(By Daven Morrison)  This post is some brief follow-up musings regarding the preceding posting by Joe Koletar, KISS (“Keep It Simple, Stupid,” which could also be called, “KISOICM” or, “Keep It Simple; Otherwise I Confuse Myself”).

I believe that a part of what was happening in the jury were the challenges of fast and slow thinking.  Fast and slow thinking is a model of different problem-solving processes described by Daniel Kahneman.  Simply saying that 2X3=23 is an example of how a child uses fast thinking to not do the hard work of remembering or adding up the numbers.  Thinking about the rules (in this case, the legal requirements for conviction) is hard work, and it sounds as if the jury either could not or would not do the slow thinking required.  This is quite ominous.

Complicating this is the tendency for distracted people to use fast thinking more often.  They are likely to be distracted by the new media—smart phones, digested and summarized news flashes, etc..  Combined with the hard work required for slow thinking, the situation becomes logarithmically more ominous.  With a legal system based on jury assessment and processing of complex information, in a society trending toward distracted potential jurors, this trend is ominous indeed.

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