Hi LW, first time commenting on here, but I have been a reader / lurker of the site for quite some time. Anyway, I hope to bring a question to the community that has been on my mind recently.
I have noticed an odd transformation of my social circle, in particular, of the people whom I have basically known since I was young, and are about the same age as me. I’m wondering if this is something that most people have observed in other people as they moved into adulthood and out into the world.
I would say that ever since I was a teenager I considered myself a “rationalist”. What that has meant exactly has of course been updated over the years, but I would say that my approach to knowledge hasn’t fundamentally changed (like I didn’t suddenly become a postmodernist or anything). As soon as I understood what science and empiricism were about, I knew that my life would revolve around it in some way. And, what made me very close to the people who would be my best friends throughout high school and college, is that they felt pretty much the same way I did. At least I very much believed they did. My happiest moments with them, when I was about 16 to 18, involved lengthy, deep, and enjoyable discussions about philosophy, science, politics, and current events. I was convinced we were all rationalists, that we were fairly agnostic about most things until we felt that we had come to well-argued conclusions about them, and were always willing to entertain new hypotheses or conjectures about any topic that we cared about.
Fast-forward about ten years, and it seems like most of those people have “grown out of” that, like it was some kind of phase most people go through when they’re young. All important questions have been settled, the only things that seem to matter now are careers, relationships, and hobbies. That’s the impression I get from my various social media interactions with them, anyway. There are no debates or discussions except angry political ones, which mostly just consist of scolding people, or snarky comments and jokes. Politically, most people I know have gone either hard-left or hard-right (mostly hard-left, since everyone I know grew up on the west coast). But what’s striking to me is how hivemind-ish a lot of them have become. It’s really impossible to have a good discussion with any of my old friends anymore. I realize that sounds a little complain-y, but what I emphasize is that this a particular observation about the people I grew up with, not the older people I’ve known like family members, and not the people in my current social circle.
Ok, sure, it’s possible that I just picked bad friends back then. But I think this is a little bit unlikely, since the reason we were drawn together in the first place is our shared interests and similar way of thinking. But I feel like I have basically stuck to the same principles that I had even back then. I’ve tried to avoid becoming too deeply attached to any one subculture or “tribe”—and there have been many opportunities to do so. What makes me believe my observation might be a more common phenomenon is that it seems to be shared by the people I’m close to now. It appears to me that there is something that alters a person’s psychology as they move into adulthood, and through college in particular. And that this alteration makes people less “rational” in a way. And whatever causes that is traumatic enough that it encourages people to cluster into groups of very like-minded individuals, where their beliefs and way of life feel extremely safe.
I’d also like to emphasize that I’m not saying that our views and beliefs have simply diverged. This has mostly to do with the way that people think, and the way that they communicate ideas.
I wonder if anyone else has had this observation, and if so, what the possible explanations might be. On the other hand, maybe I have gone through the same change in my psychology, but simply fail to notice it in myself.
I agree there’s something to the exploration-exploitation view of people becoming more closed-minded. But don’t be too quick to write it off as “people don’t think carefully anymore”, or simple tribalism. Some important questions really do get settled by all those late-night college debates, though often the answer is “I don’t think it’s possible to know this” or “It’s not worth the years of effort it would take to understand at a more-than-amateur level.”
People are recognizing their limitations and zeroing in on the areas where they can get the highest return on investment for their thoughts. That’s a difficult thing to do when you’re younger, because you don’t have much to compare yourself to. If you’ve never met a physicist more knowledgeable than your 9th-grade science teacher, you might well think you can make big contributions to the theory of relativity in the space of a few weeks’ discussion with your friends.
Similarly, when it comes to politics, the idea of considering every idea with an open mind can fall victim to the pressures of reality—some ideas are superficially appealing but actually harmful; some are nice in theory but are so far from what could reasonably be implemented that their return on investment is low. And because politics is so adversarial, many ideas that are promoted as novel and non-partisan are actually trying to sneak in a not-so-novel agenda through the back door.
