Your Unconscious Mind Fails You - How to Help Prevent It | "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by D. Kahneman

in this video I want to talk again about this book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman he's a Nobel prize-winning psychologist this is a very famous book I did a video on it last week talking about some specific lessons that you could draw from the book and apply to your own life this week I want to talk about um some Concepts that he discusses that really tie the whole book together and in some ways I think it's more fundamental than what I talked about last week and in some ways more important because of that now just a very brief overview of the book If you haven't heard of it you haven't seen the video last week Thinking Fast and Slow he describes our minds as having two systems system one is the unconscious mind the fast thinking system and system two is the conscious mind the slow thinking system this Thinking Fast and Slow now he describes um some peculiarities about the unconscious mind which is the subject of this video today and these peculiarities can get us into trouble because the way the conscious mind unconscious mind works is it tries to identify causal relationships in everything that it sees in the world everything that happens it tries to identify a cause and effect relationship because the unconscious mind doesn't understand the aspect of luck or statistical relationships things that can happen by chance okay so one of the problems with the conscious mind the unconscious mind is that it tries to create as simple a story as possible and in some ways based on as little information um as it could possibly acquire in order to create this coherent narrative so the unconscious mind keeps chattering away telling the conscious mind here's how I think the world works and here's how I think you operate in the world but it doesn't really try to gather as much information as possible before it creates these stories in fact it starts creating these narratives or these stories about how the world works like as soon as it gets one piece of information so it's already trying to create a story when it's only heard you know maybe like a small fraction of the information that otherwise would be necessary to establish a coherent picture of how the world Works in order to describe it to the conscious mind now it tries to do this and one of the reasons it can think so quickly is that it operates this way if the unconscious mind had to wait until it got all sorts of information before it could piece together a coherent narrative about how the world works it wouldn't be the fast thinking system that it is it would be much slower it would be more like the conscious mind so is useful in a way in that it helps us to rapidly interpret the world but the problem is it does so in a way that often misrepresents the work the way the world actually is so you know this the first aspect is it tries to create a narrative but it doesn't really care about the quality of the information or for that matter the quality of the logic that it uses in order to derive the conclusion in order to come up with the story this narrative that it tells a conscious mind in fact the less information the better because it's like I mean you can imagine if you have um okay I mean in math class you know like you have two points well they can be described by a straight line through two any two points right so it's really easy to create a straight line between two points but if you have a thousand data points it becomes much harder to determine well what is the what is the mathematical relationship between all these data points well the same thing is true for like information and logic oftentimes the less information you have about something if you're forced to create a story the less information you have the easier it is to create a story and our our unconscious minds deliberately deliberately try to um acquire as little information as possible as necessary to create these narratives to the extent that it will often ignore contrary information so if you have you know let's suppose you have a view of the world you have a certain opinion about the way things are and you come across information that contradicts your opinion well okay this is like a conscious example of what happens in the unconscious mind um you it's human nature you know unless you're like beaten over the head with this contradictory information and it's putting your face in the way that you can't ignore it you just try to ignore it right because cognitively it's hard to come up with a more nuanced story about how the world Works based on lots of different contradictory information right it's much easier to come up with a simple story about how the world works when all you're looking at is information that um is coherent meaning like it all agrees with itself and there are very few data points right so that's one aspect of how the conscious mind works it tries to create the story with as little information as possible and it disregards contradictory information as much as it can um you know okay so another aspect is once it comes up with this story about how the world is um it holds on to that story as tightly as possible it doesn't want to let go because it's done all this work I mean not a whole lot of work right I mean you come up with a pretty basic story based on a few pieces of information it's not a huge amount of work but it holds on to this story as tightly as possible because it's like okay great I've got a story that makes sense it's a really simple story it's really easy for the conscious mind to to understand so I don't want to let go of this story if I don't have to so you know it one of the ways it holds on to the story is that it says okay everything that agrees with this story is good and everything that disagrees with this story is bad all right so it sets up this like dichotomy where it just it views everything in like black and white where it says I'm going to acknowledge all the information that supports my story and I'm going to ignore as as much as I can all the information that contradicts my story all right and it does so like pretty um tenaciously so it doesn't want to it doesn't want to change its mind um if it doesn't have to and it doesn't like Nuance okay that's another thing now you know a funny thing about us humans okay and the way our mind works is that once