Thinking Fast and Slow(ly accepting different ideas)

[Linked]

I'm listening to a book on Audible called Thnking Fast and Slow by economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. It's about the difference between intuitive (fast) thought and reasoning (slow) thought. The author talks about how intuitive thought is nearly instantaneous and takes very little effort, where reasoning thought is slower and takes real mental effort. It reminded me of an old post on NOM 1.0 about whether or not the feeling of disaffection was a choice or not, specifically the moment of realization that you no longer think the church is true.

The intuitive brain is a huge energy saver for humans. Think about how easy it is to speak your native language compared to trying to think through a non-native language that you aren't familiar with yet. But it can cause issues. There are some biases that can cause non-optimal decisions which I expect to learn more about. Also, our intuitive responses are learned, and if we are taught things that get in there that are wrong then many decisions are based on faulty input.

The church works very hard to develop our intuitive brain from birth to support its mission. The WoW bans implant an intuitive judgement against the banned substances. The focus on sexuality and modesty creates an intuitive judgement against sexuality and even makes some non-sexual things sexual by tying them together. The teachings on tattoos and piercings give us intuition against those things and the people who have them. Testimony meeting reinforces the importance of JS, BOM, Jesus, current leaders, and most importantly that the church is True. Church leaders have even discouraged thinking with our reasoning brain about our testimonies by encouraging briefer, more testifying, "purer" testimonies. So TBMs end up intuitively being very sensitive to these things. While I have used examples from the LDS church, this mechanism is visible in all cultures. The LDS version is just a little different than most of the other ones, and the one that affects me most.

After listening to this I remembered my moment of clarity, when I realized I think the LDS view I was raised with is BS. It was instantaneous and effortless. It had the hallmark of an intuitive thought. This had me worried. Had I merely traded one bias-ridden decision mechanism for another?

I've concluded that it's not so bad. The death of my faith was slow and included lots of slow reasoning. It came about as I considered life in my slow brain, things like the situation of LGBTQ+ people in the church, what confirmation bias might mean for faith, what impact the ideas of self-fulfilling prophecies has on Armageddon, is tea really worse than mountain dew, whether faith and prayer and priesthood blessings really improved medical outcomes, and how people act very sure of themselves even when they are wrong. These slow thoughts were simmering in a sea of small frustrations with the church like how they do slimy marketing with the mormon t-shirts when doing service and high pressure sales tactics for missionaries.

All these slow thoughts had to fight a battle with my fast thoughts. Thoughts like, Gay=bad, Faith=good, Armageddon=necessary for happy time, Tea=bad & MtnDew=?, Faith/Prayer/Blessings=miracles, MyTruth=True. In my case I avoided the conflict for the most part. The slow thoughts were thought experiments and did not change what I did or believed, they were just interesting. In the back of my mind though the dots were connecting. And in the front of my mind my views on these subjects did change; I still accepted them but I had destroyed the reasons for accepting them outside of the Church being True. My faith was dying, it was on life support. Then one day the connected dots in the back of my mind were too much and I let myself accept the conclusion they led to. My faith died. To me, the church was no longer true.

So, the process of destroying the pillars my testimony stood on was slow-thinking, and I could have made choices to prevent it. Perhaps the final concluding was intuitive fast-thinking, but the basis was years of slow-thinking. The process of creating the pillars of my testimony on the other hand were fast-thinking, and it was indoctrinated into my since I was a baby.

[BriansThoughtMirror]

Super interesting. Now I want to read this. My mental exodus was long, slow, and painful, too, but I also remember a moment where it all "clicked", and the cognitive dissonance disappeared. It was effortless, just like you say. Oddly, since then, I also feel like I need to continue examining my biases, assumptions, and worldview, and I've found it's just damn hard to use the slow way of thinking on everything. It's exhausting, and it's so much less satisfying than just feeling certain that you are right, and leaving it at that!

[Linked]

Super interesting. Now I want to read this. My mental exodus was long, slow, and painful, too, but I also remember a moment where it all "clicked", and the cognitive dissonance disappeared. It was effortless, just like you say. Oddly, since then, I also feel like I need to continue examining my biases, assumptions, and worldview, and I've found it's just damn hard to use the slow way of thinking on everything. It's exhausting, and it's so much less satisfying than just feeling certain that you are right, and leaving it at that!