That’s an interesting thought. However, I tend to observe that most people do not take strictly agnostic positions on most things. In fact, it seems that people tend towards certainty rather than uncertainty. So I’m not sure that I’m seeing people tend to give up on questions they think are too difficult or that they don’t have the expertise or time to really come to a conclusion on. From my perspective it seems that people really do fall into ideological camps where they believe a lot of matters have been completely settled and do not need further discussion.
An interesting sort-of reverse phenomenon that I’ve noticed, is that on matters where people really have more expertise, they actually tend to be a little more agnostic about and open to debate. So for example you might notice people having an in depth discussion on some aspect of software engineering, like a library or a framework, weighing the pros and cons of each and citing expert opinion—but on politics, which we understand even less about—you really don’t see this at all.
I can imagine a few possible things that could have contributed.
First, being more open-minded when young and getting more close-minded as older is the usual way, not just for humans, but also for many animals. Kittens are more playful than adult cats. And “philosophy” is a way of playing with words and ideas, so naturally young people would play with different ideas (the smart ones with different smart-sounding ideas; the stupid ones with different simplistic ideas), and gradually settle on the One True Way of looking at things, as they stop being able to consider new ideas, and choose one of the known ones which seems to work best for them.
It makes sense from the “exploration / exploitation” point of view: When you have a lot of time ahead of you, and your opinions matter relatively little because you are in a relatively safe environment, it is good to explore and get new data. When time becomes scarce and potential mistakes costly, stick with the best of what you already know. Also, there is a trade-off between exploration and productivity; the time you spend playing with new ideas is the time you don’t spend earning money or working on your dreams; which is okay for a teenager with low value at job market. For an adult, job and/or children reduce the time and mental energy they can spend on thinking about things unrelated to immediate survival.
Second, people try to fit in their environment. I am sorry if this sounds too cynical, but the change of your friends probably reflects the change of the environment they are currently trying to fit in, where “scolding people, or snarky comments” are the standards of communication. (Trying to do anything else in such environment would probably gain you some snarky comments, and trying to reflect on the situation would get you scolded, plus some extra snarky comments. Not being sufficiently far-left of far-right would gain you low status as insufficiently “woke” or whatever is the right-wing equivalent.) Consider yourself lucky that you are not living in such environment.
Third, there is a possibility that a part of what you observe is simply you growing up. That not only the other people are changing, but also you start observing things that you didn’t notice before. I may be generalizing too much from my own example, but it was the case for me that the people whom I considered smart when I was a teenager, suddenly seem pretty stupid now. (Of course, the scary alternative is that this is just me achieving the One True Way of looking at things, unable to tolerate other views anymore.) For example, I used to be impressed by people who had “their own opinion” on theory of relativity or quantum physics. Then I learned something about these topics; and then I realized that most of what these people talk is pure bullshit, probably learned from a random pseudoscientific YouTube video. They still use the same strategy, and extend it to other topics; I am just not impressed by it anymore. Now that I have more information than I had as a teenager, I can see more ways how people can be wrong.
Also, if you formerly interracted with your friends in person, and now it’s mostly online, that too makes things worse.
Yes, this is absolutely normal, common experience. People get “set in their ways” in some point in their lives and it becomes easier to move a mountain than to have them change their mind. This is exactly why one of the very first parts of the EY sequences is How To Actually Change Your Mind. It is the foundational skill of rationalism, and something which most people, even self-described rationalists, lack. Really, truly changing your mind goes against some sort of in-built human instinct, itself the amalgamation of various described heuristics and biases with names like ‘the availability heuristic’ and ‘(dis)confirmation bias.’
The (speculative) explanation my mind immediately goes to: a combination of the you-are-the-average-of-your-5-best-friends heuristic, and the dilution of a selected social group when its members move into new environments.
