In 1979, a scientific paper published by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky gave rise to the emergence of a previously untapped paradigm within economic theory: The idea of irrationality in decision making, otherwise known as Prospect Theory. It was this theory that, in turn, created the field of Behavioural Economics, now so broadly understood as a cornerstone of any notion of human decision-making.
In their research, the two authors discovered a range of cognitive biases, which seemed to systematically lead humans to making suboptimal decisions, going against the apparent logic of a given situation. These biases were soon established as a threat to economic productivity and profitability, and, ever since, there has been a noticeable movement within management science toward rationalizing decisions, based on reliable statistics and the most “objective” facts available.
This development is of course strongly reflected in our most recent technological advancements: With an unprecedented use of sophisticated computing, analytics, and artifical intelligence across a variety of industries and complex processes, it appears as though we were quickly and relentlessly moving to a world that is dominated by rational decision-makers in favour over the fallable human, who is simply too prone to the cognitive loopholes in his own thinking to compete with our intelligent machines. After all, anything digital revolves around learning and optimization, in an eternal loop of creating more and more accurate representations of the reality of a given situation.
But, as with every great invention, there are eventual downsides to our craze for optimization. There are, in fact, two tremendous curses that come with increased rationality and knowledge, and are often misunderstood or ignored.
The first of these is the curse of demystification. I call it that, because the increase in knowledge over anything simultaneously erodes part of our hopes and imaginations about that very thing. Sometimes the new knowledge in itself is gratifying enough to let us ignore the pain of losing our intellectual innocence, if you will, but oftentimes we can’t quite shut out the feeling of having lost this innocence, this protected state in which we could hypothesise and dream about the implications of the reality we experience; in which the experience, in fact, carried greater weight than the objective facts of reality.
Humans derive great pleasure from learning, but at the same time they derive pleasure from not knowing. An essential notion within romanticism is to feel and experience things that cannot quite be put in words, instead of meticulously trying to label and analyse them as we do now. I argue that the surge of rational thinking takes away our ability to enjoy the indescribable and intangible, and to thrive in an experience only through what we sensually perceive, instead of what we intellectually assert. This goes along with an inability to comfortably deal with situations we cannot control, as we have gotten used to understanding things so deeply that we can shield ourselves from uncertainty. This, however, as an ill-formed ambition that can only take away from our ability to stomach and deal with the unpredictability that is so characteristic to human life.
The second curse is the curse of self-alienation. Rational thinking, as much as it is admired by many, tends to exclude judgment and intuition from the decisions we make, hence creating a state in which we are much less open to suggestions from what is commonly referred to as “gut feeling”. As such, this gut feeling has been demonised through Prospect Theory, as it is considered to represent the enemy of optimal decisions. The terrible side effect of this demonisation is that we have started to systematically suppress intuitive thinking, believing that it can only misguide us and not possibly yield any benefits for our decisions.
In the absence of intuition, we forget what it feels like to listen to our inner voice. As statistics and objective facts are purely external, and intuition is purely internal, we have come to understand that whatever decision-factors originate from within ourselves cannot be trusted and are strictly inferior to the “facts”. Intuition is emotionally charged, as it represents the part of a decision-making process that respects and takes into account our current needs and desires. This should be considered a valuable self-preservation mechanism more than a threat to good decisions, as our psychological wellbeing is directly tied to respecting our inner needs in the decisions we make.
In the above-described way, suppressing intuition in our thinking allows us to build a dangerous mistrust toward our inner world of feelings, as we are told that it cannot serve us to create an accurate idea of the outer world which we associate with and want to find a place in. Simultaneously, a loss of intuition creates a disconnection between our concsious decision-making apparatus and our subconscious, but highly valuable expression of emotions, needs and desires. The more we disconnect from our inner self and learn to rely on facts only, the more we tend to disrespect our spiritual balance, and the more likely we are to develop health issues and self-contempt over how badly we treat ourselves.
It is worth thinking about how far to tip the scale in terms of rationality, as a certain extent of spontaneous, intuitive and impulsive thinking can be an anchor for us to not lose touch with ourselves, and to be able to enjoy life even in the absence of certainty. Hence, harnessing demystification and self-alienation should be a priority in the process of technological innovation.
