A friend and I are to give a talk that he designed. He used the title "How certain should you be about that?" I maintain that we don't really know just how certain we are about many things. When we think about an issue, there are many ideas that come to mind and we don't usually take time to even list them all, much less evaluate in whatever way we can, how certain we are about each assumption and each assertion involved.
I have been fascinated with the information in the book "Incognito", which is about how much of our bodies, our minds and thinking and our lives go on in secret without reaching our consciousness. The author, David Eagleman, likens our conscious mind as the CEO of a complex operating system that only gets informed about an issue when the subconscious processes can't decide, much like a committee that gives the deciding vote on a tied ballot to the chair.
Over 50 years, I have benefited from the work of Daniel Kahneman and his deceased partner, Amos Tversky. Those two have opened up many insights into human decision making. I still haven't finished Kahneman's book "Thinking: Fast and Slow". I came across this passage from the book:
Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they got there. You cannot trace how you came to the belief that there is a lamp on the desk in front of you, or how you detected a hint of irritation in your spouse's voice on the telephone, or how you managed to avoid a threat on the road before you became consciously aware of it. The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.
Kahneman discussed the work of one of my favorite researchers, Paul Meehl. Meehl showed that the judgement of clinicians trying to select which prisoners should be given parole was inferior to a simple statistical formula in making the decisions. Having a group of people make a decision is often the best possible way but sometimes, it can be better to use a different method, IF all that counts is minimizing mistakes. Since people's feelings matter, that is rarely all that counts.
