Two Minds Blog

I have been writing this blog for just over a year. My initial commitment to myself was that I would try it for 6 months, and if nobody cared or I ran out of things to say I would drop it. That hasn’t happened — there have been about 350 unique readers in the first year, and  my list of ideas for posts is longer now than when I started. Both of those seem like promising signs. Still, 350 isn’t a lot in the world of the Internet, even for a somewhat specialized academic blog like this one. So if you like an idea that you read in this space, please comment, repost, or otherwise pass it along.  I will keep trying to get the page out to new readers, and I’d appreciate your help. Here is some of what you can look for in this space in 2020: •   More on mindfulness  – previous posts on how mindfulness  can help us to comment the Narrative and the Intuitive Minds, and the use of new sensor technologies to study mindfulness , were each  very popular. In...

In this post I’m returning to another of the classical sources of TMT, Plato’s student Aristotle. Although TMT as a whole is more Platonic than Aristotelian in its separation between Narrative ideas and the Intuitive events of the physical world, the theory includes a strong idea that behavior can be “trained” through practice . In the Nicomachean Ethics   (350 B.C.), a manual for living addressed to his son Nicomachus, Aristotle's writing addressed the idea of training new behaviors as a process of developing virtues . If our behavior is determined entirely by the Intuitive System, as TMT suggests, this means that our actions are not the result of in-the-moment conscious choices that we make. To change our behavior, we instead need to modify our habitual tendencies to respond in one way or another. This fits with the classical idea of virtues: That it doesn’t just matter  what we do  in life, but rather  what kind of people we are. This same idea came up i...

Preet Bharara is the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a Federal prosecutor by profession and the author of the recent book Doing Justice . His book is about how people in the legal system try to make decisions about what is true  in cases where the facts are muddy, and also how they attempt to determine what is right  in assigning punishments proportionate to a person's crimes. These are very serious and consequential decisions, so Bharara and his fellow prosecutors are strongly invested in trying to make them correctly. Their best methods make use of both the Narrative System and the Intuitive System, using the strengths of each one to balance out the weaknesses of the other. An interesting feature of our legal system is that it purports to offer not just opinion or interpretation, but a determination of objective facts. Mistakes can still be made, of course, but the legal system is not offering spin; Bharara's first rule for a prosecu...