Josh Landy Just how fallible is the human brain? Blakey Vermeule Does our unconscious mind always steer us astray? Josh Landy Or can we get better at slowing down and thinking hard? Blakey Vermeule Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything... Josh Landy ...except your intelligence. I'm Josh Landy. Blakey Vermeule And I'm Blakey Vermeule. We're coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area. Josh Landy Continuing conversations that begin at Philosopher's Corner on the Stanford campus, where Blakey and I teach in the Philosophy and Literature program. Blakey Vermeule Today, it's the next episode in our Jewish Thinkers series, generously sponsored by Common Era, an R and D lab for finding and lifting up new ideas and talent, we're thinking about Daniel Kahneman and the fallible mind. Josh Landy Kahneman was a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who, along with Amosversky, discovered a whole bunch of cognitive biases, weird quirks of the brain that cause us to make mistakes. Blakey Vermeule My favorite of Kahneman's biases is loss aversion. Josh Landy All right, explain that one to us. Blakey Vermeule All right, I'm going to offer you a bet. Heads, you win $500. Tails, you don't get anything. Want to take it? Josh Landy Absolutely, I can't lose. Blakey Vermeule Okay, good point. So I've changed my mind. How about this one? Heads, you win $500. Tails, you lose $400. Are you going to take the bet? Josh Landy No, thank you. Blakey Vermeule Well, why not? Josh Landy It's too risky. Blakey Vermeule But what if we did that same coin toss 10 times in a row? Josh Landy That's even worse. Definitely not doing that. Blakey Vermeule See, so that's loss aversion. Kahneman thinks it would be rational to take that bet because over the long run you're going to come out ahead, but our brains don't work that way. We're more afraid of losing things than we are excited about gaining things. Josh Landy Okay, but how big a deal are these biases? I mean, I'm sure if I took a moment to think about your bet and the probabilities and all of that stuff, I'd probably end up with the right answer. Blakey Vermeule But you're you're not going to take a moment to think about it. You're you're busy, you've got a lot of other stuff to do, and thinking is hard. I mean, Kahneman says the vast majority of thinking we do is unconscious. Josh Landy I'm sure that's true, but how bad is that unconscious thinking? Even Kahneman admits that most of our judgments and actions are appropriate most of the time. If they weren't, we wouldn't survive very long. We'd mistake a rattlesnake for a hose pipe and be dead in minutes, and our garden wouldn't get watered either. Blakey Vermeule But your unconscious mind makes zillions of mistakes on a regular basis, and some of those mistakes are really significant, like how much you should save for retirement or what medical treatment to get. So if you tell people that a surgery has an 80% survival rate, they'll go for it. If you say it has a 20% chance of death, they won't. That's what Kahneman calls a framing effect, and it's a big deal. Josh Landy That makes a lot of sense, Blakey. But doesn't Kahneman himself say that we can protect ourselves against these biases by getting more vigilant. So, like, start by learning about them, maybe by reading his book, and then when you see one coming, you can make sure to slow down and think hard. Blakey Vermeule So, okay, so you're going to spend 10 hours pondering over which toothpaste to buy. Josh Landy You don't have to do that with toothpaste. I I take your point. If you're choosing between different toothpastes, fine. Let your unconscious mind take the wheel. But when you're buying a house, not so much. I think it's kind of like with airplanes. You can leave an airplane on autopilot for 1000s of miles, but when you're coming in for that landing, better wake up. Blakey Vermeule So it's pretty easy when you're flying an airplane. You know exactly when you're approaching Paris, but cognitively dangerous situations don't come with giant signs on them. You just sort of blunder into them, and you don't even realize you've made a mistake. As Kahneman says, we can be blind to the obvious, and we're also blind to our own blindness. Josh Landy I take your point that those situations don't have signs on them, but I still think you can get better at detecting them. Blakey Vermeule So even if you do, is that really going to help? So let's say your conscious mind notices that you're about to buy a giant, delicious ice cream. You probably think it's going to stop you, right? Josh Landy Well, it's at least going to try and stop me! Blakey Vermeule No way! It's going to explain just how important that ice cream is for your health and why you deserve it after your long, hard day of work. It will even pull up a study showing that people who eat a lot of delicious, full-fat ice cream live long and happy lives. Josh Landy I really want to see that study, but seriously, Blakey, I still think there are things we can do to increase our chances of success, and I bet our guest does too. It's Tamar Gendler, professor of philosophy and psychology at Yale University. Blakey Vermeule But first, Kahneman's work was revolutionary within the field of economics. