this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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I don't think it's ADD. There's a book called 'thinking fast and slow'. In that book the psychologist separates the mind functions into two systems. System 1 is for intuition, no effort, fast thinking. System 2 needs effort, slow, but precise. What happens here is that simply people are trying to be efficient with their thinking and they use less system 2 which is required for reading.
Our brain generally relies on the first system way more than the second, to the point where what we think of as logical decisions are often actually intuitive ones that we then rationalize after the fact using system 2.
This is basically a power saving trick: Rational thinking uses way more energy than intuition.
I think there's also a bit of rationality behind that system, because
a) Trolls will just lie and declare an article says something it doesn't to "win" an argument or waste people's time making them read their bullshit article (usually something hosted on a website you don't want to give traffic to)
b) Some people on those forums might have tightly constrained time-frames for looking at things because they're students or they're working in a restaurant or retail shop or some other kind of closely managed service job where they can get yelled at by a supervisor for using their phone
c) There's a lot of content to get to on the internet
So, I think it's kind of a dick move to get mad at other people for not reading the article, and it's definitely a dick move to do that if you don't take the time to quote the specific part of the article they're claiming contradicts someone else
Good call. I can't remember if kahneman talks about it in the book but there is a fascinating experiment on people who have had a procedure that severs the connection between the left and right hemispheres (epileptics). They exhibit the impulsive tendency to explain away sensory evidence that contradicts their previous statements. The theory is that speech centres inhabit the left brain and in the absence of a measured analysis by the right hemisphere they just make something up without apparently thinking it through.