let's momentarily set aside the irony of reading kahneman and some pop-sci behavioural economics, then smooshing them together in sequence because they are them

let's momentarily set aside the irony of reading kahneman and some pop-sci behavioural economics, then smooshing them together in sequence because they are thematically connected by “system 1/system 2”, to ultimately arrive at a point entirely carried by a highly selective reading of the latter text with the opinions of the former something important to note about this kahneman/tversky system 1/2 stuff is you run the risk of walking away from it thinking that these things have a clear dividing line between them, as far as their fundamental nature and/or their applicability and/or their qualitative goodness/badness (primitive lizard/monkey/whatever vs enlightened patrician). gerd gigerenzer, for instance, proposes that when we engage in what is popularly considered “rational thought”, we're reaching into a “toolbox” of multiple, individually fast-and-frugal heuristics, piling on more computational effort to solve a problem in more dimensions. additionally, wherever you stand on that theory, his experimental work demonstrates that just as easily as you can contrive a laboratory setting in which those heuristics are fallacious, you can contrive one in which they are beneficial; charitably you can interpret them as well-equipped to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information, and functioning as some sort of encoding of the ultimate likelihood of regression toward the mean a fast heuristic can tell you the baseball bat costs one dollar or that it's likelier that linda is a bank teller and a feminist, sure, but slow, calculating thought is equally well-equipped to overfit to noise, rationalise an addiction, or send you down a detrimental neurotic spiral anyway: * cognition is wacky and quirky and difficult to poke and prod at under a microscope * the jury is out on what kind of thought is most applicable in a given situation; good luck, buddy * you should cultivate some degree of taste/discretion as to how hard you want to think about any given thing (one potential benchmark: are you accumulating a mile-long list of read-later bookmarks due to FOMO?) * my two cents: someone who reads medium articles posted to hacker news is likely in minimal danger of under-employing system 2