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sarah Lai Stirland, to find out exactly how revolutionary it was. She files this report. Josh Landy Linsanity continues here at Madison Square Garden as the undrafted point guard from Harvard electrifies MSG once again. Sarah Lai Stirland In 2012, then unknown basketball player Jeremy Lin surprised the world when he tore through opponents' defenses like a tornado, he went on to lead the New York Knicks to beat the L.A. Lakers 92 to 85. "38 at the Garden" is a documentary about that historic game. It shows how Lynn's performance that night smashed the cultural stereotype that Asian Americans are not athletic. Here's how Lynn explains it in the movie: Jeremy Lin For it to happen that way on that platform in that game against people who didn't look like me in a game where people like me don't really exist, that's why to this day this moment lives in the minds and the hearts of so many people because it was so much bigger than basketball. Sarah Lai Stirland So much bigger that it made the pages of "The Undoing Project," a book by the New York Times best-selling author Michael Lewis. It's about the work by Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky on mental shortcuts and how they lead us to make mistakes. Lewis wrote about how NBA scouts' biases had led them to underestimate Lin. Here's Lewis in a 2017 interview. Michael Lewis No one had ever seen an Asian kid 6'2" or 6'3" who's so athletic. So that you see with the model in your mind, you don't see what's out there. Sarah Lai Stirland Stereotyping, of course, is just one of many kinds of snap judgments our minds make. We now know how these mental shortcuts operate, thanks to a series of psychological experiments in the 1970s and 80s, Kahneman and Tversky found that when it comes to gut instincts, we're bad at calculating probabilities, and we don't take the time to reference all the facts. Instead, we make decisions by taking shortcuts. We rely on our most recent experiences and our memories. We try to avoid losses. The psychologist's findings, as Lewis explains... Michael Lewis ...showed the way people were systematically arrested. The mistakes people make when they're making judgments and decisions that are systematic. And so, if people can all make the same kind of mistake, markets can go wrong. Elections can go wrong. Sarah Lai Stirland But these insights can also be built upon as a force for good. For example, they've encouraged current researchers to try and figure out how to check our own biases. Katy Milkman Once we understand the underlying psychology of the way choices are made, we can change choice structures to support more inclusive decisions. Sarah Lai Stirland Katy Milkman is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She co-directs Penn's Behavior Change for Good initiative and hosts a podcast called Choiceology. She says you can change hiring practices, for instance. Katy Milkman Ee have some research showing that when you hire people in sets, say you hire all five starting members of your basketball team at once. We recognize the lack of diversity when we're looking at a whole group. Sarah Lai Stirland Of course, these days scouting and trading players is often accomplished with algorithms. Kahneman's work anticipated this question too, Milkman says. Katy Milkman Now we have these incredibly sophisticated models and much larger data sets. Whenever that's the case, substituting these kinds of models for human judgment takes a huge amount of bias and noise out of the equation. She acknowledges that we can automate our prejudices, but I can't open your brain and say, "Let me take out your stereotypes about Asian basketball players." But with an algorithm, I can do that real quick, right? I can actually do the testing, even though even if it's a black box that I can't tell how they're making the judgments because it's computational, I can run it through tests and see like is it favoring this group or this other group, and if it is, I can say, well, this black box is going to get shipped to the junkyard; it needs to be retuned. Sarah Lai Stirland So it just goes to show that you do need to understand who the minds inside the black boxes are, after all. Jeremy Lin Dude, you play basketball like, like a Japanese cartoon character. Like you play like you're in a video game. Sarah Lai Stirland For Philosophy Talk, I'm Sarah Lai Stirland. Josh Landy Thanks for that great report, Sarah. It's kind of encouraging to know that there's one or two things we can do to get around our biases. I'm Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher Blakey Vermeule, and today we're thinking about Daniel Kahneman and the fallible mind. Blakey Vermeule We're joined now by Tamar Gendler. She's professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University, and author of "Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology." Tamar, welcome to Philosophy Talk. Tamar Gendler Thank you so much, Josh Landy Tamar. You've been thinking and writing for a long time now about conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind. But how does Daniel Kahneman's thinking show up in your everyday life? Tamar Gendler I had a fabulous example of it this summer. I was going to a summer festival, and I had purchased a parking pass for $20, which had been mailed to my home in advance. But when it came day for the concert, I couldn't find the parking pass, and so I decided it wasn't worth paying $40 to park at this concert. So we didn't go. Had I lost a 20-dollar bill that day, I would very happily have shown up and bought a pass for $20 on the spot. What's funny about that case is it's identical to a case that was one of Kahneman and Tversky's original cases, which involved purchasing a movie ticket and reasoning in the same way. Blakey Vermeule So that sounds like something that happens to all of us all the time. And it sounds as though you're describing a clash between what Kahneman calls System One and System Two. What's the difference between those two systems? Tamar Gendler So let's start with System two, which is our rational capacity, our ability to think slowly and to reason. Let's contrast that with