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Ep. 42 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom

Vervaeke lecture on rationality beyond logic and intelligence, drawing on Stanovich, Baron, and Arlin to build toward an account of wisdom and problem finding.

Key Takeaways

  • Rationality requires more than logical reasoning or high intelligence; it depends on cognitive styles and psychotechnologies.
  • Optimal, not maximal, bias-awareness is key to rational functioning.
  • Good problem finding, generating a problem nexus, is central to both creativity and wisdom.
  • Need for cognition is a meaningful predictor of acquiring rational and wise competencies.
  • Wisdom is positioned as intertwined with meaning and enlightenment, to be developed in later episodes.

What the video covers

  • Rationality is not equivalent to logic or intelligence; it requires multiple competencies including inferential and control competencies, with insight as the normative target.
  • Stanovich identifies 'mindware' (psychotechnologies) and cognitive style, notably active open-mindedness from Jonathan Baron, as missing pieces beyond intelligence.
  • Vervaeke defines psychotechnology as a socially generated, standardized, internalizable way of manipulating information, with literacy, numeracy, and graphs as prototypes.
  • Active open-mindedness must be optimal rather than maximal, since overriding heuristics entirely would cause cognitive failures.
  • Need for cognition, the motivation to seek and solve problems, predicts acquisition of rational competencies and connects to problem finding.
  • Arlin's problem finding, extended by Vervaeke, is the ability to generate a 'problem nexus' that, if solved, would impact many existing problems, linking creativity and wisdom.
  • Dreyfus's idea that central cognitive problems revolve around realizing relevance is presented as foundational to good problem finding.
  • Curiosity is contrasted with wonder/mindfulness, roughly as a having mode versus a receptive mode of engagement.
  • Intelligence is discussed as partially malleable, with evidence that practices like mindfulness and training can modestly improve working memory and attention.
  • The lecture aims to resituate wisdom within the cultivation of meaning and the pursuit of enlightenment.

Chapters

  1. 00:00Recap: Rationality and the Wisdom Project
  2. 03:50Rationality Is Not Logic or Intelligence
  3. 08:00Defining Psychotechnology
  4. 18:00Need for Cognition and Problem Finding
  5. 30:00Curiosity, Wonder, and Cognitive Styles
  6. 45:00System 1, Heuristics, and Active Open-Mindedness
  7. 55:00Insight, Transformation, and Understanding
  8. 63:00Malleability of Intelligence and Closing Remarks

Answers

Questions about this video

What distinguishes rationality from intelligence according to this lecture?

The lecture argues that rationality is not equivalent to logic or intelligence. Drawing on Stanovich, it notes that people with high intelligence can still fail at rational thinking, so additional competencies such as psychotechnologies and cognitive styles are required.

What is psychotechnology as defined here?

Psychotechnology is a socially generated, standardized way of formatting and enhancing information processing that can be internalized and applied across domains. Literacy, numeracy, and graphing are prototypical examples.

What is problem finding and why does it matter for wisdom?

