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Thinking, Fast and Slow Highlights Human Cognitive Biases

1/2/2021

Kahneman, a research psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making, uses several metaphors of his own to present a fascinating look at our decision-making processes. His book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is worth an essay in itself, and we'll cover that in more detail in a subsequent blog. For now, it is sufficient to note that Kahneman describes "systematic errors in the thinking of normal people" which his research shows are the result of "the design of the machinery of cognition rather than... the corruption of thought by emotion." He uses "System 1" to describe our fast response mechanism that relies more heavily on emotion and heuristics (models) to simplify our complex world and enable us to react in the way most likely to keep us safe. System 2, on the other hand, is slower and engages the ability to reason to a much greater extent, while still accepting inputs from emotions and cognitive models. [3]

The cognitive systems Kahneman describes are broadly shared, but at least some of the content of cognitive models, like availability and anchoring, vary based on individual and group experiences. It is like the child's toy that pushes blocks of clay through forms to create exotic shapes: the forms are the same but the color varies based on the type of clay that is put into the toy. One's level of education affords no necessary immunity to the error-inducing effects of our cognitive machinery. However, an understanding of the nature of the biases build into our systems of thought, along with conscious attention to mitigating those biases, can help.

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Guns, Germs and Steel Debunks Racist Myths

1/2/2021

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Years ago, textbooks rationalized colonialism, conquest and exploitation of indigenous populations with the argument that the conquering powers brought technology and improvements to the quality of life of the conquered people. Buried in this proposition was the assumption that native peoples were somehow inferior to the conquerors, adding a racist rationale to the raw profit motive of economic exploitation. The racist notion that colonialism was a duty to lift up people of color was known as the “white man’s burden.”

The question of why technology and social organizations grew at different rates among different peoples is a reasonable line of inquiry. To paraphrase the words of UCLA Professor Jared Diamond, why did Europeans arrived to conquer the Incas rather than the Incas arriving to conquer Spain? In Guns, Germs and Steel—The Fates of Human Societies, Diamond provides an excellent description of how environmental factors shaped the speed with which civilizations emerged, developed various technologies, and projected their power on other peoples.

First, and most importantly, Diamond provides a clear rationale for why human societies developed at different speeds that debunks the racist idea that white Europeans developed faster due to inherent superiority. “In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species.” (Diamond, p. 401) Guns, Germs and Steel offers a fascinating and comprehensive analysis of these factors across all regions and peoples.

Diamond makes the case that homo sapiens moved more rapidly from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture-based societies in areas where there were higher concentrations of wild plants and animals suitable for domestication and food production. In turn, the ability to generate a surplus of food in a reliable fashion enabled the rise of cities, classes of people who could focus on something other than survival, armies, and technology. Population-dense groups living in proximity with domesticated animals suffered from new forms of communicable disease, to which many developed immunity. All together, these factors gave farming societies the ability to expand, displacing or conquering hunter-gatherer societies in their path.

Second, Diamond points out that the pattern of expansion, conquest, displacement, enslavement and brutalization of conquered peoples occurs all over the world among all the races of homo sapiens. For example, the Bantu expansion in Africa, the empires of Mesoamerica and South America, and the expansion of societies in Asia and the Pacific all ended badly for the people who were conquered and displaced. Just as being conquered does not imply intellectual inferiority, neither does it confer moral superiority. Power corrupts, it seems. Across all races, people with the power to expand, conquer and dominate their neighbors have done so.

The differentiator, according to Diamond, is the original “luck” that accrued to peoples living in areas with sufficient biodiversity to give them a head start on the path to guns, germs and steel. These peoples moved more rapidly to the stage of expansion and conquest by virtue of the geographical and ecological factors of their original homeland. Therefore, we can say that “white privilege” has its roots in a much older “Fertile Crescent privilege.” Neither privilege was ever deserved, earned, or intended by most of the people they have affected (positively or negatively).

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The Road to Character Analyzes Our Moral Ecology

1/2/2021

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The Road to Character (Random House, NY, 2015) by David Brooks is a powerful analysis of the prevailing ethos of American society. Brooks contends that Americans have shifted from a primary moral ecology founded on a vision of human fallibility, self discipline and eulogy virtues to one based on human potential, self actualization and 'Big Me' virtues. He explores this shift through profiles of Frances Perkins, Ida Stover Eisenhower and Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy Day, George Marshall, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, George Eliot, Augustine, Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne.

According to Brooks, most people attribute this shift to the baby boomer generation durning the period of the 1960's. However, Brooks asserts it was actually the greatest generation who made the shift as a reaction to 16 years of suffering from the Great Depression and World War II. Brooks also correctly asserts that the shift has some merit, even as he asserts the importance of restoring some balance to our social vision of human nature and a life well-lived.

I like this book a lot. It is my favorite read of 2020. The contrast between the traditional moral ecology rooted in a vision of human frailty and one rooted in human potential seems to mirror the dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions in Thomas Sowell's classic work A Conflict of Visions (see my review of Conflict).

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Thinking, Fast and Slow Highlights Human Cognitive Biases

Guns, Germs and Steel Debunks Racist Myths

The Road to Character Analyzes Our Moral Ecology

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