 So far in the course we've been talking about essentially the way that the mind doesn't work so it doesn't work like a video camera You can't Go back in time and re and review What it is that you experience to gain? We don't have any sort of privileged access into the workings of our own memory And we're not very good at predicting other people's behavior under most circumstances So we're not great at doing this sort of thing. That's right And I think we could spend episode after episode just going through each of these myths and trying to shatter them I mean some common examples are We only use 10% of our brains or a right-brain people are more creative than left-brain people or you can tell whether someone's lying from a Polygraph test we dealt with subliminal messages in rock music a couple of weeks ago The thing is this there's very little Empirical evidence for these claims it seems that they just they don't do what we think they might But as well as sort of shattering these myths I think it's important that we we replace our beliefs with something so one of the things we're trying to do in this course is Give a realistic idea about how the mind is actually working so we can take that and use it to improve our everyday thinking I think you're exactly right But we also need to in order to understand the way that the mind is working and give people a realistic sort of idea about The kind of processes and so on that that happened We need to understand the environment that we're operating in so specifically When we're making every day sort of sorts of decisions or what sorts of decisions do we make every day? what to wear or Whether to buy a lawnmower or not or what kind of brand that you should buy what whether to buy a latex mattress or a buck spring mattress or Whether to stay in the same job that you have choosing a mate You know going to a grocery store what sort of things that you purchase at a grocery store and so on whether to spank your child Whether it would be a vegetarian or not You know the list goes on but these are the sorts of things that we're dealing with But if that's the case most of these decisions that we make aren't under ideal conditions most of the time we're kind of rushed in order to make them and You know ideally in the best case scenario you'd have you know all the time in the world You'd have a big desk completely empty with you know paper You could have a pros and cons list and you can weigh up, you know whether to spank your child or not And you can kind of do some research, right? You'd have all of the information available to you about kind of the latest studies for example about about spanking in the benefits and and We just don't have that time right recently I mentioned a latex mattress recently We were going to buy a mattress, right? So this is it's kind of a big purchase right depending on the it can go as high as tens of thousands of dollars and as low as you Know sleeping on the floor right, but I couldn't find any sort of really good evidence for You know sleeping in a latex mattress versus a box box spring mattress though You know if you go into the sleep store They would absolutely say that there's a massive difference between them and try to upsell you But you know I don't have all day to sit and do the necessary research to be able to make these sort of decisions The thing that gets me though is that even if you do have the time to be really deliberate And think about this decision like you said after you've made the decision It's really hard to get good feedback about the quality of that decision So whether you decided to to go to the movies instead of going to dinner whether you decided to to become a vegetarian How can you possibly sort of with a sample size of one evaluate? The quality of that decision Yeah, especially in hindsight as well. I mean anything could happen. So The other thing is though even if somebody does have like the right answer if somebody knows whether it was a right decision or not People aren't going to tell you because we have these strange sort of social ideas that you shouldn't critique people You know too much so Feedback is terrible the feedback that we get from the world about the basis of our decisions the feedback that we get from our Friends and family and society is terrible as well So the world is extremely complex and extremely ambiguous, right? So most of the decisions that we're making aren't Immediately apparent so when we're talking about kind of complexity in that ambiguity I mean we kind of gave a few toy examples in the beginning in episode two We're talking about different illusions and how you see them differently most of these examples There's kind of two ways of seeing it. Maybe I mean if But when we're talking in kind of realistic terms if you talk about something like I don't know talent Right when you're talking about talent think of how multifaceted that sort of concept is when you're determining whether somebody's talented or not You can look at that notion in a million different sorts of ways And if that's the case then you know, I mean under most decision-making circumstances there are Billions of ways that it could be so it's very ambiguous as to whether something is going to Be perceived in one way or another And in terms of how we act there's a million different ways of acting so it's not an easy task Making these sorts of everyday decisions. It's clear that the world is complex and ambiguous So we have to use shortcuts. I mean, it's not ideal. So we have to rely on Easier ways of doing things rules of thumb heuristics is what they're called and we're gonna talk about that later in the episode But first we're gonna start with a distinction that Daniel Kahneman makes in his book thinking fast and slow and We're gonna talk to him in this episode, but he makes a really nice distinction between System one and system two and he kind of talks about them as though they're they're characters in his book and system one is It's fast. It's effortless. It's automatic System two is the opposite. It's slow. It's deliberative and it's very effortful and so This is a really nice distinction We're gonna provide a bunch of examples of these because I think it really does a nice job that Kind of characterizing the way that the mind works and the way that we're gonna be thinking about these everyday sorts of problems