Problem finding, following Arlin, is the ability to identify problems others have not noticed. Vervaeke extends this to generating a 'problem nexus' where solving one core problem would significantly impact many existing problems, which he links to wisdom.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00
Speaker A
[Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis so last time we were taking in an in-depth look at the work of Stanovich and rationality because we are building towards an account of wisdom because that is deeply intertwined with the cultivation of
00:35
Speaker A
enlightenment and of course with the cultivation of meaning we noted that rationality is an existential issue it's not just a matter of how we're processing information it's something that is constitutive of our identity in important ways and our mode of being in
00:54
Speaker A
the world and we'll come back to that again one of the core things we saw as we took a look at the rationality debate in which stand of its work was situated is that debate showed us a couple of
01:09
Speaker A
important things it showed us if I can put this as a formula that right rationality does not equal logic allottee and it does not equal intelligence that debate also showed us that we need multiple competencies when we're talking about rationality we need
01:31
Speaker A
an inferential competency but we need an independent competency of control and then I propose to you how we could understand what that competency is and what the normative theory is acting upon it namely insight good problem formulation we then moved into what
01:51
Speaker A
standard it saw as the missing piece if intelligence doesn't give us rationality what's the missing pieces two missing pieces they overlap in some important ways one is the notion he calls it mind where what I've called psycho technology
02:08
Speaker A
and the other is a cognitive style and the cognitive style that he talked about was active open mindedness which he gets from Jonathan Barron and this is the idea that what you should do is cultivate a sensitivity and an
02:29
Speaker A
ongoing awareness of the presence and effect of cognitive biases in your cognitive behavior your cognitive life and to actively counteract them I pointed out that unlike Stanovich who doesn't emphasize this as much Jonathan Barron who's the originator of this idea
02:49
Speaker A
as a constitutive feature of rationality points out that you can't do that too much because if you try to override too many of your cognitive biases you of course will be also overriding them in their functioning as heuristics that
03:05
Speaker A
help you avoid common and toward explosions so getting an optimal form of active open mindedness rather than a maximal form of it is crucial to rationality I want to just briefly stop here and be a little bit more precise
03:24
Speaker A
about how I want to use this term I've been using it throughout and I basically defined it by example and then it through exemplification but I want to be a little bit clearer about it because it's going to be relevant as we go
03:37
Speaker A
forward and talk about wisdom so here's the definition I want to offer to try and clarify what I mean and how I'm using the term psycho technology as I said I don't claim to be the originator of this idea but I am claiming that this
03:54
Speaker A
is the particular slant I'm taking on this idea of psycho technology the psycho technology is a socially generated and standardized way of formatting manipulating and enhancing information processing that's readily internalized Abell into human cognition and that can be applied in a
04:17
Speaker A
domain-general manner that's crucial it must extend and empower cognition in some reliable and extensive manner and be highly generalizable among people prototypical instances are literacy numeracy and graphic so I want to just make it very clear it's not just that anything we use
04:42
Speaker A
mentally will count as a psycho technology so the cognitive style of active open-mindedness will probably make use of psycho technologies in order to help track bias but obviously Stanovich means something much more comprehensive he means a set of skills
05:06
Speaker A
psycho technologies sensibilities and sensitivities right that will help you in a domain general manner note and risk actively respond to the presence of cognitive bias we can then ask what is it about people that if intelligence is insufficient for this what is it about
05:29
Speaker A
people that is predictive of them acquiring this right now this is learn Abal right and we talked about the need for cognition as being an important predictor so this is the degree to which you are motivated to go out and look for
05:53
Speaker A
problems you're trying to find formulate and solve problems so in that sense you are generating your own instances of learning and problem-solving and it quite directed and comprehensive manner I suggested to you that there's two ways in which we can think about this
06:14
Speaker A
curiosity and wisdom I want to stop here and note something about this need for cognition that I'm now going to be making use of in today's lecture which is the connection between the need for cognition and what arlynn calls problem
06:33
Speaker A
finding because that's a very central feature I would think I would say an essential feature of what it is to have a high need for cognition Ireland argues that problem finders are very good at finding problems as the name indicates there
06:55
Speaker A
they are able to realize problems and connect things together in ways that people other people have not previously done some people have argued that this is central to creativity but important for our purposes is that our land and I
07:10
Speaker A
and this is kind of prescient of this whole argument she made this argument in 1990 she argues that this is she argues that this is central to wisdom that one of the crucial features of being a wise person is the capacity to find problems
07:24
Speaker A
that other people have not yet found I want to take a moment here and offer a suggestion of how we can think about what makes somebody a good problem finder I want to this is not in Ireland this is my attempt to extend and develop
07:40
Speaker A
arlynn and make it a little bit more concrete and practicable so I want to I want to propose to you this idea we don't find problems typically in a vacuum we don't do anything in a vacuum there's always you know already a
08:03
Speaker A
