Intuition vs "Rational" thought

There was a very short vignette in the very beginning of either Gladwell's book Blink or Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Two policemen are sitting in their cruiser. It is a hot night in LA and they have the windows down. It had rained recently.

A man in a floppy coat is walking toward the cruiser's driver's side door.

The policeman who was riding "shotgun" glanced over at the person approaching the cruiser, unholstered his weapon, extended it in front of his partner and discharged it through the open window. The bullets struck the approaching man and killed him.

Much excitement followed. EMTs found a sawed-off shotgun beneath the dead man's floppy coat. The patrol car's shotgun was still in the rack.

Presumably, had the cop hesitated, both cops could have been shot and probably died.

The message that I get from this very short story

Bayes' Theorem applies to unfiltered data. Bayes' Theorem is a mathematical representation of the amount of information that is available in each incremental piece of data.

A plot that illustrates the concept that the first data-points remove more of the total uncertainty than the later points

Information is the removal of uncertainty. The first piece of unfiltered data removes the largest percentage of uncertainty of any of the data points but it is a small fraction of the total uncertainty. The second piece of data removes slightly less of the initial uncertainty that the first piece removed...the one-thousandth piece of data removes much less uncertainty then the first piece of data but slightly more than the one-thousand-and-first piece.

The idea of well-calibrated intuition is that the curve is not a voluptuous curve but is almost a square-wave.

Our brains automatically filter the incoming data and fast-tracks the most important chunks. We don't randomly evaluate a loaf of bread a single slice at a time. We scan the loaf and make an instant decision if we see any mold or places where a rodent chewed on it.

The cop who shot the gunman was never able to verbalize exactly what he saw that made him draw his service weapon and fire it. Part of that was probably due to his brain's need for maximum cognitive processing so it turned off all superfluous processing...which would include his flight-recorder function (and auditory processing and peripheral vision). Many people who experienced trauma cannot recollect any details of the event.

I imagine that there were several factors that the cop saw in that first, split-second glance:

• The dude was wearing a coat on a hot, humid Los Angeles night. Either he was hiding a weapon or drugs or was mentally ill
• How the dude was resolutely walking in a straight line directly toward the cruiser (man on a mission)
• Perhaps the cop could hear him splashing through a puddle.
• How the man was holding his arms
• Maybe there was enough light to see his facial expression

Was there a significant chance that the cop would have shot an innocent, unarmed man? Absolutely! But in this case, the evidence was that the man was carrying a lethal weapon.

The summary

While our intuitions can be ill-formed and can lie to us, they are less likely to do so than our conscious, "rational" thought.

Our conscious, "rational" thought processes complex information iteratively. It reaches decisions by "combing" due to capacity limitations in the human "buffer".

Our rational thought unconsciously discounts information that makes us uncomfortable and over-weights information that is in alignment with what we think is correct. Since these discounts and over-weights are applied at each iteration, the uncomfortable information is discounted to zero ( 0.80 ^ 10 = 0.1 ) and the information that makes us comfortable gets over-weighted into total dominance ( 1.2 ^ 10 = 6 ). In this model of "rational thought", after 10 iterations the information that makes us uncomfortable has 1/60th of the influence that the comfortable information does.

Viewed through this lens, the reason why a candidate gives us the ick is not as important as the fact that the candidate elicits a strong ICK! reaction in us. Perhaps the candidate's hand motions remind us of somebody pulling the wings off of flies or maliciously dragging their fingernails down a chalk-board. Maybe their voice pushes buttons in your head. Maybe it is how they structure sentences. Maybe it is how they drag-out certain vowel sounds 

The reason is not important. Your visceral reaction is. You don't have to 'splain why you feel a certain way. Trust your gut. It has a harder time lying to you than your "rational" thought process.

I hope it is obvious that this essay has MUCH wider application than picking a political candidate.