Over and Under thinking

On my walk this morning I was talking to my friend and linguist, Luke Wakefield, and I had an insight. For most of my life I’ve been deeply curious about how things work: everything from electronics to religion. I make models of the world to best fit the data of what I know and when I get new data I can’t really rest until I’ve expanded the model to make sense of it.

Most of the people I live and work with have come to understand this as part of my process. But I also regularly hear the phrases: “you’re overthinking it.” This always takes me by surprise as it usually comes when I feel like I’m getting close to actually understanding and articulating the dynamics of a thing from it’s underlying animating principles.

My “ah hah!” moment this morning came from the realization that what they may be expressing is that this thing I’m talking about, from their experience or way of thinking, comes easily, intuitively or automatically without the kind of conscious explanation or thought I’m articulating.

Which is to say, that it comes to them from what Daniel Kanneman calls system 1 thinking: a rapid, automatic, unconscious kind of thinking that runs in the background and gives us all kinds of useful predictions, intuitions and perceptions. This is contrast to system 2 thinking which we all tend to use when our system 1 thinking fails to make sense and we have to switch over to conscious, high cognitive load, high attention interrogation of what is going on here. Most of us can drive to and from work automatically, staying entirely in system 1 thinking. But if we have to negotiate a tricky merge in traffic or drive to a new location and find street parking? We’re likely to switch over to system 2.

The human brain even has dedicated functional areas or “modules” if you will, that specialize or can be trained to specialize and create automation or automaticity in certain tasks like: facial recognition, encoding and decoding writing, and more. This is pretty obvious from experience but what’s less obvious is that there is wide variation in the human population in the distribution and relative effectiveness of these modules.

Brain module diversity or disability?

Don’t have the module for facial recognition? We call that prosopagnosia or faceblindness. It doesn’t mean you can’t recognize faces. It just means that for you, it becomes a conscious, cognitive effort you have to spend energy, time and attention on, while for everyone else who has the module, it’s just a service their brain provides at no cost. Or in Kanneman’s framework, without the brain module to create the automation, the task moves from system 1 thinking to system 2 thinking.

Don’t have the module that does rapid automatic naming of written words? We call that dyslexia. It doesn’t mean you can’t read. It just means that it will cost you more. You’ll work twice as hard as people who have the module for half the speed and accuracy. And you’ll probably develop some hacks to get around needing to read with that part of your brain except when absolutely necessary.

The human brain is amazing. Even when the more common functional area doesn’t work, it can create new automations over time from practice and use. Or it can develop adaptive enhancements of other modules that do work well. My wife and 2 of my kids are faceblind. And they recognize voices faster than faces, which is especially fun when watching animated films. And while my two dyslexic daughters read more slowly than their classmates, they can run circles around most people in processing what’s being said and beating you to the punchline or the next point in the argument.

System 2 is Slower, but it can show its work

Another interesting consequence of having to develop conscious processes of doing the kind of processing that, for many, is unconscious and automatic, is that people who use system 2 thinking have more direct conscious access to the principles, values, and strategies that animate these actions. This means we can often put words to and describe them with more specificity and detail. But when we try to share this with someone for whom it’s simply an automatic and unconscious service their brain provides, it probably does sound like we’re overthinking it. While from the other perspective, their way of thinking and reasoning about it is:
1. not universally available to everyone

2. literally under thinking in that it’s thinking taking place below the conscious mind and inaccessible to it.

I see this dynamic operating among some autistic people who sometimes don’t have the kind of brain automation that can make perceiving and learning some unspoken social and cultural rules unconscious and intuitive. So instead they can become functional anthropologists, observing and studying in order to derive these complex rules and dynamics through observation. It’s no surprise then when, through this more conscious access to their thought process they are able to notice and describe bias, unfairness, and inconsistency in the social and cultural norms that are built up largely through unconscious system 1 thinking driving interactions between individuals and groups. By slowing down into System 2 thinking, we gain access to new insight we don’t have when we rely mostly on our brain’s System 1 auto-pilot.

