As I was looking over the posts, I saw here I and thinking
about the book I thought a lot about fast and low thinking and its role in
academia.
I spent the past week at AERA in Toronto and sat in on may
sessions, from round tables to symposia and paper sessions. I chose topics I
was interested in, and as such had a certain level of intrinsic motivation to
listen and understand what people were saying (it was a place for slow
thinking). I was consciously trying to understand what people were saying and
piece it into my understandings and my research interest. Yet I also found that
quite often system one stepped up. I would instinctively, judge a paper a low
quality, boring, or uninteresting, without really processing why, sometimes I
knew right away what was wrong, what I didn't like. But other times, I had to
wait for system two to kick in before really parsing out what I viewed as
problematic. It was those initial judgments, system one, that allowed me to
survive the conference. I could not have mentally managed five days of session
after session with system two working on overdrive. I had to cut some things
out, mentally ignore some stuff so that I could focus on others.
This made me think a lot about academia as a whole, we are
surrounded by new papers, new ideas, presentations of new work, and yet, we
cannot mentally, or at least I cannot mentally process and use all of that
information. It is my system one that instinctively tells me to ignore something,
that work isn't worth reading because they made questionable methods choices,
etc. that allows me to survive in this world. However, in academia, it is also
system one that boxes us in, allows us to stay in our worlds, and trust our
work and understanding sometimes more than we should. It seems to me that the
thing that allows us to survive intense mental stimulation is also our
downfall.
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