I’ve been thinking more about this… or, not really. One of the downsides to my particular mind-setup is that it takes a long time to retrieve things from long-term memory, but I did retrieve something interesting just now.
When I was younger, I think I did use system two moderately regularly. I do vaguely remember intentionally trying to ‘figure things out’ using non-synesthetic reasoning—before I realized that the synesthesia was both real and useful—and coming to conclusions. I very distinctly remember having a mindset more than once of “I made this decision, so this is what I’m going to do, whether it makes sense now or not”. I also remember that I was unable to retain the logic behind those decisions, which made me very inflexible about them—I couldn’t use new data to update my decision, because I didn’t know how I’d come to the conclusion or how the new data should fit in. Using that system is demanding enough that it simply wasn’t possible to re-do my logic every single time a potentially-relevant piece of data turned up, and in fact I couldn’t remember enough of my reasoning to even figure out which pieces of data were likely to be relevant. The resulting single-mindedness is much less useful than the ability to actually be flexible about your actions, and after having that forcibly pointed out by reality a few times, I stopped using that method altogether.
There does seem to be a degree of epistemic hygiene necessary to switch entirely to using system one, though. I do remember, vaguely, that one problem I had when I first started using system one for actual problems was that I was fairly easy to persuade—it took a while to really get comfortable with the idea that someone could have an opinion that was well-formed and made sense but still not be something that I would ‘have to’ support or even take into consideration, for example. Essentially my own concepts of what I wanted were not strong enough to handle being challenged directly, at first. (I got better.)
I’ve been thinking more about this… or, not really. One of the downsides to my particular mind-setup is that it takes a long time to retrieve things from long-term memory, but I did retrieve something interesting just now.
When I was younger, I think I did use system two moderately regularly. I do vaguely remember intentionally trying to ‘figure things out’ using non-synesthetic reasoning—before I realized that the synesthesia was both real and useful—and coming to conclusions. I very distinctly remember having a mindset more than once of “I made this decision, so this is what I’m going to do, whether it makes sense now or not”. I also remember that I was unable to retain the logic behind those decisions, which made me very inflexible about them—I couldn’t use new data to update my decision, because I didn’t know how I’d come to the conclusion or how the new data should fit in. Using that system is demanding enough that it simply wasn’t possible to re-do my logic every single time a potentially-relevant piece of data turned up, and in fact I couldn’t remember enough of my reasoning to even figure out which pieces of data were likely to be relevant. The resulting single-mindedness is much less useful than the ability to actually be flexible about your actions, and after having that forcibly pointed out by reality a few times, I stopped using that method altogether.
There does seem to be a degree of epistemic hygiene necessary to switch entirely to using system one, though. I do remember, vaguely, that one problem I had when I first started using system one for actual problems was that I was fairly easy to persuade—it took a while to really get comfortable with the idea that someone could have an opinion that was well-formed and made sense but still not be something that I would ‘have to’ support or even take into consideration, for example. Essentially my own concepts of what I wanted were not strong enough to handle being challenged directly, at first. (I got better.)