Universities and workplaces, with unusual exceptions, are probably not going to select as aggressively for high rationality (however you define “rational” & “rationality”) as your in-school social selection did. So (I suspect) when the people in your circle started expanding their own social networks during university and then at work, the average rationality of their friends & acquaintances went down. And because (insofar as a person and their behaviour are malleable) a person’s influenced by the people they hang out with, that probably made the people you know/knew less rational, or at least less likely to behave rationally.
Something in your comment changed my… not exactly opinion, more like feeling… about comparing social life at school and at job.
Until now, I was thinking like this: At school you are thrown together with random kids from your neighborhood. But when you grow up, you choose your career, sometimes you even choose a different city or country, and then you are surrounded with people who made a similar choice. Therefore… not sure how to put this into words… your social environment at job is a result of more “optimization freedom” than your social environment at school.
But suddenly it seems completely the other way round: Sure, the job is filtering for people somehow, but maybe it doesn’t filter exactly by the criteria you care about the most. For example, you may care about people being nice and rational, but you career choice only allowed you to filter by education and social class. So, more optimization, but not necessarily in the direction you care about. And then at the job you are stuck with the colleagues you get on your project. However, at school, you had the freedom to pick a few people among dozens, and hang out with them.
I guess what I am trying to say that if your criteria for people you want to associate with have a large component of education and social class, you will probably find the job better than school, socially; but if your criteria are about something else, you will probably find the job worse than school. (And university probably gives you the best of both worlds: a preselection of people, among whom you can further select.)
That is true for people who you are going to become friends with, but difference in negative environments is much bigger. If your job has a toxic social environment, you are free to find a new one at any time. You also have many bona fide levers to adjust the environment, by for example complaining to your boss, suing the company, etc.
When your high school has a toxic social environment, you have limited ability to switch out of that environment. Complaints of other students have extremely high bars to be taken into account because it’s mandatory for them to be there and it isn’t in the administrator’s best interests. If someone isn’t doing something plainly illegal it’s unlikely you will get much help.
The school → university transition might be the most interesting one WRT tristanm’s question, because although it theoretically offers the best opportunity to select for rationality, in practice a lot of people can’t or won’t exploit the opportunity. I imagine even quite nerdy students, when deciding where to apply to university, didn’t spend long asking themselves, “how can I make sure I wind up at a campus with lots of rationalists?” (I sure didn’t!)
I don’t know about rationalists but one big advantage of going to what’s called a “highly selective college” is that your peers there are mostly smart. The same principle works for schools, except that the results are not as pronounced because the schools effectively use the wealth of the parents as a proxy.
I think the impression you have of the people may have been influenced by seeing them primarily through social media. Have you talked to them in person? It might be different. The format of social media makes having nuanced discussions difficult, and emphasizes the more tribal posts.
Another thing to consider is that their priorities may have changed more than their approach to life. They may be applying empiricism to how to advance in a career, or how to be a good parent. There is a limited amount of time in a day, and they may have enough time to do only a few things well. Also, sleep deprivation, common among new parents, can make thinking clearly more difficult. Once children get older, parents get a bit of their balance back.
Interestingly, out of my original friend group, I am the only one who has gotten married and had a child. If anything, I have been forced to become more rational in order to cope with the added anxieties, lack of sleep, and stress.
I can offer a possible explanation (just one model though, you’ll have to verify it for yourself). Humans are by design far from rationality as we intend it: we evolved to function in a social environment of peers, and to make life and death decisions in the blink of an eye. The structure of our brain is such that we first make instinctive decisions, and then we justify them post-hoc. The aim of rationality where we try to first deliberate the truth from first principles and the conform our behaviour to those conlcusions, is totally alien to the way human beings usually work. It is possible to change our mind by self-deliberation, but it is very difficult, with our own nature as an obstacle, and thus can be done only for a limited array of subjects and with enough resources at your disposal (such as a lot of time and a safe environment). This might have been what happened to your friends: by concentrating on thriving in the social environment, they made more and more reliance on system 1 (the heuristic, quick-firing decision system) first, to the point of forgetting to exercise system 2 (slow and deliberate) first as you did when debating years ago. The more interesting question I would say is this: why you never forgot?