we have this story and again this could be a story that applies to anything you know history politics like you know whatever it doesn't matter you know we come up with stories all the time you know often without conscious thought and many many times per day whether it's you know a large matter like you know the history of the country or a small matter you know which is like why some small little event happened to you on a particular day but um the interesting thing is another thing uh aspect of how our minds Works how our minds work is that if we do end up updating this story based on new information that provides a little Nuance or is a little bit contradictory we will if we have to update the story but then we will forget about the story that we had before and we'll think we've always thought this way this you know slightly more complex way so you know it's really funny it's like you know we we are unconscious minds feed to our conscious Minds these really really simple stories that are not really um accurate you know they're not really uh they don't have great Fidelity to you know the actual facts of reality and then when we have to update the story we'll convince ourselves that we've always believed this updated version you know so it was never like oh you know I was I was wrong before and now I can see things a little bit more clearly I have a slightly wider perspective no it's like the tendency not that this happens all the time but the tendency is that we think well I've always thought this like of course everybody thinks this way you know you forget that you changed your mind so you don't even get to learn from the fact that oh you had a narrow perspective before and now your perspective perspective is a little wider and you know you have a more nuanced story now we just ignore that part and we think we've always had this slightly more nuanced story um you know and you know to some of these other examples you know another interesting thing is like the unconscious mind and I've alluded this before doesn't really care about the quality of the information that it has in order to create the story it just wants to come up with a simple easy story um so it's like the quality of the information the soundness of the logic these things are kind of irrelevant to the unconscious mind it just wants to come up with a simple story uh which is a real problem because you know most of the time you know the world is a pretty complex place and people are pretty complex and we do things for a lot of different reasons and so you know more often than not when things involve other people stories are pretty nuanced right and if our tendency is to come up with pretty unnuanced stories about you know how people operate how the world Works um it's probably not going to be an accurate representation of reality um and so it's a problem when we don't really concern ours that when our unconscious mind you know through its bias doesn't really concern itself with the quality and the information the amount of information or the quality of the logic it just wants a nice easy story um you know and I mentioned before it's like you know the the unconscious mind deals with cause and effect relationships it's not good at understanding statistical relationships where statistical relationships deal with chance you know like you roll the dice what are the chances is going to be a seven if you have two two die um so it's not really good at statistics and so you know another funny thing about how our minds work is that you know when things happen by chance and they work out really well for us we convince ourselves is that oh it's because we're so skilled and we're so smart right I mean like we deserve for this thing to work out because we're just so much smarter than everybody else you know and it's like we're so very skilled right that's the reason we because we discount the role that chance plays in life and I mean if you if you have a tendency to like read history and recognize that a lot of times throughout history you know luck plays a pretty important role I mean a lot of you know human achievement is not down to luck it's down to hard work but you know more often than we probably recognize a lot of things in life happen you know happen by luck happen by chance and we have a tendency to dis to um discredit you know the statistical part the chance part and just say oh if things worked out it was because I was so skilled and then we if we if things don't work out we generally blame it on other people right oh you know they're out to get us or they're stupid or whatever whatever so I mean at every turn it's like at every turn the bias of our unconscious mind is to dumb down reality in such a way that it's easy it's coherent and it generally makes us out to be the good guy the hero the smart guy whatever whatever like the super skilled person when you know like more often than you know our egos would like to acknowledge that's not the case um okay and then another thing and this is not necessarily you know the unconscious mind but it's a tendency that we have um we like to once we come up with a an understanding of how we think the world works right these really basic narratives we like to associate with other people who think the same way we do why well it's for the same reason I mentioned before that the unconscious mind does not like to take into account contradictory information right when it has already come up with a story well I in a lot of ways this whole is true for a conscious Minds because as I mentioned in the other video in which common speaks about in this book throughout our conscious Minds more often than not believe the stories that are unconscious mind minds tell us okay and that's a serious problem it's just the way it is call it laziness call it like whatever biology you know whatever but this is you know generally how people work um you know so we've got this super fast processor coming up with a lot of times kind of like a simplified nonsense and we just automatically believe it well the problem is you know then we associate with other people who think the way we do and you know we find on the internet information that agrees that already agrees that supports you know our views and our beliefs and so it's like you know we reaffirm these simplified unnuanced stories by you know the people that we hang out with and the information that we you know receive that we put into our