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by nedrocks 530 days ago
Catering to the masses is indicative of catering to system 1 thinking. System 1 thinking is extraordinarily cheap compared to system 2. When a movie has good cover art, an alluring trailer and one name you've heard of before, it is good enough so long as you don't engage system 2 thinking. The same can be said for your domino's argument - picking a good pizza place takes a lot of thought: deep dish vs new york style, delivery vs pick up, price point, etc. Domino's is just there, in-app, and cheap.

System 2 thinking compounds. Once you've really tried great pizza, studied film, felt good product design, drank good wine, and so on it is hard to go back. Even when operating in system 1, after you know what makes things good, you can just feel the lack of quality. This is what some people use to term "snobishness" because it can lead to turning one's nose up at something that's good enough to the untrained eye.

The minimum bar for is a great measure for society's system 2 quotient. The more deep thought, focus, and experienced a culture is, the higher the quality bar is. For instance, as a community becomes wealthier there are more shake shakes rather than burger kings because with more money people have more free time to experience good foods, leading to a system 1 preference for a higher quality bar. I'd love to see how this plays out over different communities and cultures.

1 comments

My understanding was that System 1/System 2 thinking is unproven conjecture[1] that can't even be replicated[2]. It would be unwise to analyse behaviour using this framework.

1: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-hovercraft-full-... 2: https://replicationindex.com/2016/01/31/a-revised-introducti...

I don't want to argue the basis of system 1/system 2 as described in [1], because the point I'm taking away is more about whether they interoperate at times of decision making. The point I'm making is system 2 is a far more costly (effortful in the article) mechanism of decision making.

The point I'm making is, as an organism we avoid utilizing higher-effort or higher-cost actions when unnecessary. An untrained lower-cost (IR1 in the article or System 1 in my definition) decision will result in not caring about quality. A trained lower-cost decision will utilize heuristics to bias for higher quality.

The point of the links I've shared is that there is no such thing as System 1/2, and decision effort/cost is not a factor.
Respectfully, I don't think you took away the correct implications. Specifically in the implications section of [1]:

"The key to effective intuitive decision making, though, is to learn to better calibrate one’s confidence in the intuitive response (i.e., to develop more refined meta-thinking skills) and to be willing to expand search strategies in lower confidence situations or based on novel information."

and

"Relatedly, it also means we should stop assuming that more conscious and effortful decision-making is necessarily better than more heuristically-driven intuitive decision-making."

I would say that while the article makes very interesting objections to the S1/S2 thinking framework, its objections are that they are far more intertwined as measured. However, the article still very clearly agrees that S1 is lower cost than S2.

> most notably that many of the properties attributed to System 1 and System 2 don’t actually line up with the evidence, that dual-process theories are largely unfalsifiable, and that most of the claimed support for them is “confirmation bias at work”

The article absolutely does not agree that S1 is lower cost than S2, as the article does not agree that S2 exists at all.

I see so this may be semantics then as the article agrees with intuitive decision making. I think I understand where we’re saying the same things. I will consider replacing my terminology in the future, thank you!