That’s a good question. I think what separates me from a lot of the people I surrounded myself with is that I tend to have always relied far more on system 2 than on system 1. The exact reason for this I’m not sure about, except that I’ve always felt that my system 1 has always lagged behind or has been deficient in some way relative to most of my peers. I’ve always felt very uncomfortable in social situations, high stress or fast decision-making environments, or when the demands to react quickly are quite high. I’ve always been a lot more comfortable in environments that allow me to think and work on a problem as long as I need to before I feel ready to commit to something. For that reason, I’ve come to rely on system 2 - like reasoning for a lot of tasks that would normally be done by system 1.
I think many people, once they transition to the environment in which navigating complex social structures becomes necessary, learn to rely mostly on system 1. This probably happens around the early adulthood phase, through college and into early career, when networking becomes very important. For various reasons, I found I didn’t need to network very hard or build up a lot of social capital to find a career and a comfortable livelihood. I realize that this probably makes me very lucky - I am basically able to hold this outside-view position that allows me, in a way, to be a little more protected from certain biases that could have potentially been learned from trying to thrive in highly social environments.
I’ve had the overall impression that the older you become the stronger you hold your beliefs, a metaphor can be the hardening of neural networks. I am making a relation right now between that and the part of the personality known as ‘openness’ which according to Roland R. Griffiths decrease as people become older.
“Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older,” says study leader Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
So drop acid with your friends, or rather have an underground psychedelic therapy group with blindfolds, music and emotional support. You gotta do your research though on how to facilitate these kinds of experiences. This is only for educational purposes and in theory.
Hi LW, first time commenting on here, but I have been a reader / lurker of the site for quite some time. Anyway, I hope to bring a question to the community that has been on my mind recently.
I have noticed an odd transformation of my social circle, in particular, of the people whom I have basically known since I was young, and are about the same age as me. I’m wondering if this is something that most people have observed in other people as they moved into adulthood and out into the world.
I would say that ever since I was a teenager I considered myself a “rationalist”. What that has meant exactly has of course been updated over the years, but I would say that my approach to knowledge hasn’t fundamentally changed (like I didn’t suddenly become a postmodernist or anything). As soon as I understood what science and empiricism were about, I knew that my life would revolve around it in some way. And, what made me very close to the people who would be my best friends throughout high school and college, is that they felt pretty much the same way I did. At least I very much believed they did. My happiest moments with them, when I was about 16 to 18, involved lengthy, deep, and enjoyable discussions about philosophy, science, politics, and current events. I was convinced we were all rationalists, that we were fairly agnostic about most things until we felt that we had come to well-argued conclusions about them, and were always willing to entertain new hypotheses or conjectures about any topic that we cared about.
Fast-forward about ten years, and it seems like most of those people have “grown out of” that, like it was some kind of phase most people go through when they’re young. All important questions have been settled, the only things that seem to matter now are careers, relationships, and hobbies. That’s the impression I get from my various social media interactions with them, anyway. There are no debates or discussions except angry political ones, which mostly just consist of scolding people, or snarky comments and jokes. Politically, most people I know have gone either hard-left or hard-right (mostly hard-left, since everyone I know grew up on the west coast). But what’s striking to me is how hivemind-ish a lot of them have become. It’s really impossible to have a good discussion with any of my old friends anymore. I realize that sounds a little complain-y, but what I emphasize is that this a particular observation about the people I grew up with, not the older people I’ve known like family members, and not the people in my current social circle.
