Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom

A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does it cost?

This simple puzzle dramatically changed my view of my mind and the simple errors it can make that can than ripple into larger problems in life. Daniel Kahneman describes our cognitive brain as functioning within two systems, System 1 and System 2. He uses these arbitrary labels to describe the more complex processes of fast and slow thinking. When we make a snap judgement on a person or situation this is our System 1 at play. I like to think of it as intuition or following your gut. System 2 is the more time and energy intensive way of thinking. It requires us to think statistically and analytically. Based on Daniel’s research, humans tend to avoid using System 2. There are compelling evolutionary biology arguments one could make about why this is so, but Daniel points to the overwhelming amount of data showing that, generally speaking, humans tend to avoid overtaxing their mental processes. In various social experiments, humans will gravitate towards the activity that taxes System 2 the least. I personally did not need too much data as my personal experience validates this theory for me. If I had to choose between reading a dense textbook or watching a light hearted movie, I would choose the movie. It taxes my mental processes less and it gave me joy. It takes effort to overcome this urge for laziness. I was always aware of this and used my personal value system of hard work to overcome this obstacle. Laziness was not something that I would let hold me back. I felt I could fight through this and be mentally strong. My personal journey further validated this philosophy. I was able to get scholarships, work multiple jobs, and eventually obtain a position at a highly regarded company. At this point in his book, I was not impressed by anything he was saying about System 1 or System 2. Lazy people suffer from weak minds. I could flex my mind whenever the time needed me to. But there was something deeper here that Daniel found in his research that shifted my reality by a few degrees that eventually led to a fissure in my personal value system around hard work and lazy minds.

The answer to the bat and ball question is that the bat cost $1.05 and the ball cost 5 cents. If you were like me, you might have quickly said $1.00 and 10 cents. This isn’t surprising as Daniel found in interviewing university students that between 50-80% of students would get this wrong. The wording of the problem is designed to throw you off and think of 10 cents. That’s not the point I want to make here though. The story I want to tell you is how this simple word problem nearly drove me insane the first time I heard it. I actually first listened to Daniel’s book as an audiobook. I heard the the bat and ball puzzle, I did not read it. I was so positive that it had to be 10 cents and it irritated me how even after he explained it in the subsequent lines, I couldn’t understand it. I was so irritated that I pulled my car over to listen to him over again. I kept hearing him and it wasn’t making any sense. At this point, I thought either he was wrong or I’m an idiot. I was actually getting extremely angry at the situation - at a puzzle where the answer was given to me! It wasn’t until I took out a piece of paper and made an algebra problem that I was able to understand the answer

x=bat y=ball;

x+y=1.10; x=y+1;

y+1+y=1.10; 2y+1=1.10;

y=0.05 & x=1.05

Now, for those of you who got the right answer right away, the point of this story isn’t to highlight how much I over think things. Those of you meet me figure that out in the first 15 minutes of talking to me. The point of this story is to highlight that my mind not only got trapped in a System 1 flaw, but that my System 2 had a very difficult time breaking that perceived truth. Even with all the cognitive energies I was devoting to it, I was trapped in a lie my System 1 had told me and I did not want to let go of it. It took extreme energy for me to break that lie. I had to give myself a formal proof to validate the true answer. It wasn’t an issue of intelligence or energy I was willing to spend, it was a battle of convincing myself that I could make such a simple mistake. Daniel discusses this further in the book about the illusions we create with reality and rationality. For the purposes of this blog, I want to pose the question that I still grapple with today - How tied am I to my reality that I won’t accept the proofs my System 2 is providing me?

I could easily accept that my System 1 is flawed, but this idea that my System 1 could have such a large impact on my reality frightened me. I thought I could just always be analytical and not fall victim to biases, but that’s not the point. We all fall victim to them. We all overreact to small numbers, the availability bias, and, most problematic for us all, confirmation bias. There are more cognitive biases that Daniel describes in his book, the main takeaway I had from the bat and ball question was that our intuition can cause a form of reality creep that can build into a much more significant problem than I realized. We are presented with many scenarios where our System 1/intuition is wrong, but there are no significant ramifications. We might think we have enough time to run into the store with our car parked in tow away zone because we’ve done it a few times in the past with no repercussions. Maybe nothing happens or maybe we come outside to a ticket. Either way, there was not a huge impact from this intuition flaw (although a $50+ ticket could sour anyone’s day). But it can creep further and further until we find ourselves making unnecessary risks or being comfortable with fallacies that drive our decision making behavior. And, most importantly, it has nothing to do with having a strong System 2 per se. We could be strong analytical thinkers and be well trained in our field of specialty, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t making horrible decision about fairly important aspects of our lives.

