Thinking Fast and Slow: Who Defines Intelligence?

Daniel Kahneman, in his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, presents a psychologist's delight, this problem: A plastic bat and ball costs $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Most people see the answer quickly and answer: The ball costs 10 cents, but, of course, if you stop to think about it, the ball costs 5 cents, because you have been told the bat costs $1 more than the ball so $1.05 - 0.5= $1.00, but $1.00-0.10= 0.95.

Kaheman tells us about only about 10% of students going to state schools answered correctly and about 52% of the kids getting into Harvard got it right. Kahneman goes on to assure us that one important aspect of intelligence is this capacity, to stop your "Fast Thinking (System 1)" the intuitive, quick thinking, and to bring to bear the slower "System 2" thinking.

I beg to differ.

I think this capacity is simply a matter of privilege and training. Once you have been told about this sort of trick, you can see it in many questions, and you can find the right answer. The kids whose parents can afford to send them to Kaplan SAT preparatory courses can learn these games, to become "more competitive," and can score high on exams which test this sort of thing, namely the SAT's.

The real definition of intelligence, read, "aptitude" or talent, i.e. the sort of thinking we find valuable in the world is quite different.

In fact, in my world, the person who can use his System 1 is at a premium. You can teach him to bring his slower thinking, System 2, to bear; that can be trained.

The patient is carried in to your examining room in the Emergency Room in shock. Looking at the patient, you take in hundreds, thousands of data bits and form an impression. He may have anything from a penetrating wound and blood loss to cardiogenic shock, and you go down one road or another based on initial observations, knowing as data comes in, you'll redirect. But you go with the first answer the ten cent ball, and that works until it doesn't, then you correct.

You do not, however, fail to come back around to the other possibilities, you have a check list for the things System 2 would have made you think about, and you get around to covering all the bases, at minute fifteen. But until that time, you have gone with System 1, and played the most likely possibilities, based on snap observations and judgments. And that is intelligence.

Quarterbacks, looking over defensive arrays at the line of scrimage take in lots of data, read cues, make mistakes, correct and fire off an answer in the form of a pass or an audible change to the planned play at the line. All of this puts quick thinking and slow thinking in play, but the predominant, and very intelligent, function is fast thinking.

When I was in middle school I had to take a course called, "Mechanical drawing," in shop class. Shop, I knew, was a "minor" subject, for kids who weren't "smart enough" to to go to college.

But I found mechanical drawing both difficult and fascinating. It made me look at a desk from just one angle an to see and draw only what you can see from that angle and it did not look at all like a desk from that angle. It was just a rectangle, could have been anything. It is precisely this sort of intelligence which is required of radiologists, as they move through different "slices" of abdominal organs and see them only from one angle, from north to south, head toward toe, then from back to front. The radiologist then has to reconstruct a three dimensional image in his mind from the two dimension images he's been scanning through.

As far as I know, there are no examinations given medical students for this intellectual capacity. Future radiologists are chosen based on examination which test skills more like "the bat and ball cost $1.10" variety.

Why? Because, there are no such exams available. The chiefs of radiology have never got together to think about what sort of skills and aptitudes radiologists really require and then worked with test makers to identify these capacities among medical students who will become radiology residents.

Or maybe the chiefs of radiology departments figure they do not need such exams because this sort of "intelligence" can be taught.

There is no Super Bowl in radiology. If chiefs recruit lesser talents, there is no way to know. No other radiology department beats you if you recruit a bunch of losers who had straight A's from kindergarden on, but who could not reconstruct an image to save their lives.

Medical school classes, in fact, are filled in much the same irrational way. They select kids who, to use the phrase from Moneyball, look good in jeans. That is, in baseball, talent scouts choose players who look athletic, who run the fastest sprint times and who look good in the baseball uniform. But, as a more methodical method was developed, teams discovered the player who looked terrible in a uniform, was often the better player: Yogi Berra was a pretty good catcher, but he could never impress anyone with his foot speed or his vertical leap.

Intriguingly, Daniel Kahneman, the man whose business it is to define intelligence, to devise tests which reveal real insight in those select few, commits the most astonishing leaps of assumption himself, in his discussion of studies which match behavior to blood glucose levels.

It is well established the brain runs of two things, minute to minute: oxygen and glucose. Deprive the brain of either for more than a few minutes and it spirals into dysfunction. But taking that little piece of knowledge, he spins off into studies which show that judges are more likely to grant parole to prisons in the hour after they've eaten lunch. There is so much wrong with his conclusions about the effect of blood glucose on brain glucose and brain function, it's hard to know where to begin.

He also spins off. drawing conclusions about behavior from imaging studies in which different parts of the brain "light up" as glucose utilization in those parts of the brain increase, conclusions which make the ten cent baseball look like genius.

The fact is, the brain is more like a ball of string than an assembly line. In the assembly line, you can pinpoint, geographically, anatomically, just where certain parts get added to the automobile. The brain is more like a computer, where things are lighting up and electrons are flowing in many places at oncem. True, there are "regions" where speech is centered, where vision is localized, more or less, but these regions are far more fluid and plastic than current imaging can really show.

I have not yet finished Kuhneman's book. This is just a progress report, a bulletin from the front. But I am beginning to see the general drift of the argument.

This is enlightening, because it suggests, just maybe, where we have gone wrong in our research and development world, at least that part of the R&D world located i the university, is we have been awarding the glittering prizes to the sons and daughters of the upper classes, and called it "Meritocracy."

It must also means something that Bill Gates and Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard, once they got their first glimmer of where the real ideas were pullulating.

It reminds me of the story told about Tony Fauci, which he has never forthrightly denied. Fauci is the chief the the National Institutes of Health Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He is also head of the task force on AIDS research. He was called into the office of the Chief of Medicine the day after he finished his chief residency at Cornell and all the grand mucky mucks of the Cornell University Mecical College were there and the Chief fo Medicine told him he was would be given admitting privileges to The New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center and appointed to the faculty. Fauci turned him down. The room was aghast. The news went viral through the medical center in a heart beat--and these were the days before computers.

Somebody asked Tony how he could turn down this ultimate plum, this glittering prize above all prizes.

"Well, " Fauci said. "Some day I'm going to be either very rich or very famous. If I stayed at Cornell, I'd be neither."

Tony could answer that question about the bat and ball, but he knew that's just gamesmanship. He wanted to make a real difference.