System one, or more accurately, Systems one, which are a set of automatic processes and reactions, the systems that let us catch a ball when it's flying towards our hand. The systems that let us decide really quickly whether we need to turn the wheel of our car, and the systems that, in an informal sense, keep track of how we're making use of our resources, like my own mental accounting system. Blakey Vermeule Those systems interact in unbelievably complex ways all the time. How do you think about their interaction tomorrow? How do they how do they talk to each other? Tamar Gendler Excellent question, Blakey. So mostly we walk around the world making use of our systems. One most of what we do most of the time we do automatically and without reflection. Stuff comes in from vision. Stuff comes in from sound, and we integrate those. But a certain proportion of our activity is activity of which we're consciously and reflectively aware. And in complicated neuroscientific ways, the systems one, which are a collection of automatic reactions, and our system two, which are reflective, responsive, have neural signals which they can use to communicate with one another. And sometimes one wins, and sometimes the other wins. Josh Landy So that's an interesting question. When does one win, and when does the other win? One of the things that Kahneman suggests is that essentially we're using our systems one most of the time because you know thinking is hard, it's resource intensive. We have a finite amount of energy, a finite amount of glucose in the brain, and system those systems those automatic systems seem to do a pretty good job most of the time, but there are moments when we kind of need to override the automatic functioning of our various processes. Is that about right? Tamar Gendler I would say that's about right as far as an explanation goes. It's also the case that our systems one are just faster. Our systems one are reflexive, and our system two is reflective. Reflexes, by definition, are our fastest mode of processing. So roughly, any time we want to interact with the world, any time we want to let our front brain get hold of our arm, we have to interfere with our systems one, which have already reached out and told our fingers what to do. Josh Landy You're listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we're thinking about Daniel Kahneman and the fallible mind with Tamar Gendler from Yale University. Blakey Vermeule Has your gut instinct ever led you astray? Have you been able to catch yourself before it was too late, or did you need some friends to save you from a boneheaded mistake? Josh Landy Cognitive gains and unruly brains, along with your comments and questions, when philosophy talk continues. Aimee Mann It's not going to stop til you wise up. Josh Landy Those fallible minds of ours, they often lead us astray. Can we ever wise up? I'm Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything... Blakey Vermeule ...except your intelligence. I'm Blakey Vermeule, and we're talking about Daniel Kahneman and the fallible mind with Tamar Gendler from Yale University. Josh Landy Today's episode is generously sponsored by Common Error, an R&D platform building new Jewish futures for the common good. Blakey Vermeule Do you have an unbiased question about cognitive biases? Email us at comments at philosophytalk.org, or you can comment on our website. And while you're. There you can subscribe to our free podcast, and fall into our library of more than 600 episodes. Tamar Gendler So Tamar, we've been talking a little bit about loss aversion. We talked about those framing effects that make us go for the operation if it has an 80% chance of success, but not if it has a 20% chance of failure. We heard in the Roving Philosophical Report about the availability heuristic. What's another bias that Kahneman talked about that you think is particularly important? One of my favorite biases is what's called anchoring, and I'm going to give you an abstract version and then a practical version. So, if I ask you to guess how old Martin Luther King was when he died, and I give you the number nine on a piece of paper, you're likely to come up with a fairly low number. But if I give you the number 100 on a piece of paper, you're likely to come up with a much higher number. Now, it doesn't matter very much. Our guess is about how old people are, but here's a place where anchoring works incredibly well. I go into a restaurant, I see that the roasted cauliflower is $42. I think that's absurd. Then I see that the bronzino is 75, and all of a sudden the cauliflower doesn't feel expensive anymore. We don't have an absolute sense navigating ourselves through numerical space, and so the fact that we are subject to anchoring gives every store the possibility of selling us something for a price by pretending it was supposed to cost twice as much. Blakey Vermeule I think that many, many, many aspects of consumer life have discovered this about how to get us to basically comply with what they would like us to do. Do you have a sense tomorrow of how we can sort of become more conscious of this rather than sort of walking around thinking, "Gosh, that cauliflower cost $42. I must have entered the wrong timeline or something like that. Tamar Gendler So one of the things about these heuristics and biases that Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Fursky discovered is that they're pretty much human universals. You find them not just in Western educated industrial rich democracies. You find them among all human beings, and you find analogs of them in non-human primates. So the first answer to your question is: of course, there's no way to get around them. These are appealing to the most