For some reason or other, I decided to leave Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow at home when we went to St Croix. Looking back, I think that I’d have enjoyed reading it down there. It’s a superbly entertaining book — it’s almost a book of games for clever people. If it were  a book of games, I’d have no time for it; my intellectual preference (so to speak) has no time for games at all. (Games are for children.) Kahneman, wisely, frames his puzzles as test results.

The chapter template goes something like this:

— Consider this sentence, A.
— You probably reacted in thus and such a manner, drawing conclusion Q. But (of course) Q is mistaken/improbable.
— Here’s why you erred: we tested students/professionals in Oregon/Germany/Israel and found that X.
— Your System 1 does this. Your System 2 does or, more likely, fails to do, that. We call it the N heuristic/affect.

As I say, it’s very entertaining. But of course it’s challenging as well. Once you’re familiar with the template, you approach sentence A more and more critically. And something happens that Kahneman doesn’t account for — not that I’m faulting him! Your System 1, Kahneman’s shorthand abstraction for the bundle of processes that yield automatic cognition, is malleable when it comes to reading. Another way to put this is to say that System 1 is a fast learner when it comes to reading. Most of its habits may have been set in genetic stone on the African savannah, but its reading habits (there was no reading on the savannah) are amenable to upgrades.

On page 113 of Thining, Fast and Slow, Kahneman proposes a sentence: “In a telephone poll of 300 seniors seniors, 60% support the president.” Kahneman then asks,

If you had to summarize the message of this sentence in exactly three words, what would they be? Almost certainly you would choose “elderly support present.”

Well, excuse me, but, no; my three words would be “small sample question?” I read crappy statements like this in quantity almost every day. I have developed allergies to them. The very word “poll” throws up a red flag, signaling that what follows is likely to be tripe. (I’d like to explore the polling problem, which, as I saw last night when all of this occurred to me, is one of protocol failure: there are no rules for framing polling questions; on the contrary, there are only rules of thumb that exploit the affects and heurisitics that Kahneman is writing about, deployed in order to allow pollsters to tell their clients what they want to hear.) Something happens to my System 1 when it encounters the word “poll.” Something vaguely equivalent to the fight-or-flight response kicks in. My immediate response was that the sample was too small to be meaningful (as Kahneman points out, it would skew toward extremes), and that the actual question posed to the seniors was not presented. The question mark at the end of my three words is a way of responding not with the summary of the statement’s “story” that Kahneman asked for but with a critique of the statement as a statement.

Kahneman doubts that System 1 is capable of critical discernment; that’s System 2’s job. I’m not going to quibble; Kahneman doesn’t mean for his abstract systems to be taken too literally. All he wants to do is caution us against cognitive biases. But his book has begun to remind me that there is something very strange about reading, the visual skill that requires an almost total suppression of visual stimulus. 

So strange, that when I read the first sentence of Derek Parfit’s On What Matters — yes, I ordered it and it arrived, massively — “We are the animals that can both understand and respond to reasons,” I thought, well, yes, but what’s really important is that we are the animals that can learn to read and write. (Parfit’s understanding and response to reasons, requiring the tomes that it does, certainly depend on his ability to read and to write.) But that’s another matter. For the moment, let me just say that reading Kahneman and Parfit side by side is like taking a single journey via two modes of transportation simultaneously. Probably, in fact, not a good idea.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 at 7:47 am.