’re less likely to send attractive people to prison.
These are all things we would tend to deny about ourselves.
We are largely ignorant of the destructive power of our own minds on our own decisions and relationships.
We often fail to achieve our own stated wishes, because we're ignorant of intuitive, automatic tasks we can't consciously "see" and therefore misinterpret.
We're ignorant of how cognitive biases and errors can deeply disrupt our judgments, which are often beyond our conscious reach.
These biases and errors don’t care what we think about them.
They can't be bullied. They can only quietly bully us.
- next time "Now we can remember orgasms."
- listening Jefferson Airplane "Somebody to Love"
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