Ok, sure, it’s possible that I just picked bad friends back then. But I think this is a little bit unlikely, since the reason we were drawn together in the first place is our shared interests and similar way of thinking. But I feel like I have basically stuck to the same principles that I had even back then. I’ve tried to avoid becoming too deeply attached to any one subculture or “tribe”—and there have been many opportunities to do so. What makes me believe my observation might be a more common phenomenon is that it seems to be shared by the people I’m close to now. It appears to me that there is something that alters a person’s psychology as they move into adulthood, and through college in particular. And that this alteration makes people less “rational” in a way. And whatever causes that is traumatic enough that it encourages people to cluster into groups of very like-minded individuals, where their beliefs and way of life feel extremely safe.
I’d also like to emphasize that I’m not saying that our views and beliefs have simply diverged. This has mostly to do with the way that people think, and the way that they communicate ideas.
I wonder if anyone else has had this observation, and if so, what the possible explanations might be. On the other hand, maybe I have gone through the same change in my psychology, but simply fail to notice it in myself.
I agree there’s something to the exploration-exploitation view of people becoming more closed-minded. But don’t be too quick to write it off as “people don’t think carefully anymore”, or simple tribalism. Some important questions really do get settled by all those late-night college debates, though often the answer is “I don’t think it’s possible to know this” or “It’s not worth the years of effort it would take to understand at a more-than-amateur level.”
People are recognizing their limitations and zeroing in on the areas where they can get the highest return on investment for their thoughts. That’s a difficult thing to do when you’re younger, because you don’t have much to compare yourself to. If you’ve never met a physicist more knowledgeable than your 9th-grade science teacher, you might well think you can make big contributions to the theory of relativity in the space of a few weeks’ discussion with your friends.
Similarly, when it comes to politics, the idea of considering every idea with an open mind can fall victim to the pressures of reality—some ideas are superficially appealing but actually harmful; some are nice in theory but are so far from what could reasonably be implemented that their return on investment is low. And because politics is so adversarial, many ideas that are promoted as novel and non-partisan are actually trying to sneak in a not-so-novel agenda through the back door.
That’s an interesting thought. However, I tend to observe that most people do not take strictly agnostic positions on most things. In fact, it seems that people tend towards certainty rather than uncertainty. So I’m not sure that I’m seeing people tend to give up on questions they think are too difficult or that they don’t have the expertise or time to really come to a conclusion on. From my perspective it seems that people really do fall into ideological camps where they believe a lot of matters have been completely settled and do not need further discussion.
An interesting sort-of reverse phenomenon that I’ve noticed, is that on matters where people really have more expertise, they actually tend to be a little more agnostic about and open to debate. So for example you might notice people having an in depth discussion on some aspect of software engineering, like a library or a framework, weighing the pros and cons of each and citing expert opinion—but on politics, which we understand even less about—you really don’t see this at all.
I can imagine a few possible things that could have contributed.
First, being more open-minded when young and getting more close-minded as older is the usual way, not just for humans, but also for many animals. Kittens are more playful than adult cats. And “philosophy” is a way of playing with words and ideas, so naturally young people would play with different ideas (the smart ones with different smart-sounding ideas; the stupid ones with different simplistic ideas), and gradually settle on the One True Way of looking at things, as they stop being able to consider new ideas, and choose one of the known ones which seems to work best for them.
It makes sense from the “exploration / exploitation” point of view: When you have a lot of time ahead of you, and your opinions matter relatively little because you are in a relatively safe environment, it is good to explore and get new data. When time becomes scarce and potential mistakes costly, stick with the best of what you already know. Also, there is a trade-off between exploration and productivity; the time you spend playing with new ideas is the time you don’t spend earning money or working on your dreams; which is okay for a teenager with low value at job market. For an adult, job and/or children reduce the time and mental energy they can spend on thinking about things unrelated to immediate survival.
