System 2 doesn't seem to be the agent able to make an argument for religion, since religion seems to be strictly System 1. But here I would caution against viewing the two systems hierarchically, kind of dumb vs. smart. System 1 is plenty smart.

I think system 2 is engaged in coming to believe the bible. In understanding the story, memorizing the parts, contemplating the wisdom of certain passages. Specifically, all the thinking that is deliberate. You can think very deeply and deliberately within some schools of thought that are entirely false. What matters in arriving at the truth is the process - the epistemic standards - during the time system two is engaged.

The Sunday school children may have an active system two regarding themes/wisdoms/characters in the bible. If they're never taught that the bible should be subjected to scrutiny and that ad baculum is a fallacy, there is no information that could push either of the two systems along the path of critically examining the bible. All you see is what there is. Lack of key information is the problem, not the disinterest of system 2.

Kahneman's shorthand is that when we think automatically we're in System 1, when we deliberate we're using System 2. But S2 often rubber-stamps what S1 gives us, so I don't find it that meaningful that S2 is used. (S2 is the means whereby we put a social face on the strong intuitions of S1.) When we deliberate we often don't do so rationally. If we do use rational process, we can only do that from S2, but usually we just can't see our way past the powerful "logic" of S1, or we may invest heavily in the "truth" we see coming from it, so we don't care to use logic. And that is often because S1 is where the powerful stuff resides. When we think of Truth, we get a strong feeling that can only come from System 1. If we can be shown that this is an error, we might assent intellectually from S2, but I think the feeling of truth disappears. The bottom line for me might be that using our minds is always a combination of the two systems, and truth comes from each but is different according to the source.

Speaking of how they affect conclusions, system 1 is data storage, and system 2 is processing. What's great about the data storage is there's a bit of an algorithm in the retrieval process, where associated information is selected between and retrieved.

If only a single piece of information is retrieved... well system two then has nothing else to go on, that information will be believed. All you see is what there is. That's not a failing of either system. It's simply the best way to operate when we have limited information.

I've found that during the creative process, there are tricks you can use in your deliberative reasoning to prompt system 1 to get better results. You can utilize system 2 to optimize system 1's findings. A lot of artistic and creative writing exercises tap into this, throwing permutations of information at system 1 to see what associations ping back.

DWill wrote: I'm employed in a field--mental health--that Kahneman would call a low-validity environment. Basically, there are few "regularities" in this environment that make it easy, or perhaps even possible, for anyone to make definitive judgments or predictions about mental health clients. Yet most in the agency operate as if there are. Kahneman cites work by Meehl that established the deplorable reliability of clinical prediction of all types. I would also say that diagnostic validity is always suspect; that's why a person can get three different diagnoses from three evaluators. The book has raised my antennae about all of this. I like his chapter on intuition, which is what people often say they're using when they make clinical judgments. kahneman pretty much says that intuition can't function accurately when a practitioner hasn't had the opportunity to learn the regularities of a system, in this case because the regularities haven't been established. Intuition is in fact most like memory, not a magical ability that comes out of thin air. It's always based on something that a person has learned, and what the person does is recall the information. If he's not aware consciously of the recall, he might assume he just divined the answer through some psychic means or other.

You have just described my biggest frustration doing the work we do. The diagnoses are just about useless. A diagnosis if not correct, which often they are not get in the way of appropriate treatment. Also, the criteria for getting a person into treatment is in reality so subjective, with little to no acknowledgment of this fact, that it makes it very difficult to get a person inpatient treatment or to keep them in treatment once they get past the first gate keeper. I work with the elderly, one of the problems I run into is one evaluator's dementia symptoms are another evaluator's psychotic symptoms and vice versa.

Thanks. Unfortunately, "experts" can have an especially negative effect on others if their opinions have direct influence. This might be especially true in mental health. I'm not knocking the field, because many people in it have appropriate humility about their judgments.

The later chapter on expert intuition is good. K says essentially that all accurate intuition comes from practice and immersion in necessary skills or knowledge. It's always memory-based. We have a fairly good reason to respect expert intuition in high-validity situations and fields, but not so much in low-validity areas, such as psychology. K mentions the scenario that starts off Gladwell's Blink, where the art experts just sense that there is something about the statues that tells them they're fakes. The museum experts disagree, but the outsiders turn out to be correct. Gladwell doesn't dig deep enough to find out just what knowledge the experts were drawing on, and apparently they didn't initially know themselves. But K is sure that it could have been discovered if the time had been taken. From K's perspective, it's not possible that a person can just intuit correct answers across the board. What people do who think of themselves as generally intuitive is to apply heuristics, which are rules of thumb that in many ways avoid the rational examination that the task requires.