Yeah, I've had this book for a few months but haven't jumped in until now, and so far I am really enjoying it. Thinking everything through really is so exhausting! I think I have slowly been changing my intuitive responses, but now I don't really think there is a "right" way to be in a lot of stuff, so I'm not sure if my new responses are actually any better.

Another thought about slow thinking; I spent A LOT of time trying to reason about church stuff as a TBM. I mean, it's search, PONDER, and pray, right? But TBM pondering has boundaries where you can't go. So you go from WoW being a recommendation, then someone thinks about it and thinks if it is good as a recommendation then it would be great as a hard and fast rule. Then you get someone who thinks if it is a hard and fast rule what is the basis for that rule and now coke is out. So there is reasoning involved in adjusting the intuition. But you never get to "coffee is actually good", even if you see good reasoning like some recent studies, because your other boundaries prevent it. I suppose it is a form of motivated reasoning.

[BriansThoughtMirror]

...I don't really think there is a "right" way to be in a lot of stuff, so I'm not sure if my new responses are actually any better.

Yeah, the uncertainty is hard for me to deal with! I had a bishop once tell me that I was comfortable not knowing. He couldn't have been more wrong. Not knowing was making me crazy! What he meant was, I think, that I just had to decide to believe. I tried that for a long time, and eventually my brain couldn't take it anymore.

And, yes, there is a lot of motivated reasoning going on. I hate realizing that I do it, too, though.

[Linked]

A fantastic quote from this book today in the section "Illusions of Truth". The section deals with how our fast brain ties familiarity to truth, often incorrectly.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetitions. Because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

[BriansThoughtMirror]

This quote makes me want to cry. That's my life.

[wtfluff]

A fantastic quote from this book today in the section "Illusions of Truth". The section deals with how our fast brain ties familiarity to truth, often incorrectly.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetitions. Because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

This quote makes me want to cry. That's my life.

Yep, that quote is very sobering. I remember one of my parents saying a lot that "repetition is the best way to learn" or something along those lines.

I guess repetition can be a good way to learn facts, but repetition of falsehoods just turns out to be brainwashing...

[Linked]

Another gem from this book. The author describes 2 headlines on the Bloomberg news service on the day that Saddam Hussein was captured. That morning bond prices had risen, bonds are a safe asset and prices usually rise when there is uncertainty like war/terrorism, so the headline was "US Treasuries Rise; Hussein Capture May Not Curb Terrorism". Half an hour later the bond prices fell and the new headline was "US Treasuries Fall; Hussein Capture Boosts Allure of Risky Assets". The author describes how the big story of the day was Hussein's capture and human's natural inclination to find causality meant that Bloomberg would naturally assign the cause of the whatever happened on the market that day to the capture.

The 2 headlines looked superficially like explanations of what happened on the market, but a statement that can explain 2 contradictory outcomes explains nothing at all. In fact, all the headlines do is satisfy our need for coherence. A large event is supposed to have consequences, and consequences need causes to explain them. We have limited information about what happened on a day, and System 1(Fast Thinking) is adept at finding a coherent causal story that links the fragments of knowledge at its disposal.

The church uses this A LOT. Bednar's "Tender Mercies" is a way of priming ourselves to make random events seem to be God looking out for us. God's blessings can be both trials and good things. Faith just helps us find coherence in whatever it is we believe.

On top of that, the book has shown research that indicates a correlation between cognitive ease (using Fast Thinking), and happiness/feeling good. So the less we actually analyze something and just accept the coherent causal story our primed TBM brains have put together, the better we will feel. Fighting the easy narrative requires slow thinking which is tied to depression.

I had a Stake President who taught religion at BYU with a psychology degree. He said that psychology was BS. That is the only way to keep your testimony, because either the psychology is BS or the religion is BS.

[BriansThoughtMirror]

Taking Psych 101 at BYU made me realize it was possible that it was all in my head. That was right after my mission, which gave me tons of doubts, anyway. That was not a fun time for me. I talked to the professor about it, and all he gave me was that you don't necessarily have to throw out your testimony. I'm not sure he really believed.