Second, people try to fit in their environment. I am sorry if this sounds too cynical, but the change of your friends probably reflects the change of the environment they are currently trying to fit in, where “scolding people, or snarky comments” are the standards of communication. (Trying to do anything else in such environment would probably gain you some snarky comments, and trying to reflect on the situation would get you scolded, plus some extra snarky comments. Not being sufficiently far-left of far-right would gain you low status as insufficiently “woke” or whatever is the right-wing equivalent.) Consider yourself lucky that you are not living in such environment.
Third, there is a possibility that a part of what you observe is simply you growing up. That not only the other people are changing, but also you start observing things that you didn’t notice before. I may be generalizing too much from my own example, but it was the case for me that the people whom I considered smart when I was a teenager, suddenly seem pretty stupid now. (Of course, the scary alternative is that this is just me achieving the One True Way of looking at things, unable to tolerate other views anymore.) For example, I used to be impressed by people who had “their own opinion” on theory of relativity or quantum physics. Then I learned something about these topics; and then I realized that most of what these people talk is pure bullshit, probably learned from a random pseudoscientific YouTube video. They still use the same strategy, and extend it to other topics; I am just not impressed by it anymore. Now that I have more information than I had as a teenager, I can see more ways how people can be wrong.
Also, if you formerly interracted with your friends in person, and now it’s mostly online, that too makes things worse.
Yes, this is absolutely normal, common experience. People get “set in their ways” in some point in their lives and it becomes easier to move a mountain than to have them change their mind. This is exactly why one of the very first parts of the EY sequences is How To Actually Change Your Mind. It is the foundational skill of rationalism, and something which most people, even self-described rationalists, lack. Really, truly changing your mind goes against some sort of in-built human instinct, itself the amalgamation of various described heuristics and biases with names like ‘the availability heuristic’ and ‘(dis)confirmation bias.’
The (speculative) explanation my mind immediately goes to: a combination of the you-are-the-average-of-your-5-best-friends heuristic, and the dilution of a selected social group when its members move into new environments.
Universities and workplaces, with unusual exceptions, are probably not going to select as aggressively for high rationality (however you define “rational” & “rationality”) as your in-school social selection did. So (I suspect) when the people in your circle started expanding their own social networks during university and then at work, the average rationality of their friends & acquaintances went down. And because (insofar as a person and their behaviour are malleable) a person’s influenced by the people they hang out with, that probably made the people you know/knew less rational, or at least less likely to behave rationally.
Something in your comment changed my… not exactly opinion, more like feeling… about comparing social life at school and at job.
Until now, I was thinking like this: At school you are thrown together with random kids from your neighborhood. But when you grow up, you choose your career, sometimes you even choose a different city or country, and then you are surrounded with people who made a similar choice. Therefore… not sure how to put this into words… your social environment at job is a result of more “optimization freedom” than your social environment at school.
But suddenly it seems completely the other way round: Sure, the job is filtering for people somehow, but maybe it doesn’t filter exactly by the criteria you care about the most. For example, you may care about people being nice and rational, but you career choice only allowed you to filter by education and social class. So, more optimization, but not necessarily in the direction you care about. And then at the job you are stuck with the colleagues you get on your project. However, at school, you had the freedom to pick a few people among dozens, and hang out with them.
I guess what I am trying to say that if your criteria for people you want to associate with have a large component of education and social class, you will probably find the job better than school, socially; but if your criteria are about something else, you will probably find the job worse than school. (And university probably gives you the best of both worlds: a preselection of people, among whom you can further select.)
That is true for people who you are going to become friends with, but difference in negative environments is much bigger. If your job has a toxic social environment, you are free to find a new one at any time. You also have many bona fide levers to adjust the environment, by for example complaining to your boss, suing the company, etc.
When your high school has a toxic social environment, you have limited ability to switch out of that environment. Complaints of other students have extremely high bars to be taken into account because it’s mandatory for them to be there and it isn’t in the administrator’s best interests. If someone isn’t doing something plainly illegal it’s unlikely you will get much help.
Yep.
