Born irrational

• blog reason rational System 1 Limbic System public
  • Title:: Born Irrational
  • Deadline:: January 31st, 2021
  • Completion:: Published
  • URL:: https://link.medium.com/HyiZbVfSudb

• Tasks

  • {{DONE}} Gather ideas and references January 20th, 2021
  • {{DONE}} Write the structure January 22nd, 2021
  • {{DONE}} Write a first draft January 24th, 2021
  • {{DONE}} Review and second pass January 27th, 2021
  • {{DONE}} Add photos January 30th, 2021
  • {{DONE}} Publish on Medium January 31st, 2021
  • {{TODO}} Publish on note

• Ideas

  • What’s rationality
    • based on or in accordance with reason or logic
      • https://www.etymonline.com/word/reason
  • Rationality is not inate
    • it goes against our nature
    • it’s something we need to nurture
  • System 1 and 2
    • Blindspots

    • rationality is logical coherence — reasonable or not . (Location 6917) resonate

  • Limbic System
    • Emotions in decision-making
      • emotional tagging
  • The message
    • It is not rational to expect others to be rational
    • we make most of our decisions based on emotions because they are a very efficient pattern recognition mechanism and have helped us survive for many generations
      • logic and reason take time and energy, time we don’t have when we’re under attack
        • fight or flight response
      • we can’t really make the difference between physical and psychological aggression
        • we respond to aggression with emotions

          • There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear . (Location 1217)

        • the more stressful our environment is the more likely our emotions will take full control of our decision-making
          • System 2 will be bypassed entirely
      • We can make a case that emotions and feelings are rational

        • Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality — they embody evolutionary rationality . (Location 953)

    • Heuristics and biases
      • Intuitive heuristics

        • This is the essence of intuitive heuristics : when faced with a difficult question , we often answer an easier one instead , usually without noticing the substitution . (Location 204)

        • System 1 registers the cognitive ease with which it processes information , but it does not generate a warning signal when it becomes unreliable . Intuitive answers come to mind quickly and confidently , whether they originate from skills or from heuristics . There is no simple way for System 2 to distinguish between a skilled and a heuristic response . (Location 7025)

      • why do they even exist? aren’t we shooting ourselves in the foot?
      • Hindsight
        • https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-hindsight-bias-2795236
        • What purpose does hindsight serve?
          • it gives us a sense of predictability
    • We need to ask ourselves if we really want to live rationally and if an ideal society should be based on rationality
    • Concretely speaking how does that affect us?
      • Blindspots in our judgements
    • What can we do about it?
      • Delay decision-making
      • Cognitive distancing
      • Dissociating oneself from the argument

        • “ Contrary to common bleak assessments of human reasoning abilities , people are quite capable of reasoning in an unbiased manner , at least when they are evaluating arguments rather than producing them , and when they are after the truth rather than trying to win a debate . ” 92 (Location 7666)

      • Self-reflection and meditation
  • Question
    • If emotions and intuition drives creativity, can rules and processes based on rational thinking create an environment that is conducive to innovation?
    • Should we expect our children to be rational?
      • Isn’t that hindering their creative potential?
  • Personal stories
    • As a business leader, I have made hundreds of irrational decisions, some benign, some not so much. Most of the time these decisions felt right to me. They didn’t feel like they were emotionally driven. I was very confident in my thought process, and convinced they were logical. At least to me.
  • What I’ve learned

• Structure

  • Intro

    • I have always considered myself a rational person

  • We live in a society that expects us to be rational

    • reason is one of the virtues of Stoicism, because it was seen as an ideal to reach for, not as the status quo of our human condition. But somehow, we came to implicitly agree as a society that we should expect each other to be rational and act logically.
    • letting one’s emotions being the main driver of behaviors is perceived as juvenile
      • adults are expected to be able to control their emotions and use logic and reason when making decisions
    • business
      • Businesses are not human enterprises anymore, but cold, logical money creating machines

  • What’s making decisions for us? Emotions, intuitions, and System 1

    • Heuristics, biases, hindsights
    • Emotional tagging

      • Why good leaders make bad decisions

        • Authors:: Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead, Sydney Finkelstein
        • Decisions through pattern recognition and emotional tagging

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            • We believe we make most of our decisions rationally, but that would most likely be too taxing on our System 2. Instead we have developed a quick and effective decision mechanism based that consists of recognizing certain patterns and associating them with emotion
              • Related to System 1 and Limbic System
            • Z: Consider the influence of emotional tagging in your decision making

