Common Misconceptions about Dual Process Theories of Human Reasoning

It seems to sacrifice precision for accessibility, but I still like it very much. Also, you definitely have a thick accent, but you can certainly still be said to enunciate clearly, and I perfectly understood everything that you said. Also, I detected no syntactic or semantic errors, and your diction sounds very high.

Here are my ideological Turing test results of your comment:

People usually use the word intuition to refer to vague impressions that are not amenable to the same sort of justification as deliberative judgments, so these are different from the example that you provided of quickly inventing a deliberative rule and making errors in the process. This makes the purported counterexample less persuasive to me than you seem to expect it to be. Evaluate this comment in the context that we both still anticipate the same experiences, so this is likely a disagreement over word usage, and not likely to be highly significant.

I think this is a very productive criticism. I feel emphasis in italics makes it easier for me to write because it makes it more similar to the way that I speak, so please don't interpret them as aggressive. The way my mind goes down this path is thus:

I have to make the qualification that I don't believe that intuitions are vague feelings that cannot be justified, but vague feelings that have not been justified. There is always some fact of the matter as to whether or not it is, in some sense. But once again, probably something we would consider as disagreeing about word usage. But I think it's an important boundary to draw. From Evans (2006):

If intuition means based on feelings without access to explicit reasoning, then that sounds like a type 1 process. But in some applications it seems to mean naïve judgement, which could be based on explicit rules or heuristics that occur to an untrained judge, in which case they would be type 2.

People often use the phrase 'intuition' to refer to confident beliefs retrieved from cached memory, and the idea is that when you go wrong, it's because intuitions are unreliable. I'm getting at the possibility that that's what people say, but it's not the whole picture.

Say that you're a judge on Pop Idol or something like that, and you have no experience doing it, and you want to quickly come up with a rule, and you retrieved the reliable intuition that pop idols are usually very physically attractive, and then invented a deliberative rule that used your subjective rating of each candidate's physical attractiveness as a measure for evaluating their general Pop Idol factor, and suppose that physical attractiveness actually does not correlate perfectly with the true general Pop Idol factor. Then you would have begun with a reliable intuition and put it into an unreliable deliberative process and obtained an 'unreliable' result in the sense that it does not optimize for the purported normative criterion of Pop Idol judgment panels, which is the selection of the best Pop Idol; you would have picked the most attractive candidate instead, and you would have made a mistake on a higher level than using an unreliable intuition: you would have combined reliable intuitions in a deliberative but unreliable way. This is closely related to the 'System 1 is fast, System 2 is slow' distinction. Reasoning that looks like fast, unreliable intuitive reasoning can really just be fast, unreliable deliberative reasoning. So the main point is not about saying that there are a lot of counterexamples to 'intuitive' reasoning being System 1, but that if you want to do real work the category 'intuitive' won't cut it, because it's still a leaky generalization, even if it isn't that leaky. Does that all make sense?

Here are my ideological Turing test results of your comment:

People usually use the word intuition to refer to vague impressions that are not amenable to the same sort of justification as deliberative judgments, so these are different from the example that you provided of quickly inventing a deliberative rule and making errors in the process. This makes the purported counterexample less persuasive to me than you seem to expect it to be. Evaluate this comment in the context that we both still anticipate the same experiences, so this is likely a disagreement over word usage, and not likely to be highly significant.

I think this is a very productive criticism. I feel emphasis in italics makes it easier for me to write because it makes it more similar to the way that I speak, so please don't interpret them as aggressive. The way my mind goes down this path is thus:

I have to make the qualification that I don't believe that intuitions are vague feelings that cannot be justified, but vague feelings that have not been justified. There is always some fact of the matter as to whether or not it is, in some sense. But once again, probably something we would consider as disagreeing about word usage. But I think it's an important boundary to draw. From Evans (2006):

If intuition means based on feelings without access to explicit reasoning, then that sounds like a type 1 process. But in some applications it seems to mean naïve judgement, which could be based on explicit rules or heuristics that occur to an untrained judge, in which case they would be type 2.

People often use the phrase 'intuition' to refer to confident beliefs retrieved from cached memory, and the idea is that when you go wrong, it's because intuitions are unreliable. I'm getting at the possibility that that's what people say, but it's not the whole picture.

