“A mind that follows WYSIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions… the confidence that people have in their intuitions is not a reliable guide to their validity.”
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Kahneman positioned What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) as System 1 thinking. This means the quick thinking, intuitive decision-making we humans do all the time. By contrast, System 2 thinking is concentrated, deeper determination—like working out a problem in your head to find a solution.
We need both of these systems to be fully-optimized and successful people, but surely we can think of examples of people in high places who seemingly wing it all the time and get away with it because of luck or strength of personality. I call these “bro’s figuring shit out as they go”. These characters are thought of as quick thinkers and tend to scrap and fight their way to positions of leadership in companies, in the military or in politics.
The thing is, quick thinkers aren’t using strategy, they’re figuring shit out as they go. Mistakes are made with real consequences. So they need to either slow down and do some deep thinking themselves, or more likely, deploy a team of deep thinkers (advisors) behind the curtain who do the work to keep the train on the right track. We need both to be fully optimized as people or as part of a larger organization or society.
I’m not going to say reading Kahneman’s book has been light summer reading for me, but it’s been revelatory. We all move through life thinking that we’re fully engaging our brains to work things out and come up with the right choices, one to the next, that move us towards successful outcomes. Learning to recognize that our first intuition is not all there is to see expands our options significantly. We all could benefit from a deeper level of thinking to optimize our own outcomes.
It’s important to ask ourselves when considering any strategic move, is this all there is, or is there more to the story that we aren’t considering? This mitigates the rush to judgement that often leads us into even more trouble than we had before. Decisions compound, and the more good choices we can make the more likely it is that we’ll arrive at a better place in the end.