          • But this emotion-driven pattern recognition system can be distorted by 3 red flags of emotional tagging
            • self-interest
              • biases the emotional importance we place on information, which makes it easier for us to see the patterns we want to see
            • emotional attachments
              • our judgement can be affected by our attachment to people, places, things, etc.
            • misleading memories
              • Related to experience bias
              • agbzVNSVM
              • Strong emotional attachment can mislead our memories even more
          • This is a powerful mechanism and can create strong connections between thoughts and emotions, to the point of making that connection hard to rewire

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            • > n2kopxBIq

        • It is critical to find ways to systematically detect bias, and put safeguards to protect us from red flag conditions

          • BhGvf2g_1

          • Injecting fresh experience or analysis

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          • Introducing further debate and challenge
          • Imposing stronger governance

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    • Inability to express our emotions into words
    • Narrative self makes excuses for us

      • Paradoxically , it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little , when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle . (Location 3321)

    • We can make a case that emotions and feelings are rational

      • Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality — they embody evolutionary rationality . (Location 953)

      • Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality — they embody evolutionary rationality . (Location 953)

  • What can we do about it? Waking up our System 2

    • we learn about critical thinking, but we don’t learn about understanding our emotions
    • Delay decision-making
    • Cognitive distancing
    • Create an environment of safety
      • we can’t really make the difference between physical and psychological aggression

        • we respond to aggression with emotions

          • There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear . (Location 1217)

        • the more stressful our environment is the more likely our emotions will take full control of our decision-making
          • System 2 will be bypassed entirely
        • we respond to aggression with emotions

          • There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear . (Location 1217)

          • There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear . (Location 1217)

        • the more stressful our environment is the more likely our emotions will take full control of our decision-making

          • System 2 will be bypassed entirely
          • System 2 will be bypassed entirely

  • But is it really what we want?

    • If emotions and intuition drives creativity, can rules and processes based on rational thinking create an environment that is conducive to innovation?
    • We need to ask ourselves if we really want to live rationally and if an ideal society should be based on rationality

  • What I’ve learned

    • I’m ridiculously biased, and simply being aware of my biases is not enough to protect myself from them
    • Our brains haven’t developed any incentive mechanism for rational thinking. Practicing it on a daily basis is a tiresome endeavor, and we won’t be hormonally rewarded for it.
    • Emotions have served us well for hundreds of thousands of year, but they haven’t kept up with the complexity of our social interactions and norms
    • A stressful environment is not conducive to rational thinking, let alone rational decision-making
    • It is not rational to expect others to be rational
    • Not every decision needs to be rational (follow your heart!)

  • References

    • Thinking, Fast and Slow
    • Factfulness (highlights)
    • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (highlights)
    • Why Good Leaders make bad decisions: https://hbr.org/2009/02/why-good-leaders-make-bad-decisions
    • https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-heuristic-2795235

• Content Check

  • {{DONE}} Has an intriguing title
  • {{DONE}} Is accessible to all public
  • {{DONE}} Includes personal stories
  • {{DONE}} Has clear takeaways
  • {{DONE}} Has no clumpy middle
  • {{DONE}} Has my personal words of wisdom
  • {{DONE}} Has at least one quote
  • {{DONE}} Has references (learn more)

• Article

  • Intro

    • I have always considered myself a rational and logically grounded person. My views of the world are always unbiased, and my decisions always based on reason. And when I make mistakes, I can comfort myself by reminding myself that my intentions were good.
    • Truth is, as a business leader, I have made hundreds or irrational decisions in my career, some benign, some not so much. Most of the time, these decisions felt logical to me. They didn’t feel as if they were driven by emotions. I was very confident in my thought process, and convinced I had all the elements I needed in hand to make the right call everytime.
    • So how could I make so many irrational decisions while being convinced otherwise? This is the theme I would like to explore in this piece.

  • We live in a society that expects us to be rational

    • To make sure we are talking about the same thing, let’s agree on what “being rational” means. According to the Oxford dictionary, the adjective rational means:

    • Based on or in accordance with reason or logic

    • What is reason you may ask?