The school → university transition might be the most interesting one WRT tristanm’s question, because although it theoretically offers the best opportunity to select for rationality, in practice a lot of people can’t or won’t exploit the opportunity. I imagine even quite nerdy students, when deciding where to apply to university, didn’t spend long asking themselves, “how can I make sure I wind up at a campus with lots of rationalists?” (I sure didn’t!)
I don’t know about rationalists but one big advantage of going to what’s called a “highly selective college” is that your peers there are mostly smart. The same principle works for schools, except that the results are not as pronounced because the schools effectively use the wealth of the parents as a proxy.
I think the impression you have of the people may have been influenced by seeing them primarily through social media. Have you talked to them in person? It might be different. The format of social media makes having nuanced discussions difficult, and emphasizes the more tribal posts.
Another thing to consider is that their priorities may have changed more than their approach to life. They may be applying empiricism to how to advance in a career, or how to be a good parent. There is a limited amount of time in a day, and they may have enough time to do only a few things well. Also, sleep deprivation, common among new parents, can make thinking clearly more difficult. Once children get older, parents get a bit of their balance back.
Interestingly, out of my original friend group, I am the only one who has gotten married and had a child. If anything, I have been forced to become more rational in order to cope with the added anxieties, lack of sleep, and stress.
I can offer a possible explanation (just one model though, you’ll have to verify it for yourself).
Humans are by design far from rationality as we intend it: we evolved to function in a social environment of peers, and to make life and death decisions in the blink of an eye. The structure of our brain is such that we first make instinctive decisions, and then we justify them post-hoc. The aim of rationality where we try to first deliberate the truth from first principles and the conform our behaviour to those conlcusions, is totally alien to the way human beings usually work.
It is possible to change our mind by self-deliberation, but it is very difficult, with our own nature as an obstacle, and thus can be done only for a limited array of subjects and with enough resources at your disposal (such as a lot of time and a safe environment).
This might have been what happened to your friends: by concentrating on thriving in the social environment, they made more and more reliance on system 1 (the heuristic, quick-firing decision system) first, to the point of forgetting to exercise system 2 (slow and deliberate) first as you did when debating years ago.
The more interesting question I would say is this: why you never forgot?
That’s a good question. I think what separates me from a lot of the people I surrounded myself with is that I tend to have always relied far more on system 2 than on system 1. The exact reason for this I’m not sure about, except that I’ve always felt that my system 1 has always lagged behind or has been deficient in some way relative to most of my peers. I’ve always felt very uncomfortable in social situations, high stress or fast decision-making environments, or when the demands to react quickly are quite high. I’ve always been a lot more comfortable in environments that allow me to think and work on a problem as long as I need to before I feel ready to commit to something. For that reason, I’ve come to rely on system 2 - like reasoning for a lot of tasks that would normally be done by system 1.
I think many people, once they transition to the environment in which navigating complex social structures becomes necessary, learn to rely mostly on system 1. This probably happens around the early adulthood phase, through college and into early career, when networking becomes very important. For various reasons, I found I didn’t need to network very hard or build up a lot of social capital to find a career and a comfortable livelihood. I realize that this probably makes me very lucky - I am basically able to hold this outside-view position that allows me, in a way, to be a little more protected from certain biases that could have potentially been learned from trying to thrive in highly social environments.
I’ve had the overall impression that the older you become the stronger you hold your beliefs, a metaphor can be the hardening of neural networks. I am making a relation right now between that and the part of the personality known as ‘openness’ which according to Roland R. Griffiths decrease as people become older.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/single_dose_of_hallucinogen_may_create_lasting_personality_change
Which is discussed here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7wh/rationality_drugs/4xmw to http://lesswrong.com/lw/82g/on_the_openness_personality_trait_rationality/
So drop acid with your friends, or rather have an underground psychedelic therapy group with blindfolds, music and emotional support. You gotta do your research though on how to facilitate these kinds of experiences. This is only for educational purposes and in theory.