Diverse neurologies enable a richer reality

The relatively new public discussion happening online and on social media about neurodiversity has done a great job of spreading a shared public vocabulary around attention, executive function, sensory differences. But what I’m hopeful about is the developing awareness of brain difference not universally as deficit from a default norm, but as normal variation in the population of a social species who is made stronger and richer by differences in ways of thikning and being in the world.

So the next time you hear someone talking in detail about something that to you seems obvious and automatic, before you accuse them of overthinking, pause and consider the opportunity to hear from someone who may have had to spend more energy to bootstrap their own brain function in this area from first principles rather than simply take what their unconscious mind has served up to them without effort.

I discovered Balaji Srinivasan last march. He was on Tim Ferris’ podcast. He’s a biochemist by training and a serial entrepreneur most recently with Coinbase. I was struck by the parallels between what he was talking about and our project at Sol: proof of work, communities of practice, financial incentives for work shared in public, increasing access to education globally outside the traditional academy.

Since then I’ve listened to a few more interviews and read a few pieces of his at 1729.com.

Like many I’m struck by his broad understanding of the forces that have shaped human history and his willingness to synthesize them with the currrent moment and act on them with an entreprenuer’s risk-tolerance.

I am concerned with his insistence on setting himself up in contrast to “Woke Capital” or techno-progressivists vs. political progressivists.

He’s an open transhumanist ideologue and brings with him all the reductionism and myopia of that movement when it comes to their conception of personhood, people with disabilities and Cartesian error of mistaking the thinking thing for the whole thing. But what I find compelling at the heart of his vision is the impulse to reform our most central social institutions.

I share the impulse to reform and the conviction that many times current forms are not capable of the kind of change needed in this time of accellerating social changes and existential threats.

America’s current foundering in the midst of the pandemic despite having access to more vaccine than any other nation is proof enough to me that our current institutions are not set up to face exponential threats of climate change, and the epistemic crisis that underlies it.

And on that point of how we know what we know, his focus on the pursuit of “truth” as facts is particularly interesting. The simplicity with which he speaks of truth strikes me as something that could only come from someone whose academic training was in the sciences not the humanities.

But I suspect he is aware of this and has rejected the post-modern critique as part of the “Woke” ideology he finds so frustratingly censorious.

He speaks openly of his intent to persuade and influence. He speaks of media narratives as “software” that can be loaded into people’s brains. He advises caution against spending time with people whose imaginations have been formed by a steady diet of cable news because they will load their software into your mind. And yet I hear in his speaking and writing an equal intent to merge new code into the minds of his audience. He speaks in long narrative soliloqies punctuated by pithy aphorisms and tweetable slogans that seem designed to spread as memes.

He embodies the writings of Daniel Kanneman who, in documenting the cognitive biases all human minds work within, warns and prescribes of the ways our minds are so easily manipulated to take in new beliefs by recency, repetition and confirmation bias.

Srinivasan strikes me as one of the first people I’ve found speaking publicly who is living in the reality that I started to see dimly a decade ago: that we are living in a Gutenberg moment in which our technological innovations are having an exponential impact on our social, cultural, religious and political institutions, the impact of which has barely begun.

40 years after the printing press we saw the Christian Reformation and the complete social and political upheaval of Europe in the years that followed it. We are about 20 years into the internet as a broadly accessible phenomenon.

It seems clear to me that by mearely increasing the speed of the spread of ideas (of the network throughput), we unwittingly knock over the stability of the institutions built to manage a society capable of listening, talking and changing at that prior speed.

For the people who see the moment for what it is, one of profound transition, the future is most maleable. I got into tech and design because I saw this wave swelling and I wanted, I wanted to have a hand in shaping our shared future with an eye for how it could improve things for those with the least power and privilege in our current order.

I am as impressed with Balaji’s perception of this moment and commitment to seize it as I am concerned about the vision of the future he wants to help shape.

“What Job is a Conspiracy Theory Doing? Why American Christians are Particularly Vulnerable to the Narratives of the Trump Era”

Available October 1.

keepingthefaithbook.com

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About a month ago I got so angry about QAnon, I went on a bit of a tweet rant. A Fuller Alumn friend saw it and invited me to contribute.