background of existing issues we're dealing with other people are dealing with in our culture I would suggest you that a good problem finder can do this here's some existing problems in the right space in which human beings are
08:17
Speaker A
operating and what a good problem finder does is I think not just simply add to that I mean that that would be kind of a basic skill and problem solving problem fall problem finding but I think people that we regard as being exemplary in
08:33
Speaker A
this and doing it very well and therefore demonstrating an aspect of creativity that helps to explain why problem finding sort of overlaps between wisdom and creativity they can do the following thing they can find a problem that if solved would make a significant
08:50
Speaker A
impact on these existing problems so what I'm suggesting to you is that good problem finding is the ability to generate a problem Nexus so that if you go in and say here here are some problems in various domains and then they are all
09:09
Speaker A
centered on this core problem and if we can address that core problem then we can go back and make a significant impact on this I think many of the people I don't take credit for this I think the person who should be given
09:26
Speaker A
credit for this and I'll talk about that later today it's Dreyfus the idea right that many of the central problems of cognition are centered on this ability to realize relevance I think that's very powerful kind of problem finding it's the
09:41
Speaker A
generation of a problem Nexus and I've tried to show you how it can be very generative of theoretical and empirical research so I think that's part of what it is to be a good problem finder it is to generate the problem Nexus I also
09:59
Speaker A
want to point out something that I'm going to come back to which is this is going to overlap with some an important aspect in some current theories of the nature of understanding that have to do with the effectiveness of how we are
10:15
Speaker A
relating to knowledge now that sounds very vague and I will come back to that more carefully what I need you to understand right now is that this problem finding right this the ability to generate a problem Nexus will also
10:28
Speaker A
make a significant impact interact with some of the best accounts I think that are emerging about the nature of understanding and that's going to be important because we want understanding to be part of our Theory our account of
10:44
Speaker A
wisdom now I want to come back to the effective side of this so I've suggested to you that one part of good problem finding sorry one part of need for cognition right there's good problem finding and then good problem finding is the ability
11:15
Speaker A
to generate a problem Nexus right need for cognition I look at this word here right also points to obviously an effective a motivational component and this takes us into the few things I talked about before wonder and curiosity
11:37
Speaker A
then I propose to you that although these terms are slippery one way in which we can pick up a sort of polar opposites is that curiosity is much more in the having mode it's much more about manipulating and controlling things and
11:52
Speaker A
wonder is much more than the being mode it's much more vote on encountering mystery and calling into question ones the world view one's identity etc so that's why wonder can shade into awe or potentially even into work now I want to
12:09
Speaker A
pick up on something here because this again has some very deep connections to wisdom so I actually have this on a like a plaque in my apartment it's a famous quote from Socrates which is wisdom begins in wonder wisdom begins in wonder
12:31
Speaker A
and like everything about Socrates it is it is simultaneously provocative and enigmatic as to what did Socrates actually mean by that then there's two different interpretations and you can see this and the different ways in which wonder is treated by Plato and of course
12:53
Speaker A
by Aristotle and I can see this in this sort of distinction to some of the current work on while on Wonder but for Plato the point of philosophy is to develop and extend that sense of wonder so that what
13:20
Speaker A
you're actually trying to do for Plato is you're trying to deepen wonder into awe because he feels that this aw will have the greatest capacity for transforming us for getting us deeply involved in the an agogic ascent that
13:43
Speaker A
makes sense Horace dawdle also thinks that philosophy begins in wonder but I think you could make a good case that many people have right that Aristotle sees this more in line with curiosity trying to figure things out and then what your
14:03
Speaker A
ultimate ly doing I would say for Aristotle is this you're trying to basically shape wonder into curiosity in philosophy and then resolve the curiosity in some answer to some question so for Plato wonder sets you on a quest of an agog a but for Aristotle
14:32
Speaker A
wonder gets you to formulate questions that you then answer and that's a fundamental difference between them and it's interesting because you see Plato is here sort of pushing for meta accommodation as we've seen before when we talked about this when we talked
14:49
Speaker A
about right the numinous and Aristotle is of course putting for meta assimilation of course when I answer questions that may force me to do conceptual accommodation but overall this is trying to stabilize right and assimilate and sort of home things for
15:10
Speaker A
you now the kind of stuff we saw and Garett so philosophy is working within that whole structure and why am i pointing this out because of course again we're invoking this higher order relevance realization that's at work within this
15:25
Speaker A
need for a cognition within wonder and curiosity all right so we saw that Stanovich was able to respond to many of the defenders of human rationality in the rationality debate he was able to respond respond to cohen by crucially
15:53
Speaker A
noting that we have to challenge Cohen's assumptions we do not have a sim as single competence while I also added in that we shouldn't think of it as static or completely individual all right he was able to respond to charity act by
16:10
Speaker A
pointing out that charity act was quite right about the centrality of dealing with computational limitations but that what chair neck is really giving is not a theory Christian axe theory is a theory of relevance realization is not a theory of
16:23
Speaker A
rationality but a theory of intelligence something that standard which also agrees with and then tests madland he standard which acknowledges that we need an independent normativity on control and we've already seen that we can answer that well at least i'm proposing
