The S1/S2 dichotomy has proven very unhelpful for me.
For some time it served as my “scientific validation” for taking a coercive-authoritarian attitude towards myself, resulting in plenty pain.
It’s really easy to conflate S2 with “rational” with “gets correct answers”. I know think that “garbage in → garbage out” applies to S2. You can learn a bunch of explicit procedural thinking patters that are shit getting things right.
In general, S1/S2 encourages conflating “motives” and “cognitive capacities”. “S1 is fast and biased and S2 is slow and rational”. If you think of slow/fast, intentional/unintentional, biased/rational, you are capable of doing cognition that combines any of these qualities. Unnecessarily grouping them together makes it easier to spin narratives where one “system” is a bad guy that must be overcome, and that’s just not how your brain works.
This post (along with the rest of Kaj’s amazing sequence) was an crucial nudge away from the S1/S2 frame and towards a way more gearsy model of the mind.
The S1/S2 dichotomy has proven very unhelpful for me.
For some time it served as my “scientific validation” for taking a coercive-authoritarian attitude towards myself, resulting in plenty pain.
It’s really easy to conflate S2 with “rational” with “gets correct answers”. I know think that “garbage in → garbage out” applies to S2. You can learn a bunch of explicit procedural thinking patters that are shit getting things right.
In general, S1/S2 encourages conflating “motives” and “cognitive capacities”. “S1 is fast and biased and S2 is slow and rational”. If you think of slow/fast, intentional/unintentional, biased/rational, you are capable of doing cognition that combines any of these qualities. Unnecessarily grouping them together makes it easier to spin narratives where one “system” is a bad guy that must be overcome, and that’s just not how your brain works.
This post (along with the rest of Kaj’s amazing sequence) was an crucial nudge away from the S1/S2 frame and towards a way more gearsy model of the mind.