There’s people who identify more with System 2. And they tend to believe truth is found via System 2 and that this is how problems are solved.
There’s people who identify more with System 1. And they tend to believe truth is found via System 1 and that this is how problems are solved.
(And there are various combinations of both.)
I’ve been thinking about roughly this idea lately.
There’s people who are better at achieving their goals using S2, and people who are better at achieving their goals using S1, and almost everyone is a mix of these two types of people, but are selectively one of these types of people in certain contexts and for certain goals. Identifying with S2 or S1 then comes from observing which tends to do a better job of getting you what you want, so it starts to feel like that’s the one that’s in control, and then your sense of self gets bound up with whatever mental experiences correlate with getting what you want.
For me this has shown up as being a person who is mostly better at getting what he wants with S2, but my S2 is unusually slow, so for lots of classes of problems it fails me in the moment even if it knew what to do after the fact. Most of my most important personal developments have come on the back of using S2 long enough to figure out all the details of something so that S1 can take it over. A gloss of this process might be to say I’m using intelligence to generate wisdom.
I get the sense that other people are not in this same position. There’s a bunch of people for whom S2 is fast enough that they never face the problem I do, and they can just run S2 fast enough to figure stuff out in real time. And then there’s a whole alien-to-me group of folks who are S1 first and think of S2 as this slightly painful part of themselves they can access when forced to, but would really rather not.
I’ve been thinking about roughly this idea lately.
There’s people who are better at achieving their goals using S2, and people who are better at achieving their goals using S1, and almost everyone is a mix of these two types of people, but are selectively one of these types of people in certain contexts and for certain goals. Identifying with S2 or S1 then comes from observing which tends to do a better job of getting you what you want, so it starts to feel like that’s the one that’s in control, and then your sense of self gets bound up with whatever mental experiences correlate with getting what you want.
For me this has shown up as being a person who is mostly better at getting what he wants with S2, but my S2 is unusually slow, so for lots of classes of problems it fails me in the moment even if it knew what to do after the fact. Most of my most important personal developments have come on the back of using S2 long enough to figure out all the details of something so that S1 can take it over. A gloss of this process might be to say I’m using intelligence to generate wisdom.
I get the sense that other people are not in this same position. There’s a bunch of people for whom S2 is fast enough that they never face the problem I do, and they can just run S2 fast enough to figure stuff out in real time. And then there’s a whole alien-to-me group of folks who are S1 first and think of S2 as this slightly painful part of themselves they can access when forced to, but would really rather not.