[Fluffy]

When I take a decision, most of the time I can go back and recreate the scenario and see what factors influenced my decision, and also what thought process leads me to conclusions.

Yet many people I know often fail to answer when I ask them why they did this or that. Maybe they are ashamed of the answer or maybe they don't know. I see more people being able to explain thought proccess when it comes to their area of expertise, but maybe this is just because they are more prone to talk about things they know for sure, at least in my case, I can understand why I take most of my decissions whatever the area and have a lot of detail on the influencing factors.

[gwnn]

Autopilot. 95% of the bridge players can't be wrong.

[BunnyGo]

I seem to recall reading somewhere a theory that people make decisions impulsively, and then (even when we THINK we know why we did them) rationalize them afterwards. This rings true to me sometimes, but mostly when I don't take the time to think about it first. Still....maybe I'm just rationalizing decisions I've already made....

[helene_t]

Reasoning is largely an illusion. We act on gut feelings and later we make up some arguments that can persuade others and/or ourselves that we acted on the basis of reasoning.

[billw55]

helene_t, on 2012-June-11, 05:59, said:

Reasoning is largely an illusion. We act on gut feelings and later we make up some arguments that can persuade others and/or ourselves that we acted on the basis of reasoning.

I suppose that is usually the case. But, people *are* capable of reasoning, and of using that reasoning to make decisions. Admittedly, actually *doing* it consistently takes substantial mental discipline.

In the past when I have coached weaker players at Go, I try to encourage them to have a reason for every move. Whether the reason is right or wrong, or some of both, I don't care at all - I am just trying to reduce the proportion of thoughtless impulse plays. It turns out to be very hard work. I find the same for myself, when I remember to attempt this at the bridge table. But I am convinced that doing so improves my play.

[barmar]

Fixed the typo in the title. Don't know why.

[Fluffy]

Last month I had something unnusual at least for me: I fried some potatoes on the deep fryer, but forgot to take proper care of them and they went into a big mass of sticked potatoes. I tried the simple solution of throwing random stabs with a fork to separate them, but didn't work at all, they were stick hard.

Automatically I realiced I needed more info and I could feel how my eyes focused better on the big mass of stick potatoes and went from one "long cilinder" potato to another, pretty similar to what happens on movies lie terminator.

I could also sense how inside my mind, what was before just a big mass of sticked potatoes (very low ammount data) became a 3d complex structure with cilinders connected ones into others (much bigger amount of storage), and that helped me to find the easy solution of inserting the fork in holes between potatoes and do some lever to separate them one by one.

I realice most of this while it was happening, not afterwards. Maybe some of the details are made up, but the core (specially the 3d object) happened.

[kenberg]

Some years back a (very creative) friend of mine wrote an article entitled In Defense of Mindless Rote. He quotes Alfred North Whitehead:

Quote

It is a profoundly erroneous truism repeated by all copybooks, and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
- Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics

What I try to do is to divide my decisions into two classes, those where I am open to discussion and those where I am not. For example, I recently got new tires, had my front end re-alligned, and my air conditioner repaired, all of this on a 2001 Honda with 170K miles on it. The car is still in good shape, but this may have been a mistake. My judgment was that it is worthwhile, but I talked it over with my wife and was open to discussion. On the other hand, I like stick shifts rather than automatics. My next car will probably have an automatic because as my wife's car gets old and dies we may well cut down to one car. But I bought my first car fifty-eight years ago and I am not really open to discussion on my own preference for a stick.

Here is a more emotional issue. Around the time, slightly earlier actually, that I bought my first car I also began an assessment of my relationship to religion. If some friend really wants to know my reasons for rejecting the religious claims that I was brought up with, and if I am convinced he is asking because he wants to know me better, I will do my best to explain both the logic and the psychology behind it to the best of my understanding. Otoh, if he wants to try to convert me, he is wasting his time and mine. Equally, I expect I would be wasting his time and mine trying to convince him to see things my way.

So I have my reasons for most things that I do, but that is not the same as saying that I can convince a skeptic that I am right, or even that I have any interest in trying. If a guy likes automatic transmissions, he should buy one.

[MickyB]

kenberg, on 2012-June-11, 07:29, said:

I like stick shifts rather than automatics. My next car will probably have an automatic because as my wife's car gets old and dies we may well cut down to one car. But I bought my first car fifty-eight years ago and I am not really open to discussion on my own preference for a stick.

Have you tried a dual clutch transmission?

[phil_20686]

helene_t, on 2012-June-11, 05:59, said:

Reasoning is largely an illusion. We act on gut feelings and later we make up some arguments that can persuade others and/or ourselves that we acted on the basis of reasoning.

I think this is one of those `small truths' in that it captures something, but not really the whole phenomenon. It would be better to state that human brains are fantastically efficient at rapid inductive reasoning. That is to say, we are very good at predicting the future based on passed experience. On the other hand, what we usually refer to as `reasoning' is deductive reasoning. This we are much less good at. Deductive reasoning is hard to work out, but easy to check. Inductive reasoning is easy to do, but hard to check. This is essentially a feature of the fact that deductive reasoning needs clear statements of axioms and assumptions, and these are seldom available in real world problems. Inductive reasoning amounts to saying that "experience A from my past is broadly similar to experience B that is happening now" and use that as a guide to what to do now. Its easy to see how it fails: experience A may itself have been a freak occurrence (the anecdotal fallacy), experience B may appear similar but not actually be (a variation on the inductive fallacy) etc.

