More on The Protestant Work Ethic Fallacy

The blog Stumling and Mumbling has an interesting expansion here on what I labelled 'The Protestant Work Ethic Fallacy' in my recent post on doing Philosophy on weblogs...that's the misleading assumption that putting more thought in always gives us better results. The three main points made there (with links) are:

1) Quick judgments can often work well.

2) Thinking and gathering information can increase our chances of making particular kinds of mistake (e.g. overconfidence in our position)

3) In one of the few areas where it is easy to compare the results of laborious thinking with its absence,  the field of fund management, active management seems to produce worse results  on average than other options.

Which is not, of course, to say that hard thinking work is always a waste of time. But it doesn't guarantee anything; and, perhaps counterintuitively, it can produce worse results in some cases. The Protestant Work Ethic Fallacy is only a fallacy when it involves the assumption that longer and harder work always leads to better results...

Comments

[Edward Link]

Does 'better results' mean more trustworthy. By which I mean that they can be a more reliable basis for action towards achieving some desired end. What is going on inside our heads if we can arrive at more trustworthy results without explicitly considering all the options. What can be said about intuition and can such 'quick' results be well founded? How can we tell if a particular 'quick' thought was more trustworthy than giving the matter time to 'stew'.
Does this suggest that a mixture of explicit thought and sub-conscious activity should produce a better result then either one or the other alone. It would seem that such a technique has some practical validity.

[potentilla]

(1) and (2) are backed up with substantial amounts of science. (Malcolm Gladwell/Blink is an entertaining if slightly superficial summary).

(3) is wrong for various reasons - see St & M comments.

Acting without much conscious thought (using heuristics) is more likely to produce a good result the closer the original problem is to one humans had to deal with in their their evolutionary past (I do know quite a lot about evolutionary psychology, which does not use the terms genetic or racial memory btw). Almost nothing to do with money falls into this category. For money, you definitely do better by educating yourself in your relevant evolved heuristics and consciously avoiding them.