    • the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically

    • For ancient greek philosophers, reason was considered a virtue. It was regarded as an ideal to strive for, not as a status quo of our human condition. Philosophers would dedicate their lives to its pursue knowing that they would likely never quite master it.
    • But somehow, we came to implicitly agree as a society that we should expect each other to be rational and act logically on a daily basis. And we are quite explicitly judgmental. Letting one’s emotions being the main driver of behaviors is perceived as juvenile. Adults are expected to be able to control their emotions and use reason when making decisions.
    • It’s even truer in the world of business. Businesses used to be human enterprises, but they have evolved into cold, logical money making machines. Companies’ processes and objectives expect all their workers to have developed greek philosopher levels of rational thinking. There is no place for emotions in the workplace.
    • I find it quite paradoxical that we expect average people to excel at things that even greek philosophers found hard to do.
    • Have we found the secret sauce to rational thinking in the last two or three thousand years? I have serious doubts.
    • But more importantly, why is rational thinking so hard in the first place? We are cognitively advanced sentient beings capable of inventing quantum physics, bitcoin, and curling. How hard could that be in comparison?

  • Who’s in charge? Emotions, intuition, and System 1

    • The world makes much less sense than you think . The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works . (Location 939)

    • The world is very complex, and doing a complete analysis of a situation before making any decision would overload our brains and we would end up paralyzed. To alleviate this, we have developed over time powerful cognitive shortcuts that allow us to make quick decisions so we can at least feed ourselves and maintain a bare minimum of social interactions without using too much brain power. We call them emotions.
    • The part of our brain who deals with emotion is called the Limbic System, and it includes the Hippocampus, the Hypothalamus, the Amygdala, and the Thalamus (although experts apparently disagree on what’s in it). You probably have heard about the Amygdala, [...]
    • [Basic emotions]
    • Limbic System
      • Amygdala
        • Fight and flight response
      • Hypocampus
    • emotional tagging
      • In the Harvard Business Review’s article “Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions”, the authors mention about a concept called “emotional tagging”.

      • Emotional tagging is the process by which emotional information attaches itself to the thoughts and experiences stored in our memories. (Location 62)

      • It is an extremely efficient decision processing mechanism. We recognize a certain pattern of information within our memory, and we tag that pattern with an emotion. Any time we encounter the same pattern, the corresponding tagged emotion gets triggered.
      • For example, I eat a raw shrimp and get sick. An association gets created between “raw shrimp” and “disgust”. Next time I see a raw shrimp, I’ll probably feel nauseated.
      • [...]
      • But this emotion-driven pattern recognition system can be distorted by 3 red flags of emotional tagging

        • self-interest
          • biases the emotional importance we place on information, which makes it easier for us to see the patterns we want to see
        • emotional attachments
          • our judgement can be affected by our attachment to people, places, things, etc.
        • misleading memories
          • Related to experience bias
          • agbzVNSVM
          • Strong emotional attachment can mislead our memories even more
        • self-interest

          • biases the emotional importance we place on information, which makes it easier for us to see the patterns we want to see
          • biases the emotional importance we place on information, which makes it easier for us to see the patterns we want to see
        • emotional attachments

          • our judgement can be affected by our attachment to people, places, things, etc.
          • our judgement can be affected by our attachment to people, places, things, etc.
        • misleading memories

          • Related to experience bias
          • agbzVNSVM
          • Strong emotional attachment can mislead our memories even more
          • Related to experience bias
          • agbzVNSVM
          • Strong emotional attachment can mislead our memories even more
    • System 1 and System 2
      • In his book “Thinking Fast, and Slow”, Dr. Daniel Kahneman, holder of a Nobel prize for his work on behavioral economics, proposes an interesting model to explain the duality of intuition and logical reasoning. NB: this book is quoted heavily in this article
      • He suggests that we have two cognitive systems that he calls System 1 and System 2. These systems are not actual parts in our brains. They could be pictured as two independent circuits, working in parallel. System 1 is responsible for intuition and fast decision making, and System 2 is in charge of more involved cognitive operations that rely on complex logic. For example, adding 2 + 2 or brushing your teeth can be managed by System 1, but multiplying 12 x 17 or reciting the alphabet backward requires the involvement of System 2.
      • System 1 is fast, automatic, and effortless. System 2 is slow, intentional, and physically demanding. Scientific studies on subjects being asked to perform complex tasks involving their System 2 have shown similar observations: pupil dilation, higher blood pressure, and increased heart rate.
      • So as you can imagine, we will have a tendency to rely on System 1 whenever possible. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of decisions we are making daily are taken care by our beloved System 1. This is what we popularly call being in auto-pilot mode.
      • What we don’t realize though, is that because of its automatic nature, our System 1 is involved in ways we are not aware of, resulting in [...]
      • System 1 excels at pattern recognition, categorization, and simplification. Left unattended, it will happily convert complex problems into much simpler and more predictable patterns. [...]
        • When System 1 is convinced it has a solution to a problem, it will bypass System 2. “No need to spend energy on this, I know what I’m doing!”. [...]
    • Heuristics and biases
      • Availability heuristic