fundamental facts about us as agents walking through the world. So the way to think about them is sort of like the way you think about your capacity to resist Doritos. These are built in such a way that they appeal to something universal about your humanity, and being aware of that can help you set up your world in such a way that you're less likely to be tempted by things. Josh Landy I really like that. I mean, you know, maybe appeals to my bias, all of our biases as educators, right? If we learn more, we'll be in a better position to navigate the world. And I've seen some studies that suggest that a little bit of knowledge about some of these biases can reduce the loss aversion effect, can reduce the sunk cost fallacy. Right? I read that economists, if they're in the middle of a meal that tastes bad, they'll just stop eating it because they understand that you know you don't have to keep going. On the other hand, you told a story tomorrow a moment ago about you know having lost your parking pass, and it's sort of straight out of Kahneman's book. Why didn't your knowledge help you there? Tamar Gendler So it's a really interesting question: which things you can make go away by understanding them, and which you can't. There are a lot of optical illusions. There's one called the Muller-Lyer illusion, which you must know. It's two line segments. In one of them, there are angles facing inward. In the other, there are angles facing outward. I can study everything about visual cortex, and I'm still going to be subject to that bias. I have read every bit of Kanem and Tversky. I know that 799 is the same price as $8, but I am still inclined to purchase something whose first digit is a lower number. So, in some of these cases, the best thing you can do is to set up the world to do the work for you. Blakey Vermeule That's a wonderful way of thinking about it. That you basically want to arrange your environment so that the number of boneheaded mistakes you make on the regular are fewer. So give us a give us an example of how how you do that or how you how we could do it. Tamar Gendler Well, I've noticed something quite consistent. About the relationship between my evening self and my morning self, which is that my evening self is much more optimistic about how desirous I will be to leave my bed than my morning self is, and the way I have dealt with this universal feature that we're not very good predictors of what we're going to feel like later on, is to put my alarm clock across the room, so that when it rings, my morning self doesn't have to make the decision to get up, even though it could easily stay in bed. My morning self has to get out of bed before it's able to turn off the alarm clock, and that is straightforwardly an application of the Kahneman and Fursky picture, whereby my system two knows how my systems one are going to behave. It knows that my system two isn't going to have the energy to overcome the force of systems one in the morning, and so it recruits the world to be on team system two by putting the alarm clock across the room. Josh Landy That's a great example, right? Use the features of your built environment. Another strategy that Kahneman talks about is using your own laziness, as it were, against yourself or for yourself. For example, the you know opt-in versus opt-out situations. If you know there are countries that by default make you an organ donor, and you have to choose not to be an organ donor, and then there are countries that say no, no, no. You're by default not an organ don. You have to opt in. Well, if you have a system where it's a default opt-in, that's sort of using our laziness against ourselves, so to speak, or for the common good. Tamar Gendler That's exactly right. And you might think that the error that I made with the parking pass in my window is actually the result of a default setting we have in ourselves, which is a pretty good default setting. It's a fundamental accounting setting whereby we can say in advance, rather than treating every minute as a moment of zero-based budgeting, rather than treating every encounter as one in which I'm going to rethink my entire value structure. I'm actually going to put my value structure into place in advance and operate on its basis as I move through the world. So I think the reason that it was so easy for me to be taken in by the parking ticket is that that is in many ways a default structure that I'm very happy to have in my system? I deal with the fact that there's too much choice in the world by setting into place some principles which I operate on. I, for example, am a vegetarian, and so I don't eat things that look like meat, even when they're not meat, because it's a pretty good heuristic for allowing me to continue in the world on the basis of my dietary commitments. Blakey Vermeule You're listening to Philosophy Talk today. We're thinking about the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman with Tamar Gendler from Yale University, Tamar, let's talk about nudge theory, which has been one of the most influential kind of streams of thought to come out of the Kahneman, the original Kahneman-Tversky papers. Can you tell us a little bit about nudge theory, nudge theory, and how it works? Tamar Gendler Sure. Nudge theory is the idea that the way your environment presents itself to you is going to affect what you end up doing. Of course, that's not news. But what the Kahneman and Persky theory reminds us is that we tend to do what's easiest to do. A nudge theory sets up the world so that the easiest thing for you to do is the thing that, on reflection, you would want yourself to have done. Josh Landy Why don't you give us one example? Tamar Gendler Sure. So one of the things to remember