The late Nobel laureate advocated deliberate thinking, but what rules now is haste and gut instinct. His passing should give us pause, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr
The late Nobel laureate advocated deliberate thinking, but what rules now is haste and gut instinct. His passing should give us pauseHere is a simple maths problem: together a bat and ball cost £1.10. The bat costs one pound more than the ball. How much is the ball?
But our brains have also evolved more sophisticated processes: rational evaluation of probability, abstract reasoning, the self-awareness required to identify unconscious biases and moderate behaviour accordingly. The loudest call for action is not a reliable guide to what might actually work. But punchy rhetoric that speaks to the gut beats turgid argument, meandering its way to the truth.
Winning by prodding base human instinct is a method as old as politics. What makes the 21st-century iteration unusual and frightening is the combination with communication technology that accelerates cognition down the fast track of fallacy and bias. That would be less of a problem if analogue politics wasn’t so clunky. It isn’t simply a question of archaic procedure . The deeper challenge relates to the necessity of patience with representative democracy.
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