"Pay Attention"

As an admonishment, it's pretty mild, and yet this imperative command has stuck with me from childhood.

 

Too bad it's execution didn't.

 

At least, according to Daniel Kahneman's (2011--well before MAGA was trademarked) Thinking, Fast and Slow.   During my latest re-read, two other things struck me:  (1) how the biases of Fast thinking + the laziness of Slow thinking got us into our current geopolitical mess, and (2) that PP didn't need a fancy book to tell him that his kids wouldn't learn anything if they weren't paying attention.  Hence the admonition.

 

But first, Fast and Slow.  Fast thinking is our intuition (instinct), which operates automatically, immediately, and unconsciously.  Fast thinking is our default mode, constantly scanning our environment for perils and opportunities to make "sense" of what we perceive--and works pretty well to keep us alive in the face of physical danger.  But it also exaggerates or even fabricates patterns, suppresses doubt, and makes us overconfident in our first impressions (because the world doesn't actually make sense--our brains just present it that way).  In contrast, Slow thinking is what we (ego) think of as thinking, usually deliberately, laboriously, and (more often that we'd like to admit) rather lazily.  Slow thinking allows us to set tasks and switch among them, which can correct the errors of intuition, but only at a pretty high cost.

 

Because paying attention is draining--sucking the glucose right out of our brains.

 

Since that's not terribly efficient, most of the time [unless we can slip into effortless flow] we coast along on Fast autopilot, allocating our spare mental capacity second-by-second.  Not surprisingly, each of us also naturally relies a bit more on either Fast or Slow mode.  However, if we have to (discipline!), we can all switch to slowly attending to things, but when we face too many tasks that demand slow thinking either at once or in a row, there isn't much left to spare and we either lose the motivation to pay attention (ego depletion) or max out on our capacity to do so (cognitive load).  

 

A bit like what is happening to you right now...

 

Sadly, although decades of research have demonstrated that cognitive overload, hunger, and fatigue all seriously impact decision making, only a few institutions have incorporated this knowledge into structuring the day to optimize learning, increase efficiency, or better meet desired outcomes.  [Exceptions include timing targets (albeit not all well met) for meal plans in schools, universities, hospitals, and the military.]  Instead, the greatest response (okay, exploitation) to awareness of how overload influences decision making has come from advertising and supported industries (including politics).

 

The ones that literally capitalize on you when you're down.

 

As well as on the other vulnerabilities of how Fast thinking influences Slow, such as how easily our Slow thinking can be primed by the sensory input registered by Fast (e.g., money matters make us more selfish, seeing posters of Big Brother increase obedience, and worrying about mortality inclines us toward authoritarianism).  Or how we are more gullible when we feel good (digital crack), we jump to conclusions under time pressure (flash sales), and distraction lets us believe the blatantly untrue (smoke screens).  And don't forget how repeating is believing because familiar things (that haven't previously killed us) must be good, that we underestimate risk and overestimate benefits for thing we like, and that we just don't want to hear things that might upset our tidy world narrative.  The beauty, of course, is that we are not only unaware of all this happening (as speedy Fast absorbs things subconsciously), but also largely refuse to accept it (as lazy Slow welcomes the line it was fed by Fast). 

 

However, today's is not a rant about television, search engines, or social media or how they specifically take advantage of the errors of fast thinking and the limits to slow thinking.  It should be obvious that, in the absence of societal guardrails, these industries (and those behind them) will profit from fast thinking taking us down rabbit holes when we allow ourselves to become too overwhelmed to think slowly.  Nor is today about how AI LLMs mimic only Fast thinking (by making "sense" of juxtaposed material through association, even when there is no linkage in reality) or how modern media infinitely complicate the already fraught balance between these two modes of thinking in the realm of politics, making us more vulnerable than ever to propaganda as we trust even blatantly illogical confirmatory arguments.  [Goebbels must be smiling from hell.]

 

Rather, today is a reminder that we can--individually--actually do something about it.  We can learn to quickly recognize the situations in which Fast thinking is likely to trip us up, so that we know when to switch to Slow thinking.  And then we can either avoid them, or use willpower to actually think.

 

Or, in the immortal words of PP, pay attention.