The Michael Lewis book "The Undoing Project" is about the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their work is often summarized as being about our human brain circuits and basic rapid impulses. The PBS program "Hacking Your Mind" refers to their work and mentions the Lewis book, since by appealing to what Kahneman calls "fast thinking" in his book "Thinking: Fast and Slow", politicians and advertisers nudge us in directions that benefit them, regardless of our needs. The fast part is more ingrained in us and our slower human conscious deliberation kicks in only when we stop and question what we are doing and what we want.
My friend, Dr. Larry Riggs gave a good illustration of the fast and slow response systems. Walking through the woods, I step on a branch. It is shaped in such a way that the far end jiggles some dead leaves. I thought I was alone and get an instant jolt of fear - what was that? What's there? Then, a little checking takes place and I realize there is no danger, just surprise.
Our rapid response system has been trained over eons of years and it is aimed at our survival. It is the system that kicks in immediately, much more so than careful evaluation of alternatives. The tv program "Hacking Your Mind" shows a very primitive group of currently living hunter-gatherers in Africa, the Hadza. The narrative voice states that their living conditions are such that they benefit from taking advantage of every chance to eat sugar, fat and salt. The camera does a quick cut to a modern candy store with hundreds of candies, far more than any human could eat, even over several days.
We all operate with impulses, basic feelings and rules of thumb that aren't designed for our lives today, which have been very much modified, especially in the last 2 or 3 centuries, with electricity, modern medicine and and sanitation and internal combustion machines.
Michael Lewis also wrote a book called "Moneyball". It's about the Oakland A's baseball team, hampered with a lack of funds to pay the "best" players. The manager turned away from the rules of thumb as to which players were the most valuable and instead had the help of a statistician. They took a careful look at players's records and found undervalued players who didn't necessarily stand out but had what it took to get a team to the top.
We are entering a time of big data, careful record analysis and questioning everyday common sense, in sports, in medicine, in law enforcement, in all walks of life. Older people often sense that the world has changed and in politics, education, and all sorts of important activities, we are on the outlook for better approaches and deeper insight.