16:41
Speaker A
that we can answer that by a different area in psychology which is the work out a good problem formulation and insight a problem formulation that avoids combinatorial explosion ill-defined itness and the way in which we can be misdirected by salience to misjudge what
16:56
Speaker A
is relevant I now want to refer I now want to return to Stanovich this theory properly what's his positive account of what rationality is so the waste and Fitch does this and right and I I don't want sorry the way he's doing this
17:20
Speaker A
overlaps with a lot of other work and this is a point that he himself make there's a lot of convergence in psychology on the idea of a dual processing theory that we have multiple competencies now what does dual processing is is itself
17:33
Speaker A
very controversial initially people talked about two systems and then they talked about two styles and because of critiques it was hard to maintain those terms and I'm not even convinced that they are just you know that they're distinct things they might lie on a
17:50
Speaker A
continuum but the basic idea so to avoid all that controversy they're simply called s1 and s2 right and like I say I'm not claiming that they're discrete systems or even discrete styles it's quite possible that they are polar
18:09
Speaker A
positions with on a continuum of processing I'm going to put all other side because it's not relevant for what we're talking about here right so the main idea here is that these are different ways in which you process
18:22
Speaker A
information and this process works largely intuitively and it works very much in a highly associational fashion it makes use of a lot of implicit processing and it's very fast right it's very fast so this is the kind of processing that
18:54
Speaker A
you're using all the time in what we you know we talked about this one Ravello Varela talked about your ability to cope those are your coping right so when I'm moving around the environment I'm relying a lot on my intuitive knowledge
19:12
Speaker A
my capacity for implicit learning the way I can quickly associate things together right and so I would add to this of course as I argued before that this is also sort of how we're primarily caring for things being involved with
19:28
Speaker A
them finding them salient etc but nevertheless this is the this is the part of your cognition that is operating a lot of the time in the background in fact III want to I'm going to step aside from Stanovich for a moment and and and
19:49
Speaker A
propose to you that instead of thinking of these of discrete systems we can think of different states where you're in where one style or other is more foregrounded and the other is more backgrounded so I'll come back to that
20:01
Speaker A
let's do the what's s2 well s2 operates more deliberately in both senses of the word like deliberation where I'm engaging in reflection and deliberate in the sense that I am aware of it and intentionally directed in it so it's
20:17
Speaker A
deliberately right so it tends to not work association ly it tends to work inferential e argumentatively right argumentation in the philosophical sense not in the sense of having an emotional conflict with somebody the processing of course all processing has
20:39
Speaker A
and this is an important point some aspects of it that are implicit so this is more of a contrast of emphasis but this processing is much more explicit and it tends to be very slow so Kahneman has a book out right now thinking fast
20:57
Speaker A
and thinking slow that is a very good sort of discussion of this dual processing MA dual processing model because as I said there's a lot of theoretical argumentation and evidence that is converging on this so this is a
21:09
Speaker A
very highly plausible thing you need you see it's showing up in many many different domains within psychology alright so one way of thinking about this and this is a way in which standard vision Evans have tried to get a clearer
21:30
Speaker A
more precise way of distinguishing the two is the degree to which they're tapping making use of working memory so the idea is s2 really relies on working memory whereas s1 relies much less on it and so it's much more automatic in that sense in its
21:53
Speaker A
operation so let's let's take an example where you use the two systems right so your grocery shopping and you come up to the cashier and they're ringing you in and you've got a normal sort of basket full of normal groceries and the cashier says
22:23
Speaker A
to you well that'll be $1,000 please and you know what now where did that what come from right what did that what come from well you have associations between sort of these objects their prices sort of the amount you get you've got you've
22:39
Speaker A
picked up implicit patterns right notice how intuitively Association aliy implicitly and quickly you do what that's wrong it can't be a thousand dollars that makes no sense so you call the cashier and the question by using your s1 processing now what the
22:59
Speaker A
cashier has to do right though she can't just she or he can't just respond this way to you the cashier can't go nah it's a thousand I can sense it what this they have to do they have to
23:15
Speaker A
deliberately no they have to take out each thing they have to get up the bill they have deliberately right notice that the concentrate that the pay attention step-by-step make the argument to you explicitly and slowly no no look
23:28
Speaker A
look look look at this matches this met they're using that's to processing now these of course are in a trade-off relationship because the problem with remnants of course is instead of it acknowledges this but right part of the
23:46
Speaker A
problem with this is how much demand it puts on your working memory how slow it is so you cannot rely on it yet another argument why you can't Descartes your way through your whole of your existence right you can't rely on it for most of
24:01
Speaker A
your behavior because you will just head into the ocean of combinatorial explosion you will get so slowed down and so overwhelmed that won't be able to live your life you'll commit cognitive suicide but of course we have this for a reason we have this
24:19
Speaker A
because it is supposed to override to a degree this so notice that these two systems are in a basically an opponent relationship they are both working towards the same goal of making you adaptive but they tend to work in