minds generally you know from the internet um you know which we're not doing ourselves any favors right because again the world is a pretty complex place it's a pretty nuanced place because people are nuanced like we have this like the most you know complex thing in the universe is our minds right like we're we we do things for a lot of different reasons and it's generally not you know on off you know ones and zeros like black or white this reason or this reason and that's it it's usually a lot of different reasons and usually we're not even conscious of all the reasons that we do things right and all the conscious of all this stories that we tell ourselves and all the thoughts that we have um running through our minds so we're really complex beings and we have this processor that tries to like dumb everything down and simplify it beyond all recognition which tends to get people into a lot of trouble like throughout history um this is nothing to do with like modern day I mean this is like as long as humans have been humans we've been getting ourselves into trouble um you know another thing you know that's interesting uh is that again the way our minds work our unconscious minds are really um influenced by environmental factors that we're not conscious of I mean you know if you walk out and it's a nice bright sunny day you're gonna feel good and you're conscious of the fact that you feel good but more often than we recognize other subtle environmental factors really have an important effect on excuse me the beliefs that we have the stories that are unconscious mind comes up with and tells our conscious Minds um you know the these environmental factors have important influences on the decisions that we make um and we're not really aware of it so not only all right do we have this processor that comes up with simple stories ignores information dumbs things down beyond recognition you know wants to associate you know with people who support these stories and get our information that supports these stories but then we don't even recognize that oh yeah there's a lot there are like a lot of environmental things that are going on that influence in ways that we're not even conscious of so I mean it's like it's a mess and I'm not suggesting that you know we're like all walking around right on the verge of like self-destruction right because I mean our minds are pretty powerful and they work pretty well but when you start looking at the details and you start understanding how the mind works it's easier to recognize how we are heavily influenced by this amazing processor that is faulty right it's it's amazing it's usually powerful but you know it gets us into trouble and a lot of times we're not even conscious of it um let's see oh okay and then here's another thing that's really interesting you know and this this has to do with um wanting to limit the information that we we receive that contradicts our beliefs or these narratives and you know part of information that you receive is in the form of feedback right and it it the average the typical human like we're all kind of like this we don't really like to get negative feedback why because it like it it tells us hey you know you're not as smart as you think you are you know you're not the hero you know that you think you are um you're understanding the world is not as accurate as you think it is and all of these you know like all of those um that information that we receive it's like it contradicts this view of that we have of ourselves that like oh yeah we've got everything figured out right and so not only do we have all these screwed up views and and we we only want to associate with people and information that agrees with us we also want to black out all the information from sources that say Hey you know your view is is not actually correct or there's like a lot more going on than you realize so it's like we've really set ourselves up for failure in a lot of ways you know when we rely on this super fast but super simple in some ways unconscious mind and the stories that it creates um now this is another this is one of the last things I'm going to talk about because I know I'm just like droning on and on about how the mind works and you're like dude you know tell me something that I can is useful but this is really this is really really important it's really fascinating understanding how the mind works because like wherever you go your brain is there right I mean it's influencing you you can't get away from it so whether or not it's interesting you know particularly to you where I'm presenting an interesting way it's still highly relevant you know so if you're going to read a book I mean this might be a good one to read but anyway another thing that we do in our effort to make things as simple as possible to understand the world make these stories as simple as possible is we do what he calls substitution where we substitute our thinking about one thing that's easy to think about with our thinking that we ought to do about this thing that's hard to you know that's hard to think about and the example he gives is when we have to think about when we have to when we look at a situation or an argument or you know an event that happens and we want to ask ourselves what do I think about this okay well that requires gathering information good information um using proper logic and and you know coming up with like an explanation or an understanding that really makes sense if you want to do it properly what we often do instead of instead of answering the question what do I think about this we answer the question how do I feel about this okay and it's much easier for us humans right to come up with you know a Feeling about something than it is you know rational thought based on you know objective information because like our feelings are just automatically generated right and so you know you might you know hear about an event and you have an emotional response and let's say it's like a negative emotional response well the tendency for us humans is to say oh what do I think about that I think it's a really bad thing right when you're actually you didn't put a whole lot of thought into it what you're really saying is this is what I feel about it not what I think about it so we do this substitution so it's like all of these all of these things really mess with our ability to understand the world understand other people right like we're