November 22, 2023

Smoke & Mirrors: Unintentional Dangers and Slow Thinking (Because Reasons 8)

50 minutes

EPISODE 98 | Smoke & Mirrors: Unintentional Dangers and Slow Thinking (Because Reasons 8)

Guest: Kent Weishaus, licensed clinical social worker, author of Stop Breaking Down: The Secret to Avoiding Overwhelm and Crack-Up

Why are there so many adherents to conspiracy theories these days? What are the mechanisms that encourage people to latch onto a particular narrative?

We are modern creatures with out-dated brains. Clinical social worker (and former TV guy) Kent Weishaus talks about various theories and cognitive biases, and champions slow thinking in an age that seems too fast for our minds to keep pace with.

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SECTIONS

03:48 - Smoke & Mirrors - TV, unreasonable expectations, wraparound for commercials, the hard edge

09:49 - Cognitive Distortions - Daniel Kahneman's Availability Heuristic, it's the system, TV was Gen X's buddy, we love fat (and sugar)

15:37 - Prospect Theory, Loss Aversion, the Endowment Effect, Aaron Beck's thought distortions, overgeneralization, "mind reading", slow thinking, I-know-how-this-will-end, please get raptured, humans crave structure, think about your thinking, Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems (IFS) says we are fragmented beings

26:10 - Towards Accuracy - E-Prime, people are not their diagnosis, slow thinking helps counteract otherization

33:46 - Too Much Information - Fast thinking feels good, apes with car keys, phantom urgency, unintentional dangers, too much sensory input

41:39 - Slow Thinking - Emotions are not uncontrollable, list the systems you're embedded in, nothing goes away in the digital system, Thomas Piketty and late-stage capitalism, the system is out of control

Music by Fanette Ronjat

More Info

Kent Weishaus website

Stop Breaking Down: The Secret to Avoiding Overwhelm and Crack-Up by Kent Weishaus

Kent Weishaus on IMDb

Availability Heuristic And Decision Making

Prospect Theory: What It Is and How It Works, With Examples

Loss aversion on BehavioralEconomics.com

The Endowment Effect: Why Perceived Value Increases with Ownership

Cognitive Distortions: Unhelpful Thinking Habits

13 Cognitive Distortions Identified In CBT

Cognitive Distortions: 22 Examples & Worksheets (& PDF)

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

About IFS (Internal Family Systems)

E-Prime on Wikipedia

Discovering E-Prime

E-Prime and Linguistic Revision

Wandering Gaia: Dispatches from the Anthropocene website for Gaia Vince

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Nature of the Modern Mind by Pierre Steiner

Turning the stone: embedding systems thinking in the everyday by Oliver Standing

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty

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