24:36
Speaker A
opposite fashions and our stand of it sees s2 is largely having and there's deep truth to this having a corrective function for s1 all right so now I can first give you his theory of foolishness which he understands as dis rationale
24:56
Speaker A
yeah like dyslexia and then by implication his theory of rationality which because it's a comprehensive kind of rationality it deals with a comprehensive kind of foolishness it's now bordering on an account of what wisdom is so here's the idea what is
25:19
Speaker A
active open-mindedness doing well what's happening is this is the place where you know all the heuristics and biases are this is where they are operating and what happens here is they make you leap to conclusions remember when I did the
25:39
Speaker A
problem with you you know where you've got the pond and on day one there's so many lily pads and it doubles every day and on day 20 it's done on what day was the pond half covered and you're a swan
25:52
Speaker A
shouts at you ten days ten days in because it's half and half and that's how it works and that's wrong because on day 19 half the pond was covered right and what you have to do is s2 has to
26:04
Speaker A
basically override how you're leaping to conclusions how you leap to the conclusion that the people at the airport are in danger because of the representative heuristic or the availability heuristic so s1 is constantly giving but I need this that's
26:23
Speaker A
what makes me fat if I'm not leaping I'm not fast I'm not coping leaping and coping are deeply interdependent but the thing is sometimes and again it's unclear what the degree is that's one of the ways in which I think Baron is a
26:40
Speaker A
little bit more clear than by Stan of itch but sometimes we need to override this leaping to conclusion so he sees that what active open-mindedness is basically doing is teaching you to protect this processing from being overridden by the way s1 makes you leap
27:01
Speaker A
to conclusions you are foolish you have disregard to right to be properly protected from the interference from s1 to see what's going on here this is how he's ultimately responding to Cohen you had these two competencies you need both of them
27:28
Speaker A
they are constitutive of your cognitive agency there so they're both constitutive competences but this one can interfere with this one and that can cause you to behave irrationally what active open-mindedness does is to protect this kind of kind of processing
27:46
Speaker A
from that interference so that's Stan of itches central model now III think that's definitely a good account of active open-mindedness my central criticism of this is I think it's an insufficient account of rationality its insufficient I grant a lot of work has
28:07
Speaker A
been done here rationality is not being equated to intelligence it's not being equated to logic ality it's centered on overcoming self-deception there's an account of self-deception it's so flat on ok it's so platonic here's the monster and it's interfering with the
28:24
Speaker A
man right so platonic and so we get that interference effect that's what's causing us to be foolish that makes us self-deceptive if we cultivate active open mindedness then we can reduce the interference and that makes more comprehensively rational I think
28:41
Speaker A
that's all well it's all elegance is beautiful and the fact that it kids this kind of work keeps getting replicated and massively convergent it's so highly plausible and profound that's all I think that's all worthy of being noted
28:54
Speaker A
however let's look to this because is sleeping always a bad thing well I already implied you need to leap to cope but let's take a look right at the work of Baker Senate and CC from 1996 okay so
29:14
Speaker A
what they investigated a thing they called inductive leaping I think calling it inductive leaping is a mistake because I understand induction as an inferential procedure and what they're explicitly doing is not inferential nature but it is not inferential in
29:29
Speaker A
nature so I'm gonna suggest that we don't use that term and I'm instead going to use the more neutral term of cognitive leaping what's cognitive leaping well cognitive leaping how did they test it they tested it in the
29:45
Speaker A
following way so I give you various patterns that are unfolding across time and that write at various times I stop and I ask you you can tell me what it's going to be one version of it is there's
29:58
Speaker A
like we talked about this before I'm a bunch of dots and what's it going to be and more dots get filled and eventually you are able to leap and say oh it's going to turn out to be a sofa and
30:08
Speaker A
notice how you're doing stuff really going from features to Gestalt you're doing that leap and you're going from looking at the dots to looking through them you're doing an opacity transparency shift all that stuff we talked about right mindfulness is is
30:22
Speaker A
involved now why does that matter well what they found was something very important this allowed them to operationalize kind of the in at least an aspect of the inevitability of insight as often you don't know what's going on in an insight there's this leap
30:40
Speaker A
and what they say how they operationalize it was this you're a good leaper you're a good leaper if you can use fewer cues and accurately say what the final patterns going to be so if you're if you're if you like if you use fewer cues
31:02
Speaker A
and you're making lots of mistakes you're not very good if you're largely accurate but you have to get a whole bunch of cues then you're not a very good leaper but if you use few cues and get to the full you stall reliably right
31:16
Speaker A
then you're a very good cognitive leaper okay you're doing this you have this skill this facility with pattern detection pattern completion why is that so important well because that and that's what the experiment show this is directly predictive of insight the
31:36
Speaker A
better you are at leaping the better you are at insight so do you see the tension here if I try to shut off too much leaping to conclusions I'm also shutting off the machinery that makes me more insightful it's right we
32:02
Speaker A
have look we have to give up simplistic notions naive simplistic notions of rationality yeah I'm not accusing Stanovich of this not at all but what I'm saying is we have to is it being rational is a very complex process in which there are
32:25
Speaker A