all pretty complex and so you know and the funny thing is like we tend to think about ourselves as very complex very nuanced you know there's like so much going on in my personality and my character and the thoughts that I have but when we when we try to understand other people particularly other people that we've never met like you read about things in the news it's all like black and white super simple oh this person is totally good this person is going to destroy the world kind of deal right it's it's always like not always but it's often like that you know like you know we're really complex everybody else is really simple right it's like give me a break so all of that I know I rambled I'm sorry if you've even made it this far I would be surprised but all of that is to um describe to you the the problems that are unconscious mind creates for itself and to summarize to lead me into the next part is um the unconscious mind tries to come up with super simple explanations for a very complex World okay and more often than not our conscious Minds believe these super simple explanations okay now this is um my recommendation for how you and we all we all suffer from this like if you're a human being right we all suffer from this so this is my recommendation for how you can start developing skill to push back against this tendency okay I mean I would like to say take a humble pill right and like you know recognize that the world's more nuanced than your and your brain can't recognize reality as easy easily as it thinks it can but there's no such pill what I recommend okay is reading like okay I mean every single video I'm like read read but it it's really important I recommend um you spend some time reading a subject that you're interested in that discusses events from multiple perspectives and with a whole lot more Nuance than you otherwise thought there was okay so for instance um reading history okay uh like the right kind of history books like well presented objective you know broad perspective history books um are really good because it helps you understand how nuanced things can be because you know the really good authors they look at all the information that's available and they have to come if they want to produce like a good you know useful book they have to come up with a nuanced understanding of these historical events you know why they occurred you know why people um you know like why they took part in them or like what their motivations were or anything else and so you know reading for instance a really good history book where the author demonstrates to you that there's far more Nuance in a certain thing that you thought there was it's a really good way right to start opening up your mind and learning something new but really to start opening up your mind to the fact that things are more nuanced a lot more nuanced than we far more often than not appreciate okay and other people are far more nuanced and why people act is far more nuanced like um so my recommendation is um if there's uh I talk about history book and this leads me into my uh personal example but if there's a subject that you're interested in it doesn't matter if it's history or biology or whatever whatever else and I mentioned this last time start reading about things even you know 5 10 15 minutes a day that you find interesting now that's really important in its own right but if you focus on trying to um read about things that expand your perspective not just on information like oh learning more about or how a certain thing works but really understanding or exposing yourself to the fact that certain things are more nuanced than you appreciated before it will help you develop like the conscious ability okay to push back against these very unnuanced stories that your unconscious mind tells you and the more you expose yourself to Nuance in the world okay the more automatic it will be to push back against these stories say no you know you know you might have an automatic response to something that you see and you have to stop yourself and say okay this is you know my idiotic unconscious mind trying to tell me some simple stupid story about the situation I'm sure it's more complex okay even if like you know you don't try to research every single thing in your life you have time but the more that you and and I highly encourage reading because it's really effective the more that you read about things that demonstrate to you this Nuance right the more you will be able to consciously push back against this tendency for the conscious mind to just automatically believe these super simple stupid stories of the unconscious mind okay I know I rambled this was not a great video I would be surprised if like one person even gets to this part but um if you do uh thanks for your patience I want to tell a personal story um that I think illustrates some of these things not that you know I think you necessarily care about like you know my personal story but I think it I think it's a good way to tie some of this together um and um it's really in some ways what motivated me to talk about this subject specifically all right so a month or so ago a friend and I went to um Harpers Ferry West Virginia um it was made famous 1859 John Brown abolitionist in the U.S you know preceding the U.S Civil War um I don't need to get into the details but it's it's an historical town and it's made historical because of events related to the U.S Civil War back in the you know it's 1861 to 1865. this certain event happened in 1859 um and you know it was really interesting um I'm 48 now so it's been 30 years since I graduated from high school generally U.S students in the US learn about the Civil War you know in any debt in depth in high schools and it's been about that long since I've really you know learned about the Civil War and I've never really been into it it's just never really interested me okay well we went to Harpers Ferry and they had a museum it was the John Brown Museum okay and you know maybe because I was in a frame of mind from like doing intensive reading for the last three years you know I was really open to New Perspectives and you know um a more nuanced understanding of how the world works and you know just I'm just like more in that frame of mind than I ever used to be you know before I really started reading you know back in 2020 um and for whatever reason you know maybe the way the information was presented in