Are We Fooling Ourselves? Heuristics and Logic

I've noticed a few things lately. 

• People are quick to say wise sounding assertions. 
• People are quick to accept wise sounding ideas.

It goes like this. "You know what the problem with our city/state/country/world is? We just need to focus on diet or exercise or education or home affordability or a stronger military or clean energy or space exploration or "real" democracy or strong leadership or less (or more) of something."

Then, a bunch of people (including me) nod our heads in agreement. Why is that?

We are energy conserving machines. Our brains make up 2% of our body weight but use 20% of our metabolic energy. Even with that much of an energy budget, we can't let our brains go limitless. There's too much for our brains to do. Each day we make thousands of decisions. Most of those decisions have to be quick. So we create heuristics or mental shortcuts: "Meatless Monday", "Taco Tuesday", "TGIF", "No pain, no gain", "Trust the process". 

How often do we use heuristics? 90-95% of the time. 

But heuristics fail us. Your partner asks you to buy milk on your way home. You come home empty handed. "Where's the milk?" You reply, "I was hungry and you know they always say, 'Never go grocery shopping when you're hungry'?" This is a ridiculous example, but not too different from the last time a heuristic caused a conflict in my life. Am I the only one? Think about it.

The solution, you think, is good old logical reasoning. You come up with premises and make an argument. 

• "All dogs like to eat. All cats like to eat. Therefore, dogs are cats." 

Oops, that's not logically valid. So let's make another logically valid argument. 

• "All cats are animals. All animals like to swim. Therefore, all cats like to swim". 

Oops again. The premise "all animals like to swim" isn't always true. We need "all" of the premises need to be true.

The problem we have is that few things in life fit nicely into a simple syllogism. There's always an edge case or exception to the rule. Many arguments are really just heuristics dressed up in fancy clothes. They are shortcuts. 

Even Newton's Law, as perfect as it is, fails under relativistic conditions. 

So what do you do? How can you not fool yourself? Read my Intellectual Vision: Four Truths and the Eightfold Path

 “Whatever I say — you can sell it as wisdom. You say whatever — that can be wisdom. You can say ‘what matters is today’ — that’s wisdom. Or you can say ‘what matters is eternity’ — that’s also wisdom. In our ideological universe, the form ‘this is what matters’ is immediately consumed as a piece of wisdom.” -- Slavoj Žižek