NOTE: This is my first post as a guest blogger to Minds On Fire. I write at Cartesian Faith about mathematics, data analysis, and management science. Sometimes I post pictures as well. My focus here will be about applying analytical thinking to improve life skills, such as decision making and interpersonal interaction.
People are often surprised that I’m able to predict the outcomes of events. I seem to have a knack for knowing how someone will behave in a particular situation. Imagine the shock of an employee when I return from a meeting and I ask why they did such and such while I was away!
Aside from being a fun parlour trick, the value of this form of ‘clairvoyance’ is that it can help you make better decisions and set realistic expectations for the people you interact with. This clairvoyance is actually nothing special and can be learned by anyone. It is simply an artifact of logical reasoning.
Logical reasoning and psychology
Learning logical reasoning is easy. It is about understanding when to use deduction (if a then b) and induction. The difficulty that people have is not in understanding the method but rather in coercing yourself to use the method. I have been reading Daniel Kahneman’s fascinating book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which describes two systems in your brain that work in concert to process information and ultimately make decisions. In short, System 1 is your reactive brain, which is responsible for autonomic decisions and behavior. System 2 is your logical, rational brain. System 2 is much better at reasoning but is lazy and avoids ‘working’. On the other hand, System 1 is almost always on and is never wrong. This might sound like a good thing, but what it means is that your System 1 will fabricate stories to explain inconsistent observations! This happened to me when I was driving back to Dublin from Belfast and ended up driving 90 miles west instead of south. I kept observing all these data points that I was going the wrong way, but since I was deep in thought, my System 1 fabricated explanations to explain the data. For example, I noticed that Dublin was no longer listed on mileage signs, so I thought “must be because it’s still too far away”. I also recognized a town that was in western Northern Ireland, and I immediately thought “there must be another Enniskillen on the way to Dublin”. It wasn’t until the road ended and a sign saying Dublin was 90 miles east that System 2 was forced to wake up and start thinking.
What this highlights is that the challenge is not in comprehension but in fighting laziness, or what I call intellectual complacency. Our brains are actually wired to be reactive and not think deeply (apparently that’s what happens when your life is governed by the threat of being lion food). Our System 1 will always use assumptions and fabricate stories to explain observations. We must be vigilant in recognizing this so that we can activate our System 2.
Practice makes perfect
One way to get in the habit of activating your System 2 is by playing games of strategy. It doesn’t really matter whether it is chess, go, master mind, or even battleship (best to avoid the drinking version) as the point is that to win you must think rationally about the choices presented to you. A simpler example is tic-tac-toe. If you play this with System 1, then you won’t know in advance whether you will win or not. If you play with System 2, you know in advance at every move whether you can win or the best you can get is a tie (hint: player 1 can never lose if using System 2). Games offer a stress-free environment to flex your System 2 and try out different approaches to reasoning. It also forces you to think about the assumptions that you are making before making a decision. This is very relevant in games like chess and go, where you have to establish the modus operandi of your opponent, which informs the strategy you choose.
The other benefit of strategy games is that they help you plan for contingency. Typically you need to work through a few alternative scenarios and think about what potential countermoves your opponent will make. How will you counter the counter? Perhaps it sounds tedious, but that’s just your System 2 whining! In the end, this is the same process for understanding another person’s point of view and reasoning about how s/he will react to a situation.
Conclusion
The lesson here is that to become clairvoyant you should play games. In seriousness, playing strategy games will help your System 2 get out of its slumber and help you to understand the world better.
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