Our Lazy Brain Democracy: Are We Doomed?
By John Banja, PhD Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Martin Shkreli embarrassment in connection with System 1 and 2 reasoning [1]. Popularized by thinkers like Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman , System 1 thinking refers to the fast, intuitive, reflexive, usually highly reliable cognition that humans deploy perhaps 95 percent of the time in navigating and making sense of their environments. System 2 thinking, on the other hand, is slow, effortful, plodding, analytical, and data dependent—in short, an activity that most humans don’t particularly gravitate towards perhaps because our brains, at least according to Kahneman, are inherently lazy [1]. Shkreli , you’ll recall, is a former pharmaceutical CEO who found himself at the top of everyone’s hate list when he announced that his company was going to increase the cost of its drug Daraprim by 5000 percent. (Daraprim is used in the treatment of malaria and HIV.) The public’s System 1, gut-level outrage predictably kick...