Too little thinking onto too quick decisions and actions
Everything has good and bad points. Everyone is prejudiced. At some point, welcoming people becomes pandering to them. A good way to see many visions of the same scene is to ask for and accept multiple viewpoints of the “same” thing. The trick is that the views are so hostile to one another that the people holding them can’t sit in the same room without engaging in confrontation and hostility too. People are programmed to engage in survival to reproduce behaviour, not think clearly and reason well. Survival and reproduction in a situation of information overload demand use of decision-making short-cuts in the interests of rapid useful action. Common “mind-games” include dividing the world into in-groups and out-groups, assigning single “causes” and single “effects” to complicated events to close off thinking further at this level to move into planning and executing action plans.
Chapters 1 & 2 of the Kindle book on avoiding systematic thinking errors deal with over-estimating our ability to think successfully. We only hear about success. Our attention is drawn to success. Failure of identical individuals to those successful stay quietly in graveyards out of sight. Only the successful write how-to books. We see the numerator of successful rock-stars or authors everywhere, but never think much about what the denominator, successful plus unsuccessful, value is. Chapter two raises the intriguing question, especially for me as I think I’m very prone to this error, of swimmer’s body illusion. Practising swimming does not give you a swimmer’s body. Successful swimmers are born with that body type. Short, rotund people make lousy swimmers. Make-up does not make people beautiful. Beautiful people grow up that way and then apply make-up. Harvard graduates may be successful because of the qualities they are chosen for rather than the training they receive at Harvard. In short, the desired quality is present beforehand, not instilled by the process. Cheerful people, it suggests are born that way, not created by their own self-help books. They credit themselves with becoming positive when the attitude is innate. This really goes against the grain of equal-birth and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps while others are idle and frivolous.
Dec 31, 2017 Started Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow From the introduction, a recurring theme of the book is that luck plays a large role in any success story. A small change at certain points would have led to a much more mediocre outcome. I would worry though that this could lead to a nihilistic fatalism. It’s a crapshoot so why bother trying at all? The answer I think is because the world still needs and benefits from individual success even if luck is almost always involved.
Your success for example in becoming a combat pilot may be largely luck. There are many others out there that could have been one too. However physical stamina, mental intelligence and emotional mastery is required to do the job well, as it was to do many of the other jobs one was lucky enough to do on the way up to being a pilot.
Remember the McGill guy’s square box of yes-no event and yes-no result:the upper left box (yes-yes) attracts way more brain attention than the other boxes.