In the paper this weekend was an interview with Hank Davis who is promoting his new book Caveman’s Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World. Here are the juicy bits of the article

  • … we still happily shroud ourselves in superstition, magic and blind faith rather than burn the extra mental calories it takes to think critically and reach rational conclusions
  • We continue to default to the same magic explanations that our caveman ancestors did. (Such as ‘Thank God’, ‘Good Luck’, ‘Everything happens for a reason’)
  • he debates the relative merits of heuristics and shortcomings of the human mind
  • Patterns are everything to us. We hunger for them. We revel in them. … But a perceptual system that is so geared to wrestling patterns out of complex arrays of stimuli is bound to produce some false positives
  • Our Pleistocene ancestors need to err on the side of caution in order to keep themselves well fed and safe from predators
  • Our problem is not with the adequacy of the cognitive mechanisms we have inherited; it is with the inability to turn them off. They work all too well and too frequently.
  • Part of the problem with our brains is a “causal detection error” that leads us to wrongly believe that our behaviour has more of an effect on our environment than it actually does.
  • Asking people to retrain their brains to question their most fundamental beliefs is a tall order.

This article would likely have got a write-up on the merits of the ideas alone, but definitely gets one in light of Dave Rooney’s post last week on Reverting to Training. The crux of it is:

During my flight training, my first instructor made a point of saying early and often that it was very important to listen closely, do what she said the way she said to do it, and to practice that way afterwards. She emphasized the importance of this, saying that “when faced with an emergency, you’ll revert to your original training”

In other words, when faced with crisis we revert back to our caveman logic. Of course cavemen didn’t have complex coding, testing or deployment problems so we encode our caveman logic into our brains, and those who follow us, at a much later evolutionary state (late teens / early twenties usually) but the effect is the same. The problem of what should (and more importantly should not) become our fallback position is perhaps more important than overriding the ones we have through evolution.