Thinking Fast, Abandoning Knowledge (When We Need it Most)
I have been trying to put my finger on what exactly bothers me quite so much about Trump’s approach to politics. Yes, there are lots of individual elements that people have rightly criticized. But now I have figured out what unifies it all for me: Trump is pushing us collectively into thinking fast and abandoning knowledge.
What do I mean by this? One of the books I highly recommend is “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. In it Kahneman catalogs years of research into behavioral economics and distinguishes between two mental systems: one system is effortless and thinks “fast” but is subject to all sorts of cognitive biases (it is really more “feeling” than “thinking), the other system requires us to expend real effort and allows us to think rationally. Trump and others like him around the world are explicitly appealing to the first system. They explicitly appeal to the kind of highly automated narratives in the “thinking fast” system. And that appeal is awfully effective. It is even then effective in getting the other side to revert to the same place. So I have found myself riled up and easily slipping into emotional responses when meeting with and talking to someone who supports Trump.
What this means is that collectively we are abandoning knowledge, which is premised on rational discourse and on thinking slow (with effort). This is particularly dangerous for the world at a time when we need knowledge more than ever. We have massive problems to solve, such as climate change, and massive opportunities ahead, such as curing disease. Those require that we accumulate more knowledge, not abandon it. I have always wondered how it was possible that we went from the heights of Athens to the Dark Ages, from the Enlightenment to Fascism. Major regressions from knowledge to feeling have occurred before and now we are witnessing one first hand. The massive amplification systems that we have built in the form of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. are not helping at all. In fact they are accelerating the decline because they too play to thinking fast, not slow -- which is why fake news stories (which all play to confirmation bias) do better than real news.
I don’t know how to best stem this massive backsliding on knowledge that’s happening not just here but all around the world. But at least I feel I have a better grasp on what’s happening and that’s a first step in figuring out what to do about it.