is there's no such thing as a neutral way to set up the world. The world doesn't come pre-structured. So you can, for example, set up a cafeteria so that the healthy food is at the beginning of the line and the sweets are at the end of the line. You can set up your living room so that the remote control for the television is at the back of the drawer and the book that you want to read is sitting already on the coffee table, you can set up your house in the morning so that your yoga mat and your workout clothes are already out, so that the amount of effort that it takes to engage in an activity is lower. Nudge theory is basically the theory that. Structure your environment either at the level of the individual or at the level of the community in a way that the actions that are easy are the actions that you want to encourage. Josh Landy Let's dig in a little bit more into that notion of community because we talked about a couple of different strategies for getting our way around the more dangerous biases. So learning about them, the set it and forget it model, develop a policy and and make that policy so kind of instinctive that your lazy brain just implements it, and then the nudges. But what about community? How how can we use our friends? How can we use the institutions that we're part of to try to keep us a bit more on the straight and narrow. Tamar Gendler So suppose you want to go out and take a walk twice a day and get to know your neighbors. There's a really easy way to do that, and it's called get a dog. If you get a dog, you will find yourself going out for a walk twice a day, and you will get to know your neighbors. That is, you can put social structures into place. One of the things that is true of us as human beings is that we're incredibly responsive to social settings. The fact that students study in libraries, that athletes practice together, that we have group language classes rather than people individually learning material that they could on their own, is all evidence first of our capacity to be influenced by the social world, but second of all of our tacit recognition that the way to get system one on our side is to put ourselves in a setting where doing what we want to do is the easy thing to do. It's much easier to keep your body moving in a particular way as you row, as you dance, as you engage in some sort of calisthenics. If the other bodies around you are doing the same thing. If you want your body to be silent, focused, and concentrated, surround yourself by other bodies that are silent, focused, and concentrated, and your system one tendency to imitate those around you will kick in. If you want yourself to be wild and raucous, bring yourself to a football game, and if you want yourself to be destructive, put yourself into a mob. Josh Landy Tomorrow we've got an email from a listener from Louise. Louise writes that biases are essential for any kind of learning, and she gives the example of learning to speak. She cites Noam Chomsky, suggesting that infants received flawed data. They don't get any explicit instruction. They don't get enough feedback, and yet they still manage to learn language. And the reason, says Louise, is that they have a built-in bias toward grammars of a particular form. But says Louise, this is true for all learning. Without biases, no learning. What do you think about that idea, Tamar? Tamar Gendler I think Louise is exactly right. We have lots of instinctive responses to the world that were evolutionarily advantageous. Even a tiny infant thinks that a transparent surface is an unsafe place to walk and will turn their head away from a loud sound. Likewise, with capacities for social learning, like our capacity to learn language, we don't enter the world as unstructured systems. We enter the world with what are sometimes called priors, prior expectations of the ways that things will be. Those priors tend to be the consequence of a risk-averse selective process that was extraordinarily useful under a certain set of circumstances, but was much more willing to make certain kinds of errors than others. It was much more important to run away from something dangerous, than it was to be careful and calm and check out: is that really a bear? And so, a lot of our biases are enormously helpful first cuts on getting by in the world. If you gave me the choice, no biases or all the biases. I would, without question, take all the biases. But one of the advantages of being a human being in the society where we now find ourselves is we can take the set of biases that we get for free and refine those by using reflection. Blakey Vermeule So many of these biases, and you just gave a wonderful example of loss aversion. It's better to basically run away from something that looks dangerous, even if ultimately it's going to turn out not to be. Dangerous. So many of these biases have a sort of evolutionary function, and one of the things about Kahneman's work is that he's not talking about our evolutionary past. He's talking about a very complex modern society with lots of different moving parts. How do you think about that, Tamar? Tamar Gendler So it's a really interesting question. So take circumstances in which you need to train people to get over a certain sort of fear. If I'm training soldiers who, like every other living being, when they feel themselves at threat of death, would be inclined to run away, I have to help them cultivate through their system one practices that let them overcome these instincts, and you might think of the philosopher Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics as describing one of the tools we have for dealing with the fact that our systems one don't always guide us in the right direction. Aristotle