It is perfectly rational to pipe all decisions to a cheaper form of cognition that relies mostly on pattern matching, and to save your limited reserves of concentration and reasoned thought to situations that pass through this initial filter and ping your higher cognition to look into it more.
I totally agree with this for some/many use cases. I would caution against doing so in the following situations:
Novel situations—If a type of situation is new to you, the closest pattern may fail to match well.
Unanalyzed situations—If you have always used pattern matching to decide something, it would be valuable to verify the pattern, at least once, to make sure you are not missing or abusing opportunities.
Repeated situations—This is a bit trickier, but sometimes we have repeated applications of the same pattern over and over. It would still be useful to analyze these in depth every once in a while, to maintain the calibration of the heuristic.
In reality it is a balancing act, and it would be best to avoid over-reliance on either approach: over-analysis or pattern heuristics.
I’d say that in most contexts in normal human life, (3) is the thing that makes this less of an issue for (1) and (2). If the thing I’m hearing about it real, I’ll probably keep hearing about it, and from more sources. If I come across 100 new crazy-seeming ideas and decide to indulge them 1% of the time, and so do many other people, that’s usually, probably enough to amplify the ones that (seem to) pan out. By the time I hear about the thing from 2, 5, or 20 sources, I will start to suspect it’s worth thinking about at a higher level.
It is perfectly rational to pipe all decisions to a cheaper form of cognition that relies mostly on pattern matching, and to save your limited reserves of concentration and reasoned thought to situations that pass through this initial filter and ping your higher cognition to look into it more.
I totally agree with this for some/many use cases. I would caution against doing so in the following situations:
Novel situations—If a type of situation is new to you, the closest pattern may fail to match well.
Unanalyzed situations—If you have always used pattern matching to decide something, it would be valuable to verify the pattern, at least once, to make sure you are not missing or abusing opportunities.
Repeated situations—This is a bit trickier, but sometimes we have repeated applications of the same pattern over and over. It would still be useful to analyze these in depth every once in a while, to maintain the calibration of the heuristic.
In reality it is a balancing act, and it would be best to avoid over-reliance on either approach: over-analysis or pattern heuristics.
I’d say that in most contexts in normal human life, (3) is the thing that makes this less of an issue for (1) and (2). If the thing I’m hearing about it real, I’ll probably keep hearing about it, and from more sources. If I come across 100 new crazy-seeming ideas and decide to indulge them 1% of the time, and so do many other people, that’s usually, probably enough to amplify the ones that (seem to) pan out. By the time I hear about the thing from 2, 5, or 20 sources, I will start to suspect it’s worth thinking about at a higher level.