Thank you! This is the one point I very much disagreed with from this talk. His argument is that our logical brain, which is new, is first to interpret our environment but am pretty sure that premise is flawed. Our irrational, fast, animal side is first given sensory input and a chance to act on it... Fight, flee, flinch, do nothing... At which point the slower, newer, better evolved logical side begins to work through it and make rational decisions. This newer side is what truly separates us from the rest of the animals out there, and is what creates everything.. Society, self-awareness, inventions, everything.
Not to say instinct is bad. It's extremely valuable, and as Blink Theory pointed out so famously, has it's place as well.
But as you said, I agree it's bad advice to let one simply trump the other.
None of us can. At most we can do some very virtualized logic interpretation, but we are all faulty, emotional-driven “machines”, and even behind the most logical people’s actions the reason is simply they felt that way.
In my experience, the vast majority of human reasoning can be assigned into two categories:
a) that which justifies doing as their instincts say
and
b) that which justifies acting in their interest as determined by their instincts.
Humans are animals. We happen to possess an extraordinarily tool for abstract reasoning. That tool is mostly used for rationalization and not as an oracle of truth. We are all creatures of biology. Most everything we do is about getting food, shelter, performing sexual displays, and various forms of social signalling and jockeying.
"We have a very selective memory indeed. We have absolutely terrible judgment, are super irrational, and pretty reliably make decisions that are against our own interests, "
This is a really bad argument - human intelligence is not highly rational, but it is deeply nuanced, using social cues, emotions, instincts and a miriad of other things.
Computers can never be anti-knowledge because they lack the free will and social behavior of humans - they didn't chose to be pro knowledge either.
>We fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning our best thinkers have discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others.
Key word here being: 'Best thinkers'.
Average (intellectually speaking) humans would prefer one-track or one-line thinking. One cannot expect to hold them to higher ideals and deeper thoughts.
Above-average humans would (mostly) prefer exploiting average and below-average humans for their personal gain.
The human mind is tailored to the human situation, is what he meant. There are many things we cannot do, because it exists outside of our experience. For example, we can't memorise the contents of millions of web pages, nor can we do thousands of calculations in moments unaided. In this sense, our minds are specific purpose, even if that purpose is broad.
Is everyone under the mistaken impression that a human is primarily a reasoning animal? Much of what appears to be "reason" is pattern recognition with no significant cognition backing it up. Don't think you're immune either. We all do a lot of things that if questioned closely is based on presuppositions that aren't ultimately as justifiable as we think.
> Logical reasoning is a higher order skill that often requires formal training. It's not a natural ability for human beings.
I've read your comments here, and while I understand your point I think you have it backwards. Reasoning is a natural ability for human beings, but we also carry a lot of evolutionary impulses that add a lot of noise to the decision process, eg. observation->judgment->[set of possible decisions], judgment has "reason" as one path that adds to the set of possible decisions, but there remain other paths we inherited from our evolutionary roots. Education is training that removes poorly calibrated paths that lead to mistakes in the decision set, but reasoning remains thus improving the signal to noise ratio.
So I 100% disagree that an individual cannot separate cause and effect without training. They will just be worse at it than someone who is trained to filter out those impulses that lead us to jump to conclusions.
The only reason we formed societies is because we evolved an innate a theory of mind to reason about how others might be thinking and feeling. That's reasoning. We have a natural ability to do limited arithmetic, otherwise we wouldn't be able to hunt, gather or track enough to to endure climates, or keep track of our children for that matter.
We have far too insufficient knowledge of how human reasoning work to claim to know we are more than stochastic parrots with vastly more context/memory. It's way too early to claim there's some qualitative difference.
(And humans are not very reliable; more than current models, sure, but still pretty bad)
We also have hard-wired general memory and reasoning faculties.
"We are not animals."
We are not base animals, to be sure. Neither are we angels of pure logic.
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