trade-off relationships and a very complicated kind of optimization needs to be trained so we want active open mindedness to prett let's let's make this the error of interference so sometimes I leap to conclusions and that causes a lot of mistake in inference the
32:51
Speaker A
kind of stuff that Stanovich and what I need is active open mindedness to moderate that and ameliorate it in a significant degree right I wanted I want to leap to the insight and I need that for good control and
33:09
Speaker A
good control is central to being a problem solver essential to being rational so what do I need well it's interesting because if you turn to a domain outside of the academic domain and right we have to because rationality
33:28
Speaker A
is existential we have to pay attention to the context even in which we're theorizing about rationality right and if we're in a largely academic context we're going to think of rationality as primarily about theorizing and so this is a great danger to theorizing and so I
33:47
Speaker A
would argue if the rationality if the project you're engaging in rationality is the project of theorizing and I mean that broadly in the sense of generating scientific you know or historical theory right then active open mindedness is crucial but there are domains but it
34:06
Speaker A
goes the other way there's domains in which what you do not what you need right is you need to be able to come up with a transformative insight when you need a radical reconstruct in where's it domain and
34:27
Speaker A
where that's crucial well we've talked about it so this is good for theorizing the Jacobs in his book and you can see some related work by Teasdale points out there's an opposite context there's the context not of theory but there's the
34:48
Speaker A
context of therapy right I think it's broader than this but I'm using this because it's a good contrast and that that right the there's an illiterate of relation to help for mnemonic purposes so in therapy very often what's needed is and we've talked
35:05
Speaker A
about this remember your existentially trapped and you need this fundamental kind of transformative insight and you cannot infer your way through it we've already tackled that argument in you cannot infer your way through it and the problem in therapy is people try to
35:20
Speaker A
think their way through it that's Jacob's main point and I say related a book called the ancestral mind and there's the same point as being made and I think by Teasdale when he talks about metacognitive insight being central to therapy often what you need
35:41
Speaker A
is to try and shut this down try to trigger this let me think of frightened free association all right you have to try and shut this down prevent it from interfering right bring this into the foreground keep this in
36:08
Speaker A
the background so when we're theorizing we need this in the foreground and we need it protected we need it too seriously background and constrain this active open mindedness in doing this but in the therapeutic situation this needs to be much more foregrounded this needs
36:22
Speaker A
to be back rounded and it needs to we it needs to be constrained so it doesn't unduly interfere with this now with what we can ask ourselves is well what's a cognitive style right that makes this much more focal tries to constrain this
36:43
Speaker A
and really improves insight well we know what that is and teasdale in fact argues for it explicitly and it's what triggers metacognitive insight that's mindfulness so you think about how much in a mindful in a mindfulness practice I've tried to
37:02
Speaker A
argue that there we need an ecology of psycho technologies to cultivate the cognitive style of mindfulness right think of one think of meditation think about how much in meditation you are trying to write really constrain this shut this down reduce all that inner
37:19
Speaker A
speech all that inferential processing their deliberate or a direction right and you're trying to open this up in a very powerful way so notice that I now have write a cognitive style that is in a very important sense opponent not adversarial
37:42
Speaker A
but opponent to active open-mindedness notice that they are both sharing the training of attention and what you're paying attention to and how you're paying attention so this is great for planning and this as I said this is great for coping and especially when the
38:08
Speaker A
planning is epistemic when we're trying to theorize when we're planning for truth this is very good for coping especially when we're doing a kind of coping that's therapeutic in a broad sense in which we are needing to transform and undergo important
38:25
Speaker A
qualitative development so I think what's missing from Stanovich is a broader account of our competences and how they can be how they are played off against each other how there's a trade off relationship with them and part of
38:49
Speaker A
what I would argue and I'm going to come back to this more more directly later what goes into wisdom is a cultivation of both active open mindedness for inference and mindfulness for insight and then what we're going to need is
39:02
Speaker A
well what what coordinates them together how are they coordinated together how do i optimize the opponent not adversarial how do i optimize the opponent processing between them I want to come back to that and explore that in detail
39:17
Speaker A
with you because I can't push this any farther because as we as we push this farther we're getting farther and farther away from Stanovich who's theory and moving in towards a theory that I myself I'm going to propose to you the
39:31
Speaker A
work I've done with Lea Ferraro and then sort of critically reflect on that so I need you to remember this for when we come back to more explicitly talk about a theory of wisdom and to be fair descent of it she's ultimately no
39:43
Speaker A
offering a theory of wisdom and I think when he talks about rationality he really means theoretical rationality as opposed to what we might call practical or therapeutic rationality ok I want to stop here though and note it and
40:03
Speaker A
continue on with our investigation now of explicit theories of wisdom but I want to sort of pull one thing out of our discussion of substantive itch before we leave stand of itches good company and I want to use somebody
40:22
Speaker A
else's work to extend that a bit and to just add more teeth to this claim that rationality is ultimately an existential issue a way of understanding what Stanovich says is the following right when I use intelligence to learn
40:41
Speaker A