In the words of the eds “If you are a Christian searching for a sense of political belonging within the church, this book is for you. If you are a Christian who is looking for brothers and sisters who will stand with you as allies in the fight for justice, this book is for you.”

I started reading the other contributors this morning and I already feel less alone. Thanks to Jesse Wheeler and especially to Suzie Lahoud who has created this space of dissent for us to push back.

“Covid 19 was fake. Oprah Ellen and others been arrested for being perverts so they make us stay home while they are on trial.”

I wasn’t aware of this particular conspiracy theory so I googled around until I learned that it’s a variant on another I had heard of. In this one, Bill Gates caused coronavirus as a cover to spread vaccination based tracking microchips. In this new version, Ellen and Oprah are secretly pedophiles who are under house arrest and they created the pandemic scare to make the rest of us have to stay home so no one will notice that they are on house arrest.

I know. It sounds crazy. How could anyone believe this?

I think that’s the wrong question if you want to understand what conspiracy theories like this mean.

A better question is: what work does this story do for the person who believes it and shares it?

If Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey are in control of the pandemic then that means human beings, powerful, rich and famous though they may be, are in control of what is happening and there’s still hope that humans could reverse it.

Meanwhile our best clinicians and scientists are telling us that there’s a lot we don’t know and advising as we learn more each day. And if you pay attention to what we are learning it can be terrifying. What’s more, the world most of us have inhabited since birth —a world where science has made humanity mostly untouchable by the natural world— seems to have gone away overnight. We are feeling exposed to a new threat that is not well understood and our best hope of developing a cure is months or years away. We are exposed to the chaos of a random mutation in a virus we can’t see, threatening to tear down all we have built for our families and our nations and our species. We are staring into an abyss and feeling how vulnerable we had really been all along.

In the old days we told stories about how we were suffering because of the agendas or displeasure of unseen gods and deities. Those stories did similar work then. They left the door open for us to have some control over forces that threaten to roll over us like tidal waves. Now we blame Bill Gates and Oprah because it is somehow less terrifying than staring directly at our weakness and vulnerability and facing what we must do to care for one another and rebuild our shelter against the chaos.

Despite stories like this, many many Americans are still engaging in social gatherings or refusing to wear masks.

We have recently seen the power of the viral videos in changing public opinion and raising awareness about about the experience of being Black in America. These videos haven’t haven’t solved racism but they have changed the conversation around it.

Lately I’ve been wondering how videos showing the very real suffering and death caused by the coronavirus might change our national conversation and motivate action.

Why video? Don’t we have evidence and data we can share? In the internet era many Americans have lost trust in news organizations to establish shared sets of facts through the bias-mitigating practices of journalism. And though we know video can be edited in ways that change it’s meaning, we still respond to live action footage more immediately and with our full minds and bodies.

Let me be clear: we still need empirical, objective data. We need a nationally led testing regime. We need to be led by epidemiologists and other experts who have studied past instances of these seemingly unprecedented events. We need that data to guide leadership and action.

However, these past six months have shown that data, science and arguments appealing to the intellect can not and will not motivate sufficient public action to stop the spread. We need to tell a story that resonates deep down in the body.

When I worked as a hospital chaplain, I was with people dying regularly; both people at end of life, and sudden, surprising deaths in the emergency room. Seatbelt safety was an abstract value that I was intellectually committed to. And then one night, I sat in a tiny room with a mother while she learned that her baby was dead after a car accident. Her soul-wrenching groans moved my commitment to making sure I got my baby’s car seat installed correctly, out of my head and into my body. Witnessing that motivated me to act.

Social distancing has meant that many of us are more cut off than ever from our broader communities. The pandemic has meant that even family members often don’t see their loved ones struggling for breath in their last moments. This burden falls to healthcare workers who have unequivocally been warning us of the danger of this new disease.

I’m afraid their testimony is not enough.
We need to see it for ourselves.
And hopefully, seeing will be believing.