says you become brave by acting as the brave one does. You start acting deliberately as if you were the thing you hope to become, and then you end up practicing it. That lesson from Aristotle is the same lesson as the lesson that Kahneman is pointing out to us: that we can use our system two to set up the world to let our systems one rehearse actions that we want them to find familiar. Blakey Vermeule So, in the words of Hillary Clinton: "Fake it till you make it." Is that right? Tamar Gendler "Fake it till you make it" is among the most profound pieces of philosophical advice. Or let it be governed by rules till it's governed by habit. So take seatbelt laws. We made it a law, but for me, it's habitual. I get in the car and I feel like I haven't fully sat in my seat till I fastened the seat belt. If I'm learning how to dance a complicated dance, I fake it till I make it in the sense that I deliberately and explicitly think about wearing putting my feet until my feet learn where to go. Josh Landy You're listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we're thinking about Daniel Kahneman and the fallible mind with Tamar Gendler, author of Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology. Blakey Vermeule How can we learn to make smart decisions? Can you reprogram your brain to do a better job? Could you even use your quirky brain against itself? Josh Landy Think it, set it, and forget it. Plus, commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher when Philosophy Talk continues. Housemartins Think for a minute, stop for a minute. Josh Landy If you think for a minute, can you fix your brain for good? I'm Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything... Blakey Vermeule ...except your intelligence. I'm Blakey Vermeule. Our guest is Tamar Gendler, and we're thinking about Daniel Kahneman and the fallible mind. Josh Landy Today's episode is generously sponsored by Common Era, an R&D platform building new Jewish futures for the common good. Blakey Vermeule So Tamar, we've been talking about how many biases there are in our minds and how much impact they have on us, give us a bit of wisdom about how we can come to accept more of our own sort of unruliness about the fact that we're sort of divided between saints and sinners, between the kind of rational self and the self that wants to stay in bed all morning and eat ice cream and doom scroll and watch trashy TV. How can we come to a little bit more self-acceptance of the the the two characters that sort of live inside of us all the time? Tamar Gendler So on the subject of wisdom traditions, you might think this is what every wisdom tradition seeks to do. So you mentioned that this episode is part of a series about Judaism. Judaism as a religion says you yourself are unlikely to realize that you need rest once a week. So we're going to build a structure in place that makes it easy to rest once a week and hard not to do so. At the same time, we're going to recognize that there's an incredible joy in embodiment. So we're going to set a whole bunch of ritual structures that are defined in such a way that you take bodily pleasures, things like eating, things like dancing, things like seeing lights, listening to sounds, smelling particular spells, and what's true of the Jewish religion is true of every religious practice. In what way do you relate to food? In what way do you relate to sexuality? In what way do you structure your family? What. Does community look like? You can think of wisdom traditions as attempts to say you can buy a full package of well-tested strategies for optimally relating between system one and system two. Josh Landy I'm not sure I would necessarily think that every religion has got that all worked out, but if you're starting a new religion tomorrow, then I am definitely signing up for it. But I wanted to ask a neighboring question because we've been talking a lot about how we curb the unruly impulses of this sort of dodgy roommate that's that's living in our house on a permanent basis. Kahneman actually seems to have sort of three different attitudes. One of which is yeah, curb those unruly impulses. Another is a kind of compromise position where it's like actually that roommate's doing some important work. That roommate has some chores, and does them really quick, and they're not always done perfectly. But we kind of need that. And then a third position is you know sometimes it's actually really good. I mean he has that very interesting stuff about optimism, right? We're often way too prone to believe that things are going to turn turn out for the best, and sometimes that gets into trouble. But without that bias, without that irrationality, there wouldn't be entrepreneurs. There wouldn't be great leaders. We would be more depressed. So, what do you think? Are there? Do you think that's right? Do you think there are places where we can actually embrace the irrational side of ourselves? Tamar Gendler Absolutely. And I think all three of the examples that you cited are really important. Notice that we wouldn't be able to do anything like drive or type or play piano, if we didn't have the capacity to offload incredibly complicated routines to automatic systems. But on the question of optimism, roughly we live in a really noisy world in terms of the information that reaches us, and if we didn't have a tendency to ignore evidence to the contrary, we'd never be in a position to carry through an action. The mindset that Kahneman is describing when he talks about optimism is also sometimes described as a mindset called implementational mindset. The mindset that you take on when you're carrying out an action, roughly when you are in implementational mindset, you're better off