Say that you're a judge on Pop Idol or something like that, and you have no experience doing it, and you want to quickly come up with a rule, and you retrieved the reliable intuition that pop idols are usually very physically attractive, and then invented a deliberative rule that used your subjective rating of each candidate's physical attractiveness as a measure for evaluating their general Pop Idol factor, and suppose that physical attractiveness actually does not correlate perfectly with the true general Pop Idol factor. Then you would have begun with a reliable intuition and put it into an unreliable deliberative process and obtained an 'unreliable' result in the sense that it does not optimize for the purported normative criterion of Pop Idol judgment panels, which is the selection of the best Pop Idol; you would have picked the most attractive candidate instead, and you would have made a mistake on a higher level than using an unreliable intuition: you would have combined reliable intuitions in a deliberative but unreliable way. This is closely related to the 'System 1 is fast, System 2 is slow' distinction. Reasoning that looks like fast, unreliable intuitive reasoning can really just be fast, unreliable deliberative reasoning. Does that all make sense?

If I understand correctly, Gram_Stone is using input here to refer to the organism's short term memory, and reliable algorithm to refer to working memory (unreliable algorithm means no use of working memory), and output to refer to the organism's observable behavior. I'm not entirely certain of how he's distinguishing between input, algorithm, and output in this context, but that's my best guess.

The paragraph is a criticism of certain varieties of "thinking fast, thinking slow" sorts of arguments.

A common problem within psychology research is that researchers will conduct a study in which the independent variable is a stimulus in the external environment and the dependent variable is the organism's behavior, but then the researcher will make a claim about the underlying cognitive process without any evidence to make that claim. Without collecting data on the process, such studies are frequently not able to distinguish between different parts of the cognitive process.

So it is not possible to determine from examining an unreliable output whether that lack of reliability was due to an unreliable input or due to an unreliable algorithm.

The key thing to note is that the input in that sentence is not referring to the independent variable. The independent variable is being manipulated in a step before the input.

This was really helpful though. Dual-processing theory has always come across to me as being all over the map in terms of the definition of what is type 1 and what is type 2.

The sentence immediately after it is a paraphrase of the sentence in your quotation:

To make a deliberative judgment based on a mere unreliable feeling is a different mistake from experiencing a reliable feeling and arriving at an incorrect conclusion through an error in deliberative judgment.

Is that also too complex?

Excellent question. It would take a lot to present all of the evidence, but working memory still seems to me to remain the best distinction, because the many things that you refer to as 'intention' also require working memory to function. Intentionality is probably not a bad term to use, but still noncentral I think.

Everything we want to talk about is in the prefrontal cortex. There are four major components worth distinguishing: lateral prefrontal cortex, frontal pole, medial frontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The entire prefrontal cortex, but the lateral prefrontal cortex in particular, is a key component of working memory. This is evidenced by the poor performance of patients with neurological lesions in the prefrontal cortex on delayed-response tasks. Also, physiological studies on the actual cells in primates, and functional-imaging studies on humans, have shown that prefrontal cortex activation remains even after the original stimulus is absent. We are not quickly caching this information and constantly editing the cache, we are maintaining the information in a low-capacity, dynamic memory store, just like computers do with their RAM. All of the caching stuff is in other regions. There are also regions of the cortex responsible for goal-oriented behavior, which involve the generation of a hierarchy of goals and subgoals, and the aforementioned patients often also do poorly on this, for one, because they have difficulty imagining consequences (takes working memory and selection of information to infer consequences, i.e. counterfactual surgery) and also, because it seems they have a problem selecting task relevant information. So another big part of it is a selection mechanism that filters out the irrelevant parts of cached information, but notice that the only reason to do this is because you're trying to figure out whether or not you want it to take up space in working memory. Also notice that this failure at selecting relevant information is an explanation for why these patients have intact recognition memory but poor recency memory (ability to recognize how long ago they obtained some memory). Recognition memory is all cached data, recency memory requires you to select the parts of the cached data that are relevant to figuring out when the data was observed. I'm probably missing a lot of important distinctions and details still, so don't consider this the final word; see Chapter 13 of Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun's Cognitive Neuroscience if you really want to get on top of this. Remarkably smooth read for the level of the content it contains.

He was. but it's not like everybody who ever uses his terminology has actually read his book.