Comment by cornholio
20 days ago
I apologize for the "System A/B" confusion, I was of course trying to reference the "System 1/2" paradigm from Daniel Kahneman's well known book "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
Addictive apps are algorithmically tuned to maximize user screen time so my (unproven) hypothesis is that tend to promote content that minimizes deep System 2 thinking, which is well known to tire the brain and deplete its energy storage. Educational content - if it's any good - is all about training deep thinking.
Thank you. I had not heard of it before.
Has it been validated? I cannot find citations which test and verify the applicability of that idea.
I ask because there's a long history (left-brain/right-brain, 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, learning style theory, power pose, etc) where intriguing ideas which makes some intuitive sense end up being not so clear cut.
At its core, I think it's basically just a self-evident metaphor of how human cognition works that does not need any validation.
For example it's very clear that when you see a square you can instantly tell what shape it is without reasoning about the number and length of the sides, angles etc.; another System 1 example would be driving, you can do it for hours without even thinking through your physical actions, I need to press this pedal, shift into this gear, etc. the car basically becomes an extension of your body.
Conversely, when asked to mentally multiply 175 and 12 the answer does not similarly jump out in the head of most people, and you need to run an algorithm to get the answer, and the process of doing that is frustrating and tiresome if you don't have the exercise; conversely, with enough exercise, the answer might jump out, or your brain might begin to see patterns and shortcuts like 175 = 350/2 and 12 = 10+2 etc. This is what education forces, this continuous exercise that leads to higher cognitive function.
I don't think you could dispute the paradigm in this vague and self-evident form, but surely the exact details of how System 1 does its pattern matching and how System 2 rationally trains it to recognize future patterns are up for debate. Some of the examples and arguments Kahneman gives are dated and have been discredited or questioned in the great psychology replication crisis.
Yes, the papers I read trace the idea back to the Ancient Greeks.
That doesn't mean it's all that valid, just like left-brain/right-brain dualism.
Are there actually many different systems, and not just two?
For example, you mention recognizing a square. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_recognition_(cognitive_... says "Neuropsychological evidence affirms that there are four specific stages identified in the process of object recognition".
Is System 1 equivalent to all four stages, or does it include more or less than that?
Is there a similar set of stages for multiplication, and how does one tell if it's System 1 or System 2?
If there is an innate modularity of mind, does the System 1/System 2 lets us assign which modules are which?
In Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development there is "a series of four qualitatively distinct stages (the sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational stages)." (Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-general_learning )
Which of those are System 1 or System 2, or is that a completely different view of how the mind works? If the latter, which makes stronger predictive claims and what is the result of comparative testing?
That same page describes John B. Carroll's three stratum theory, and others.
That there are so many different self-evident metaphors for human cognition is exactly the reason it needs validation.