ignoring information that suggests that you're not getting where you want to go. Not major information that suggests that you're not getting where you want to go, but very rarely is a path uphill or downhill, straight uphill or downhill, and so in order for us to act in the world, we actually need to be slightly irrational. If we constantly adjusted to every bump in the road, it would be impossible for us to go long distances. Blakey Vermeule Thank you for that. Sometimes I like to imagine myself as a person who has 10 times more agency than I actually do, and that actually helps me get things done. It's like if I were that kind of person who had 10 times more agency than I actually do. What would I be doing in this situation, as opposed to the endless cost-benefit analysis that that those of us who are prone to overthinking can sometimes engage in? Tamar Gendler So, what I would say, if you want to be a 10x agent, is to figure out what are the parts of your life that you pretty consistently want to act in the same way about, and set up routines that are first overseen by your rational self until they become easier. Remember when Aristotle is talking about how we become brave, he starts with the example: we become a harpist by playing the harp. And I often think that the example: how do you learn how to play piano? is an incredibly valuable way to think about how we learn many many routines. Josh Landy So that sounds like a relatively optimistic picture of the human being, and that raises a question for me because sometimes Kahneman seems to have that view. He has this line at one point: "The focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence." But then at other times, he seems more pessimistic, and he says that some of these studies threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous author of our judgments and our choices. Where do you see things falling out? You know, once we accept the Kahneman and Tversky picture of human cognition, does it seem like we should really think a little less of ourselves and our vaunted intelligence, or should we think now we've got all these workarounds? We've got nudges. We've got set it and forget it. We can actually do pretty well. Where do we end up? Tamar Gendler So you mentioned the word picture, and at the beginning of the original paper on this topic, Kaman and Fursky make a comparison between visual illusions and cognitive illusions, and I think that is deeply insightful. I don't think my visual system is degraded just because if you put a pencil in a glass of water, it's going to look bent. Likewise, I don't feel like my cognitive system fails to work just because I'm subject to recency bias or to the representativity heuristic, whereby I look at an example and consider that to be indicative of the whole system, all of those are just facts about the way this complex system that I have that evolved from a million years of other people's habits, where if my ancestor's habit was better than chance or associated with something else accidentally that was better than chance, I ended up with it, and that's the way my cognitive system works. So my own attitude is much like my attitude towards the visual system. The world's really complicated, and I am so grateful that I have a mechanism that lets me pretty well figure out the location and magnitude of objects on the basis of light waves that bounce off them. So too with the conceptual world. Blakey Vermeule So let me ask you a follow up on this, which is that many of us are not living at the moment in communities, much less religious communities, and yet a lot of what Kahneman is talking about is sort of, as it were, you know, back creating these large social systems that that for most of our history kept us kind of in check. I mean, kept our mistakes in check. I mean, you talked about the importance of of religious communities in this respect. I mean, how do you think about the the notion of the the individual tomorrow as as having to be the one to do all of this kind of back creating of a of a massively kind of multimodal sensory and community kind of experience, in order just to sort of you know figure out how to how to get through the day in our enormously complex world. Tamar Gendler So I think part of the reason the culture wars are as intense as they are right now is that they're fundamentally about which ways of living will be easy and automatic. They tacitly recognize that we tend to a act in conformity with those around us, and B take the path of least resistance. So remember that many of the objections to no-fault divorce, when that was introduced into the system, is that it would make it too easy for individuals who had committed to raising children to separate from one another and not bear the relation of responsibility towards these co-created beings who were not yet mature. We, as a society, made a decision about making space for no-fault divorce, but that's a very clear example of an opt-in, opt-out, make it easy, make it hard nudge. A university worries about its campus culture because that's what determines what sorts of behaviors students find easy, students find hard, and that applies both to social settings and to academic settings. How do you create an environment in which students take pride in their intellectual work and take responsibility for one another's well-being? Josh Landy Well, Tamar, I feel like you are the living embodiment of the stuff you're talking about. You're doing unbelievably complex processing with your brain and making it look easy. Thank you so much for joining us today. Tamar Gendler My absolute pleasure. Thank you for including me in this conversation. Josh Landy Our guest has been Tamar