This idea that our System 1 can have such a powerful impact on our identity made me finish the audiobook within the week and then read the hard copy as well. It led me down a path to read about decision making frameworks and the biology around our CNS anatomy. To use an analogy from Plato, it was like I was living in a cave watching shadows on the wall not realizing that people were making those shadows. In this case, I did a deep dive on the strength of my intuition and how my System 1 had shaped parts of my identity that if I let my System 2 further explore, I would find out I didn’t like that much. That journey started in 2015 and I can say that I have faced myself in the mirror and taken a lot of pieces of who I thought I was aside and bring other parts of myself more to the forefront. Our judgement and decision-making goes much farther than who we think is going to win the next big sports game or whether we think a promising drug should be moved into clinical development. If we are not aware of the natural flaws in our System 1, we may not realize how our reality may be getting influenced on purpose by external forces, or how we carry certain life experiences way too far. The powerful thing I gained from Thinking, Fast and Slow is that I may not be able to change these cognitive flaws, but that I can be aware of them. Just being aware of them gives my System 2 time to process and make sense of them in a more rationale way. It also helped me realize that even with a strong System 2, some events can be so traumatic that rationale evidence will not be enough to overcome the fallacies in my mind. For example, I was threatened at 11 years old by another boy who said that he and his brother were going to kill me. I was told by another friend that the brother was in a gang and that his family got kicked out of his apartment because he killed somebody near the apartments. Even today my Systems 2 mind has trouble convincing me that there wasn’t enough evidence to suggest I was truly in danger. I did not confirm if the boy’s threatening words were just hot air or not, but my 11 year old self relied on my System 1 that told me the boy wore gang colors, knew gang signals, and was constantly in trouble with school administration. I took that information and decided that everyday I would run straight home, through city hall and by the police station just to be extra safe. Eventually that boy stopped showing up to school. I heard from a friend he went to a Juvenile Detention Center. Again, my System 1 accepted this when in reality he may have just moved. I unfortunately had multiple superficial encounters like this with gangs and feeling threatened, but nothing bad ever happened to me and there was no clear evidence that something bad was going to happen to me. And to be clear, I did not grow up in a violent area. I’ve tried to review the statistics for violent crimes in the area I grew up in, and what I can find is that for my time period the level of violent crimes was not that much different from the national average. I say all this because I still struggle with feeling safe. I get nervous if I’m out at night by myself. If I’m with family or friends, I’m constantly surveying my environment for threats. This isn’t healthy, nor does it follow rationality. My safety is largely a well-defined risk probability depending on the base line risk of violent crimes in that area. All of this information is public knowledge. My System 2 needs to fight hard to dismantle these fallacies created by my System 1, but I also need to be patient with myself. I have to remind myself that it’s okay that I thought the bat was $1.00 when it was really $1.05.

I want to end this on a direct tie into professional development because that is my goal with these blogs. I gave a personal story to tug at your heart strings so that this point may hit home harder. You probably have false narratives about your career and job identity. Your System 1 has probably impacted the way you do your job, why you chose that job, etc. I’m not suggesting this is a bad thing, but if you haven’t taken time to evaluate where your intuition came from around your career, you may realize that you are missing out on achieving your true career goals. Are you chasing incentives that are based purely on financial security? This may or may not be a bad thing, it all depends. It takes strong System 2 analysis. Are you focused on a drug target because you think it will cure a disease? What makes you think that? Are you falling victim to well known cognitive bias when interpreting possibly weak pre-clinical data? All our career decisions are a mix between System 1 and 2, so this essay is not about disparaging our intuition. My hope is that it will help you realize that your intuition is an important building block that is constantly shaping your identity and reality. This important workhorse is going to fail you. It is going to fall for cognitive biases. That’s okay, as long you recognize this is going to happen you can adjust for it on a routine basis and not let it shape important parts of your reality and identity.