        • People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media . (Location 126)

      • Priming effect
      • Anchoring effect
      • Generalization and oversimplification
        • Intuitive heuristic

          • This is the essence of intuitive heuristics : when faced with a difficult question , we often answer an easier one instead , usually without noticing the substitution . (Location 204)

      • Gaps, sizes and straight lines
      • Fear and Urgency
    • Hindsight and why we believe we are logical

      • Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight . (Location 225)

    • How come we are not aware that all of this is happening to us?

      • You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience . But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on . (Location 915)

        • Tags: subjectivity

  • What can we do about it? Waking up our System 2

    • When it comes to decision-making and how to reduce the influence of emotions, biases, heuristics, and other mischiefs of System 1, Kahneman offers a simple but powerful recommendation. Delay decisions. It sounds overly simplistic, but postponing when we make a decision is the most reliable way to make sure it wasn’t dictated by emotions.
    • Not expecting “simple” solutions. Looking for simple solutions and shortcuts is the playground of our System 1, and it will be happy to oblige at any occasion. If you find a very simple (and often elegant) solution to a problem, take a moment to play the devil’s advocate and try to find situations where your solution wouldn’t work. You would be surprised to see how hard it is to argue with your System 1 once it has made its mind!
    • A corollary to not expecting simple solutions is to make problems harder (or at least “look” harder) in order to engage our System 2. A study showed that making the font harder to read on a problem increased significantly the chances of not falling into its trap; problems such as “if 5 machines can make 5 items in 5 minutes, how many items can 100 machines make in 100 minutes?”.
    • Self-reflection. Reflecting on our actions and how we feel about them is a difficult but powerful way of increasing our self-awareness. More specifically, we want to recognize that: 1) We may have made decisions unconsciously 2) How we feel prior to and after a decision 3) How could our feelings have influenced said decision Yes, the process is as laborious as it sounds.
    • Requiring feedback. It is much easier to spot inconsistencies in others’ judgement than in our own. By the same token, the best way to get a full picture of a situation, including our blindspots, is to ask for feedback.

      • two important facts about our minds : we can be blind to the obvious , and we are also blind to our blindness . (Location 334)

  • But is it really what we want?

    • As we’ve seen, rational thinking is not an innate skill and requires both an acute awareness of how our emotions influence our decisions, and a will to do something about it.
    • While I agree that developing a capability to read our emotions and feelings is beneficial and can help us understand who we are and what is important to us, I also think that there are times where letting our emotions decide for us is preferable.
    • Creativity is one thing that comes to mind. Many creative decisions are directed by intuition, and driven by emotions. There is nothing rational about going somewhere you’ve never been before. Sure, expending our horizons can be rationally explained as a survival mechanism, but why choosing a certain direction over another one? [...]
    • Another one is empathy. We are social animals and need to feel that we belong to a group. We have developed a complex intuition framework that allows us to gauge in real-time how well integrated we are to our group. These intuitions prime on many of our daily behaviors. We can’t explain it, but we definitely “feel” it when someone is socially awkward.
    • Decisions purely driven by rational thinking are usually not the most humane, and this has certainly be a factor of alienation between people and businesses. Ironically, these businesses also expect their employees to be creative and innovative without letting them being human.
    • [case about evolutionary rationaility]

  • What I’ve learned

    • I’m irreversibly biased, and simply being aware of my biases is not enough to protect myself from them
    • Emotions have served us well for hundreds of thousands of year, but they haven’t had the time to adapt to the complexity of our social interactions and norms. The cognitive shortcuts that we call heuristics are now working against our sociological interests.
    • Our brains haven’t developed any incentive mechanism for rational thinking. Practicing it on a daily basis is a tiresome endeavor, and we’re not hormonally rewarded for it.
    • If rationality is
    • Stressful environment is not conducive to rational thinking, let alone a rational decision making.
    • It’s not rational to expect others to be rational

  • References