Gendler, professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University, and author of Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology. So, Blakey, what are you thinking now? Blakey Vermeule I'm thinking that I have a lot to learn and a lot to try to understand about this whole fascinating universe of heuristics, biases, nudges, and our infinitely complex mind. Josh Landy Yeah, me too. And I'm thinking of that lovely line of Kahneman's when he says, "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it," which is such. Your beautiful piece of wisdom. We're going to put links to everything we've mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org. And while you're there, you can subscribe to our free podcast and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. Blakey Vermeule Now, if there's anyone who thinks fast, it's Ian Scholes, the 62nd philosopher. Ian Shaoles Ian Shoales... Daniel Kahneman called himself in 2016, the grandfather of behavioral economics, which is the study of the psychology of decision making. Along the way, he partnered with others to create prospect theory, replacing. So I read utility theory. The premise of prospect theory is that we evaluate potential decisions based on perceived value changes rather than absolute outcomes. We're not entirely rationals to take away. I take away. It has always been thus. Kahneman and his colleagues sought to remember centuries of mental neglect, overcoming a nearly toxic reaction to simple statistics through the judicious application of prospect theory. In recent years, this has moved beyond the realm of academe and philosophy into the realm of pop psychology, if you will, TED talks, self-help books, so forth, in the vein of successors, only with a Ph.D. This is good stuff, though. See, we set up barriers to clear thinking in our very brains. We have biases, shortcuts, heuristics that are not always helpful to deciding. Loss aversion is a big culprit. Faced with risky traits leading to gains, we prefer a certain outcome with a lower expected utility. You'll never be a billionaire that way, baby. There's optimism bias for which we overestimate the likelihood of a positive event. There's framing. Some are told the survival rate is 19 percent, for example, and some of the mortality rate is 10 percent. The first is accepted more than the second, though they're both the same. There's the sunk cost fallacy, which I like to call the "Why are we still in Vietnam?" problem. The idea is we spent too much money to stop now. My mother would have called this throwing good money after bad. So the idea here is to root out bad thinking habits. I think codify them and leave them out on the operating table. How do we stop letting bias affect our thinking if we don't even know we're biased? Well, prospect theory is a way of using thought experiments, kind of as a way to pump what we used to call common sense. There does seem to have been a backlash against reason in recent years, if politics is any indication. So maybe prospect theory is a kind of course correction. If the sleep of reason produces monsters, as the artist Goya said in his TED talk, maybe a prospect theory is a wake-up call we need. We're underthinking, and then maybe we are overthinking our underthinking. If we're just making decisions about where our next check is coming from or where we can restore Republicans to their former glory, we don't need pure reason like Spock's brain in the jar. A little anxiety comes with the territory, doesn't it? Even AI, which our president apparently thinks to be renamed superintelligence or maybe intelligent intelligence, as opposed to what we have now is not exactly Boolean in its approach to decision making. AI hallucinates, just like a college student with a microdose and an iron butterfly record. But anyway, it's all about fuzzy thinking and its cure. As I noted earlier, though, the path to clear thinking is paved with old wives' tales, and our nightmares and regrets are full of mom. When we wake up in a cold sweat, her voice saying "I told you so" still ringing in our ears. What if prospect theory is just folk remedies gussied up and gone to Harvard? For example, I read that the quote dependence of preferences and the formulation of decision problems is a significant concern for the theory of rational choice unquote. In other words, what did my mom always tell me? Don't put the cart before the horse. Of course, I've also heard from moms, aunts, and others. Many hands make light work, but also too many cooks spoil the broth. Well, which is it? Lady of the Tiger, Scylla or Charybdis, hands or cooks? Land sake, how would I know? I don't have the sense God gave a goose. At least that's my mom always said. She has yet to be proven wrong. I gotta go. Blakey Vermeule Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2026. Josh Landy Our executive producer is James Cass. The senior producer is Devon Strolovich. Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, Karen Ajluni, Steve Choy, and Linda Fagan. Blakey Vermeule Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, where our program originates. Josh Landy Support for this episode comes from Common Era, an R&D platform building new Jewish futures for the common good. Thanks also to Laura Maguire for originating the idea for this series. Blakey Vermeule The views expressed((or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders. Josh Landy Not even when they're true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytop.org, where you can question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I'm Josh Landy, Blakey Vermeule And I'm Blakey Vermeule. Thank you for listening. Josh Landy And thank you for thinking. Death Race: Beyond Anarchy Think slow. Drive fast.