Balancing Reflective and Reflexive
On April 20th 2015 Professor Steve Peters came to the University of Sheffield to present “Getting the best out of yourself and others – befriending the Chimp within”. Peters is a psychiatrist who used to work in Sheffield’s medical school as Dean of Undergraduate Education. He also worked with British cycling, the snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan, the Liverpool footballer Steven Gerrard and many others.
At the time, Peters was seen as one of the key people behind the success of British cycling, so My cycle group attended Peters’s talk en masse. We listened to him describe his “mind management” model as expressed in The Chimp Paradox. For Peters, performance in sport is about finding a balance between the “chimp” and the “human”, two different representations of our selves.
That same year I was reading Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Like Peters’s book Kahneman’s work also has a dual process model motivating it. Dual process ideas can be traced back to William James’s Principles of Psychology and more recently Michael Posner and Charles Snyder developed the dual-process model of the human mind in Attention and Cognitive Control where they referred to System 1 (the chimp) and System 2 (the human).
Dan Andrews' illustration of Chapter 7. See scribeysense.com
At the time, I had begun to focus on public understanding of machine learning. And I borrowed these ideas (and Jonathan Haidt’s descriptions) to share an understanding of what machine learning was providing. I explained that what we’d produced so far was more like the “fast thinking”.
For Peters, the balance between the “human” and the “chimp” is what gives performance in sport. Today, I’ve been interviewing undergraduates for my college. I can’t help but feel the strong relationship between the way a sportsperson’s capabilities come together during a match and the way a prospective computer scientist’s capabilities need to come together in interview.
Both the sports person and the student relying on trained behaviours which mean that often they have good intuitions. But sometimes they need to step back from their intuitions and reflect on where they are going.
From motor intelligence to mathematical instinct, it feels like there’s a full spectrum of decision-making approaches that can be deployed and that best performance is when they are judiciously deployed according to the circumstances. The Atomic Human tries to explore this in different contexts and I think Dan Andrews did a great job of capturing some of those explorations in his image for Chapter 7.
I think the reason why they relate is because in both cases there is time pressure, it’s from the outside world that pressures come and require us to deliver a conclusion on a particular timeframe. What I find remarkable in human intelligence is how we sustain both these fast and slow answers together, so that we’re ready to go with some form of answer at any given moment. That means that as individuals we are filled with contradictions, differences between the versions of our selves we imagine versus how we behave in practice.