When we face a real world problem, our `gut instinct' is really the application of inductive reasoning. Familiar to all bridge players who "feel" the right way to play a hand when it still seems too complicated to analyse. After inductive reasoning has thrown up a, or sometimes more than one, reasonable solution, next comes deductive reasoning. You try to `rationalise' the solution, which is really an attempt to find deductive reasons why it fails or succeeds. The worse you are at deductive reasoning, the less likely you are to spot holes in your inductive thesis. In general, skill at deductive reasoning is lacking in most people, so they often end up rationalizing gut instinct when they should discard it. However, this is not an irrational behavior, if you have learned from experience, that your inductive thesis is much more likely to be right than you are to understand it/improve on it using analytic methods. This too is familiar to bridge players in "over thinking", or "second guessing yourself", where you form some kind of tenuous argument that persuades you to reject your instinct. In my experience, these are mostly `correct' chains of reasoning, that merely fail to correspond meaningfully to the real world, because of a flawed assumption.

The key to rational behavior then, is to appreciate that your brain is fantastically good at applying old experience to new problems, and then to search for a cogent argument why that process has not reached a tenable conclusion. Normally arguments that persuade you that your thesis is flawed should carry more weight than those that persuade you that it is correct. This odd dichotomy of decision making gives rise to the common problem where we apply old ideas to new problems, normally with terrible results. E.g. : The current Eurozone crisis. This is fundamentally a case of economists who are applying models that fundamentally do not apply to the given situation. That is because this situation is one that hasn't happened since the world left he gold standard, and therefore it is out of most peoples experience. Sadly, even in clever professions like economics, most people rely on inductive reasoning rather than deductive, so they "feel" the right answer based on their experience with certain strains of thought, and don't ask "what is the appropriate strain of thought for this problem".

===================================

In an unrelated note: Deductive thinkers are normally the most interesting people. They see the same things, and have a totally different idea. This means, on the one hand, they are often full of useful and interesting insights, and on the other that they tend to be terrible at repetitive tasks. They will have a habit in their work of `solving a task from the beginning'. This is a terribly annoying habit, and normally means that simple tasks take much longer. It also means they are much more likely to make simple mistakes, since humans are pretty terrible at deduction (- we can't even solve a simple game like chess!). On the other hand, they are likely to be the only people in the room who will realize when an old idea is about to fail spectacularly.

[Fluffy]

nice post phil

inductive/deductive I always called them myself "analogic thinking"/"digital thinking", because of how they work, with inductive you throw unmeasurable thoughts with different factors into a mixture and you come to a conclusion (wich can be close), with deductive it is just right or wrong, one or zero etc.

[ggwhiz]

The slowest (and very good) Bridge player does research in artificial intelligence. He doesn't do anything without thorough evaluation.

I was always plagued with (too fast) tempo errors but speedballs have helped reduce them to where tempo is a useful weapon in f2f bridge.

In real life I'm much improved on thinking the important ones through, not always correctly. Hot button philosophical or emotional issues are non-negotiable along Fluffy's deductive lines and always correct for your general morale.

[Fluffy]

Another question, when talking about deductive vs inductive. On a situation where you know you shouldn't do something, but you are not strong enough to avoid it, for example lighting a cigarette (I'm not a smoker so this might be a bad example, but something similar happens to me with excesive food).

Is it correct to say that the Instictive part of my mind that ends up winning is the inductive part, and the conscious, who knows it is wrong but ends up lettng it go, is the deductive?, are they related?

[jeffford76]

I would highly recommend the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for insight into this area. He talks about the two systems we use for thinking (gut vs. analysis), and how we decide or not which system to use.

[phil_20686]

Fluffy, on 2012-June-11, 09:59, said:

Another question, when talking about deductive vs inductive. On a situation where you know you shouldn't do something, but you are not strong enough to avoid it, for example lighting a cigarette (I'm not a smoker so this might be a bad example, but something similar happens to me with excesive food).

Is it correct to say that the Instictive part of my mind that ends up winning is the inductive part, and the conscious, who knows it is wrong but ends up lettng it go, is the deductive?, are they related?

I think if we could answer this kind of question, we would be much closer to understanding Life, The Universe, and Everything.

I don't think this example is the same kind of thing at all. I think this is a case of misaligned preferences. You decide what you `want' when your brain remembers what both of those things feel like. Unfortunately lots of the right decisions that come up are between instant gratification and delayed gratification, e.g. exercise vs playing my computer, its hard for one to properly rate the "good" of doing exercise. If you want to make these decisions easy you must either convince yourself that the good you are delaying is worth more to you (positive reinforcement strategies, or simply reward yourself with a different form of gratification - e.g. I can go on holiday only if i finish my thesis), or you can attempt to make the decision into a habit. A habit takes your decision away by virtue of simply not considering it as a decision. Anything you do consistently eventually becomes a habit, like going to work, or cleaning your teeth, after which one no longer evaluates it. The habit strategy is to say something like, I will only ever have one portion. After the fiftieth time of refusing seconds, it will just be something you do. habit is the reason that routine is so effective in getting the best out of people.

There is also a separate case where preferences conflict. This happens most commonly in ethical problems, where one must choose between what is good for me and what is good for society/generally/other person. This is essentially the only ethical dilemma. In these cases your inductive reasoning simply returns a conflict and expects you to do something about it . I don't think that there is any resolution to this kind of problem, you have to make a decision.

PS: kahneman's book is good.