From my own studies on this and related topics (with the disclaimer that I'm not professionally qualified to comment on it), I agree with your take on this, Matt. The subconscious (or unconscious) has, in my opinion, a very big role to play in decision-making (or our behavior in general). People in the past attributing it to dreams, omens, God, whatever were doing it I suppose as part of their social culturing, but said authors seem to take it to the other extreme in hypercorrection. I guess part of the problem is we can't pry open the human brain during such processes and put our finger on it, literally. But even just empirically, it should be clear that there is a fair amount of processing that's taking place outwith our conscious perception, and that does impact our final decision-making, which is indeed for the conscious brain to take control of and finalize. And this is not unlike Kahneman's System One thinking (the firefighter in book is pleased to find a mention here too 🙂).
Anyways, this might just be my intuition, I'll sleep over this to find out ;-)
I thought the points you made were all good ones. And I agree with you that it isn't unlike Kahneman's System 1, but that gets demonized by the dual-process folks as just being this error-prone thing that needs to be corrected by System 2 thinking. The authors of the book I mention in the post seem to come out of that tradition. That being said, I would suspect that there's a limit to how much we can process intuitively and effectively, even with more experience and expertise. But there's a limit to more conscious DM (decision making) in that regard to. However, with more conscious DM we can make more deliberate (and conscious trade-offs) that we likely can't do at the most intuitive level (not that these trade-offs aren't made intuitively, but we're then obviously less consciously in control of them).
I am reminded of John Boyd's OODA loop and the interplay between observing, deciding, and acting. The pace of this process was dependent on the more nebulous second "O" (orient), which involved factors that helped put a situation into context (including past experience). It is similar to what you were saying about Archimedes' "eureka" moment.
I like the reference to the OODA loop. The "orient" phase really does line up well with what I was arguing about intuition. It’s not just about reacting quickly (observe-decide-act), but about how we frame what we’re seeing based on experience, expectations, and learned patterns. And much of that happens outside of conscious awareness.
From my own studies on this and related topics (with the disclaimer that I'm not professionally qualified to comment on it), I agree with your take on this, Matt. The subconscious (or unconscious) has, in my opinion, a very big role to play in decision-making (or our behavior in general). People in the past attributing it to dreams, omens, God, whatever were doing it I suppose as part of their social culturing, but said authors seem to take it to the other extreme in hypercorrection. I guess part of the problem is we can't pry open the human brain during such processes and put our finger on it, literally. But even just empirically, it should be clear that there is a fair amount of processing that's taking place outwith our conscious perception, and that does impact our final decision-making, which is indeed for the conscious brain to take control of and finalize. And this is not unlike Kahneman's System One thinking (the firefighter in book is pleased to find a mention here too 🙂).
Anyways, this might just be my intuition, I'll sleep over this to find out ;-)
I thought the points you made were all good ones. And I agree with you that it isn't unlike Kahneman's System 1, but that gets demonized by the dual-process folks as just being this error-prone thing that needs to be corrected by System 2 thinking. The authors of the book I mention in the post seem to come out of that tradition. That being said, I would suspect that there's a limit to how much we can process intuitively and effectively, even with more experience and expertise. But there's a limit to more conscious DM (decision making) in that regard to. However, with more conscious DM we can make more deliberate (and conscious trade-offs) that we likely can't do at the most intuitive level (not that these trade-offs aren't made intuitively, but we're then obviously less consciously in control of them).
I am reminded of John Boyd's OODA loop and the interplay between observing, deciding, and acting. The pace of this process was dependent on the more nebulous second "O" (orient), which involved factors that helped put a situation into context (including past experience). It is similar to what you were saying about Archimedes' "eureka" moment.
I like the reference to the OODA loop. The "orient" phase really does line up well with what I was arguing about intuition. It’s not just about reacting quickly (observe-decide-act), but about how we frame what we’re seeing based on experience, expectations, and learned patterns. And much of that happens outside of conscious awareness.