the psycho tech and the cognitive stock I can use intelligence to actually improve how I'm using my intelligence I can use my intelligence to improve right how the competencies are optimizing and I can therefore overall enhance my capacity for relevance realization we
41:01
Speaker A
can think of that as rationality but something else is emerging right out of this which I'm only suggesting now but we may perhaps be able to use our rationality to improve our rationality to make it more optimal overall and I
41:27
Speaker A
would suggest to you that's going to be crucial to wisdom that that's going to be an essential feature I would I would argue not everybody agrees with me on that's I'm trying to be really clear about this but I would argue that that
41:39
Speaker A
is a place in which we can find the locus for understanding the nature of wisdom how it relates to rationality and how it relates to intelligence what the nature of this is we're gonna have to come back to one more time please
41:56
Speaker A
remember when you see this word that I am NOT equating it to logic allottee or intelligence I've given you long arguments but I've tried to expand this notion right it's is much more about the reliable and systematic ability to
42:12
Speaker A
overcome self-deception and to afford the enhancement of development and meaning in life that's what I mean by it okay so let's keep this in mind let's take some time now right to take a look at some more explicit theories of wisdom
42:32
Speaker A
I can't look at them all this is a this is a growth industry I'm going to a conference tomorrow with it has a lot of the people that are working in this and it's going to be a discussion to try and
42:45
Speaker A
see if we can come to some consensus about this precisely because it is such an important topic a lot of good work has been done on it but again because there is such a multitude of viewpoints getting a clear consensus on this it's
43:00
Speaker A
going to be it's going to be a theoretical challenge okay now the I want to as I said do one more thing before I do that before I move to the explicit theories and I want to show you I want to show you a bit about this
43:22
Speaker A
and the point about this is to bring out something that stander which is not addressing which is the existential aspect of rationally the degree to which we identify with our higher cognitive processes okay so this is the work of
43:42
Speaker A
Dweck Carol Dweck and it's work on mindset she has a book entitled that and this is course is again an ongoing thing it's been taking up in a lot of different research so I want to describe an experiment to you and and then I want
44:04
Speaker A
to sort of challenge a little bit a potential ambiguity or confusion in in Dweck that I think we can clarify by making use of this work from Stanovich so what did the following thing sheet he brought she had a whole bunch of
44:23
Speaker A
experiments but let's talk about one she brought in a bunch of school children and she randomly assigned them to the three groups Group a group B and Group C now Dweck talks about two different ways in which you can set your mind towards
44:51
Speaker A
your your traits and the trait that's really crucial hood and this is relevant is intelligence so she talks about two views you can have two ways in which you can set your mind now it's a mindset because it's not just a belief it's the
45:04
Speaker A
way in which you are identifying with right it's the way in which you feel you are embodying the the traits we're talking about so you can have a fixed view of your intelligence or a malleable view okay and so in the fixed view you
45:21
Speaker A
think intelligence is like fixed basically sort of birth or earlier on and then once it's locked in there's not much you can do with it so for example my height is affixed to trait there's not a lot I can do to modify it it's a
45:35
Speaker A
fixed trait okay my weight is a much more malleable trait I can change it can it's quite variable it can change quite a bit so you may think that intelligence is more like my height you're sort of born with it you're fixed you got this
45:47
Speaker A
number assigned and that's it or intelligence is malleable it can develop and change now notice your behavior is going to be different if you think intelligence is fixed if you think intelligence is fixed your attitude towards error is that error will reveal
46:19
Speaker A
that you have a defect in a non changeable trait it'll reveal it'll it'll permanently disclose that you are not smart so fixed intelligence tends to turn error into permanent revelation right if I make mistakes that will show that I have low intelligence and once
46:49
Speaker A
once everybody knows that including myself there's nothing I can do about it and then I'm doomed to being a stupid person okay if you have the malleable view of intelligence error doesn't right error doesn't do that for you there doesn't
47:10
Speaker A
see error is now oh wait error points towards the skills I'm using I need better skills or the effort I'm putting it I need to put in more effort because if it's malleable I can do things to change it so the error says
47:27
Speaker A
the errors brace is pointing you need to make some changes you need to cultivate more skills you need to call to more effort now notice something right away please notice how the fixed view focuses you on the product right it focuses you on
47:42
Speaker A
right you just get fixated on the error oh no this focus is you remember the key of rationality it focuses you on the process the process okay so she has a lot of experiments showing that right to fix you and the malleable
48:02
Speaker A
view have a huge impact on your behavior but interesting thing the way how could how can you trigger people into this mode well if you're in sort of an authority position like like like being a teacher out of school the one way you
48:17
Speaker A
can trigger the mode and this is really a mode right the mode that people are in is how you praise them the kind of feedback you give them if I praise you using trait language like you're so smart you're so bright that's going to
48:38
Speaker A
tend to trigger this orientation if I praise you for the process wow you're really you're using a really good skill you're putting in a lot of effort for that that's going to make the process salient to you the more I make this
48:52
Speaker A
salient the more you're going to be in that mode the more I make this salient anymore you're going to be in that mode okay so I can praise the trait right or I can praise the process think about how important this is to parenting
