Woo-kyoung Ahn

Humans behave in largely irrational ways, and carry this irrationality to decisions big and small. These irrational thoughts can feel intuitive because they help us survive our daily lives, but if research from the last several decades has proven anything, it’s that we can’t trust our gut on everything.

We overestimate our knowledge, we overestimate loss & negativity, and we trust our personal experience more than measured reality. I think we often put a lot of truck into “know-how,” and for many things it is handy to trust in your know-how. It’s a waste of cognitive resources to effectively re-learn to drive every time you’re behind the wheel. It’s especially a waste of time to not trust yourself to walk properly. These are small skills we’ve developed over years, and can largely trust our unconscious mind to handle. However, we’re still grossly susceptible to seeing others do things they’re good at, and assuming it’s easy, a manifestly irrational belief.

This book was nakedly political at times (and I’m not complaining—I’m happy to see some anti-vax arguments exposed for their irrationality) because so many of these biases occur in our political spheres. This is a both-sides irrationality though because it’s a human irrationality. I think one thing future generations (while they’re dying off from climate change) will reflect on is the effect of media on politics. It would be foolish not to attribute the “polarization” of political factions to the irrationality news media coddle. News aggregate sites (e.g. Google News, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube) hinge on algorithms created to keep your attention, and what keeps our attention is increasingly extreme variations on our fascinations. Obviously, not all these sites are primarily news aggregate sites, but because they contain political discourse they become a source of “news” for most people. These sites play to our biases (especially the irrational ones) in order to keep us returning to the app, no matter the real-life ramifications. Yet because they consider themselves a service, not a town square, they conservatively police the discourse. They’ll block the manifestly dangerous sometimes, but 1. this is inconsistent and 2. this is a stopgap measure that doesn’t engage the environment requiring a stopgap in the first place.

If I’ve learned anything from this book, it’s to never trust my (over)confidence. We know a lot less than we convince ourselves we do. It’s better to accept ignorance and open oneself to learning than to stubbornly insist on our own rationality & intellect.… (més)