this Museum okay and it talked about you know uh perspectives of slavery and you know perspectives of slaves in the time and perspective of you know northern northern states and southern states and things like this I don't get into I won't get in the details of the Civil War um but for some reason it really resonated with me and it was like wow you know it's really interesting to learn about all these different perspectives now if you have if you've ever uh um studied the U.S Civil War like if you're a U.S you know if you grew up in the U.S and U.S schools um the thing that struck me about Civil War is that it was really a complex event in the sense that okay the the motivations for people to enter the war and to enter battle and to sustain you know their efforts for the four years of the war was far more nuanced okay than um is typically presented so typically people are like oh you know it's the north versus South and the South South you know is about slavery and the north is about you know maintaining the union or whatever when abolishing slavery yeah those were important things but it was far more nuanced than that and for some reason going to this Museum this John Brown Museum like that really resonated with me and I became really really interested in trying in learning about all these different perspectives and perspectives of the slaves the perspectives of free blacks perspectives of the soldiers and the politicians in the North and the South and so I started reading some history books and there's this one excellent history uh author uh James McPherson he wrote a bunch of books and I read several you know in the past four weeks one of which is called for cause and comrades where he looks at 25 000 diary entries and letters sent by soldiers you know generally back home to their families um soldiers from the north and from the South during the U.S Civil War and you know he he he discusses their motivations for entering the war for um sustaining the war for entering battle when like lead is flying all around and you could you'd be killed instantly um you know it's like for enter for engaging in any uh specific battle and then from Battle to battle you know all of these and then throughout the duration of the four-year War all of these things he examined and it it really um Illustrated for me how absolutely nuanced okay the motivations were because if you think about it it's not just like you know and I talk about the U.S Civil War and I realized some people watching this video aren't aren't even you know in the US and it's not relevant but you know each country has its own you know issues like this and for the U.S Civil War they talked about oh the North and the South well okay the north is a mass is a land mass right the south is a land mass okay and land masses do not engage in battle nor do like oh you know Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis right they do not engage in battle there were three million soldiers in the U.S Civil War approximately and each of them is a unique you know human being a unique individual and each of them went to war volunteered or whatever and engaged in battle for his own unique reasons most almost all of them are men boys even you know 16 you know plus um and so you know learning about this really really Illustrated for me just how nuanced this war is the Civil War but then really when I General generalize it really how nuanced the world in general is and how nuanced you know people are and um you know how like complex you know events can be even when you have relatively few people involved because each individual person really is pretty complex and you know to make things worse like per Thinking Fast and Slow much of what makes us complex we're not even consciously aware of okay so a super long video not I know I I was kind of rambling whatever whatever um but just to recap okay your unconscious mind tries to create a story that eliminates all the Nuance in the world okay but the world is a very complex nuanced place and people individuals are very complex and nuanced okay and not only that but they're not even aware that you know particularly how complex and nuanced they are okay and so a very very good way to train your conscious mind to push back against these sometimes ridiculously simple and unnuanced stories that our unconscious mind tells us okay is to read about you know events and subjects where you have to um appreciate and learn about the nuance and again it doesn't have to be with people it could be you know with biological systems or it could be with technology or whatever whatever but the point is the more you um practice the skill of appreciating the Nuance in the world the more automatic it will be to push back against the unconscious minds attempt to take all the Nuance out of the stories that it tells us our conscious Minds about how the world works and how people really are okay I hope this was even partially useful I would be amazed if more than one or two people make it this far but if you do um I promise like over time these videos hopefully I well I promise I will try to make these videos more and more relevant and useful as time goes on but I think this is a really important subject even if I didn't present it particularly well um just a quick thing um wrestle I'm sorry if I mispronounce your name he asked about uh if I could do uh cover Atomic habits a book by James clear I'm going to do that next and I'm really glad that you suggested that because a lot of what James Clear talks about in atomic habits relates specifically to what Daniel Kahneman talks about in Thinking Fast and Slow also thank you to dobre I had to look that one up it's in the Cyrillic alphabet for being a subscriber I think I'm up to four which is amazing because there's like four more subscribers than I had a couple of months ago so all that being said you're a very complex person and so is everybody else try to appreciate the Nuance in the world by training your mind to appreciate it and read something that expands your perspective so that you understand that there is this Nuance in the world thank you so much for watching um I will try to make these videos more and more relevant and useful as time goes on I will see you in the next video

Channel: Dear Niblings

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Id: Q55PBP1V3p0

Length: 35min 55sec (2155 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023