49:11
Speaker A
or schooling okay so let's go back to the experiment we have these three groups the three group it's the control group they're all given a set of problems that have been pre-tested for I think they were great for it they could
49:24
Speaker A
all solve these problems they're challenging but they're all solvable and they all solve them so all groups solve them but group a is praised for its trait Group B is praised for the process and then Group C is given the neutral
49:39
Speaker A
just acknowledgement oh oh the praises we you succeeded so well in that problem okay so neutral so the idea is this is going to trigger right these people into the fixed view that's going to trigger people into the value of all view so now
49:56
Speaker A
what you do is you give the kids a bunch of tests you ask which ones want to take on some more challenging problems notice what i'm doing here i'm looking for need for cognition looking for need for cognition what i find is this group yeah
50:11
Speaker A
sorry that was completely wrong descrip says no i don't want to try harder problems why because if they try harder problems there's a very good chance that they will generate error and then error will generate right the recognition that
50:28
Speaker A
they're less intelligent and then they're permanently stained with that permanently marked the process people say yeah I'd like to try harder problems they have a need for cognition seems to be triggered of course neutral right then you give them some harder problems
50:46
Speaker A
and ask do they enjoy them and do do you not enjoy this yeah I enjoy this neutral now here's the crucial thing now you give them a set of problems that were equal in difficulty to the first set of
51:04
Speaker A
problems you get us give them a set of problems that were equal in difficulty to the first Center problem this has all been massively pre-tested so it's safe right and what you find is this group does about the same this group does much
51:15
Speaker A
worse and this group that's better than it did and now I want to I want to extend this and notice how this is starting to fold into a kind of self-deception right you asked these kids to write - I believe
51:34
Speaker A
the experiment was done in America you ask these people to write to a student in Germany that they'll never they will never meet by the way and report how they did on the experiment so these two groups write largely tell the truth they
51:50
Speaker A
just took you know 40 percent of these people lie about their performance okay what am I trying to show you I'm trying to show you the way you frame yourself the way you identify with your processing has a huge impact on your
52:16
Speaker A
problem-solving ability your proclivity for self-deception and your need for cognition rationality is an existential thing it is not just an informational processing thing now one thing that comes out of this is the question yeah but is intelligence fixed or malleable
52:46
Speaker A
and and wek is not quite clear about that the evidence is pretty clear that there's a few things you can do to modify your intelligence there's some suggestion that long-term mindfulness practice by enhancing attention and working memory can improve your your
53:10
Speaker A
measures of general intelligence but by and large intelligence is is fixed it's not that malleable and then you may say okay then this whole thing is based on you know lying to the kids right basically getting them to relate to
53:28
Speaker A
intelligence is something malleable not really not really at all because what we're actually talking about here and that's what I've been continually alluding to here is that something that is terrifically there's a way in which intelligence is terrifically malleable
53:46
Speaker A
and this is exactly what mine setting is the way in which intelligence recursively relates to itself is a way in which we can think about it being rational but that might sorry the way in which we can think about it being
54:00
Speaker A
malleable and you my word slip shows you what my thinking is a better way of talking about this is that intelligence is fixed and this is what what Santa argues but rationality is highly malleable and then here's Stanovich
54:14
Speaker A
whose main point about this we care too much for intelligence and not enough for rationality because yes intelligence is highly predictive of all these things and that's why measurements of G are such powerful predictors but if I wanted
54:30
Speaker A
to know something about you now following state of itches argument I want to know not how intelligent you are I want to know how rational you are and that is highly malleable okay so what I'm trying to show you is this that
54:45
Speaker A
rationality is an existential issue it's about how you're identifying with your own cognitive processing and the way in which that identification process can impede how you're applying and using an Intel or it can enhance it and then there's
55:00
Speaker A
the possibility right of cultivating the right kind of recursion and identity the right kinds of cognitive styles so somehow we have to put processes of identification processes of coordinating cognitive styles together and we can get a clear path for becoming much more
55:20
Speaker A
rational and as I'm suggesting to you therefore much more wise because if we if we use rationality to better learn how to use rationality and identify with our rationality then of course I'm suggesting to you that's wisdom and as I
55:35
Speaker A
promised we should now next we should now turn to some of the explicit psychological theories of wisdom now I can't as I've already mentioned I can't do all of them I'm gonna zero in on four theories that I think are quite
55:54
Speaker A
representative of central ideas in the psychology of wisdom I and then I will then propose I'll put my I'll propose my theory that work I've done with Leo Ferraro and I'll put that into sort of dialogue with these existing theories as
56:09
Speaker A
well as critiquing the theory that I the work that I did with Leo and then ultimately what we want to do is resituated account of wisdom right into its connection with the cultivation of meaning and the pursuit of enlightenment
56:27
Speaker A
we will take a look at that next time thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you [Music] you [Music]
Topics:rationalitywisdomproblem findingStanovichactive open-mindednesspsychotechnologyneed for cognitionintelligencecognitive biasmeaning crisis

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