Pets

   My family hasn't had successful experiences with pets.  For one reason or another, each—although much loved—had a short history with us.

  We got our first dog after my son David begged for a pet when he was about five.  Helen bought a Yorkshire terrier, which David named Sugie.  She was a wee thing—so small that when she jumped off a curb just a week after we got her as a puppy, she broke a knee and had to walk in a cast for months.  Despite her Lilliputian size, she dutifully sat by the stroller of David's baby sister Abby, defending her from the neighborhood's large dogs if they dared to come near—she would ferociously chase them off by yipping and nipping at their heels.  
  

David and Sugie

  Unfortunately for me, Sugie had a propensity for getting into poison oak and soon sensitized me to that weed, whose effects I'd never previously suffered—I got successively worse cases of it.  Nor was Helen's asthma helped by Sugie's dander.  After a few years, Helen left her at her mother's when visiting Utah one summer.  Sugie's memory was superb, though: when I visited Utah two years later, she immediately jumped onto my lap.  I was thankful that the homestead didn't seem to harbor poison oak.

  Our next animal lived in an outside cage: a husky rabbit, BunBun, which we inherited from friends.  He was allowed to wander freely in our back yard during the day, where the kids played with him.  "Dumb as a bunny" had no meaning for him, for he would endlessly play hide and seek with them, and would always win.  The only way to attract him from his well-chosen hiding places was for David to lie on the ground and play dead; then BunBun would hop up to him and sniff at his head to make sure he was alright.

Abby and BunBun

  Alas!  BunBun didn't always hide so effectively.  We had hired a neighbor girl to feed him and release him to run free in the yard each day during a month's vacation we took.  The day before we returned, a dog managed to get into our yard, and dispatched BunBun to rabbit heaven.

  Abby begged for another rabbit, so we got a little Dutch one, for which I built a hutch on our upstairs deck, where she could roam freely, away from marauders. Abby pledged to take faithful care of her, but I ended up doing most of the work.  Once, after a week of doing it all, I asked Abby if she had fed the rabbit.  She blanched, for she hadn't, and now feared that the rabbit must have died.  After running to the hutch, Abby was relieved to find the bunny in good health.

  This rabbit hadn't heard of "dumb as a bunny" either.  Although the walls of the deck are more than three feet tall—some ten times the bunny's height—and opaque, she soon figured out that freedom must lie on their other side.  She somehow managed to get to the top of them (probably via one of the lounge chairs), scramble over our roof, and spring to the nearest garden wall, never to be seen again.

  We thought a dog would engage Abby more, so we bought her a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, which she called Buttons.  Abby was indeed totally enamored of this pet, and the feeling was reciprocal.  One of his tasks was to awaken Abby each school-day morning, and he would wait anxiously in the kitchen until given the go-ahead.  When told "Go wake Abby," he would scramble lickety-split down the wood floor of the hallway, make a noisy, skidding turn into her room, then jump on her bed.

Abby and Buttons

  Helen's asthma regrettably intervened again, even more so than with Sugie.  To the sorrow of all, a year or two later we decided to return him to the breeder, who lived in Washington state.  It fell to me to send him off at the airport.  I still remember his baleful eyes looking accusingly at me through the door of his cage as he was driven off on a cart to be loaded onto the airplane. 

   It must be karma.  My family seems not to have been meant to live symbiotically with pets.   Balancing the karmic equation, I note with some satisfaction that we don't eat any of their four-legged cousins, confining ourselves to fish and fowl.  That must give us some standing among quadripeds, if not exactly for longevity of relationships with them. 

La Bella Italia

  Although I've written here about my experiences in Britain, Russia and France [1, 2, 3], I've so far neglected Italy, a favorite.  Despite my surname, I have no ancestors from that country that I know of, although I feel an intense kinship with it.  I cannot be other than rhapsodic: Italy cooks the best cuisine; lilts with the most musical language; sparkles with some of the world's most verdant countryside and beautiful towns and cities; stuns with its gorgeous classical art, churches and monuments; beats the world in modern design; overwhelms with the loveliness of its people.

  I won't prattle about Italy's museums, monuments and other tourist attractions, dazzling though they may be. Because of its foundational place in Roman and Greek antiquity and the Renaissance, Italy has more of these than most, and you've no doubt seen them.  Rather, I'll reminisce about some of the personal experiences that enamored me of the country.

  An earliest memory: Helen and I were visiting Rome in 1967 with David, who was not yet two.  We'd arrived at our hotel at about 7:30 pm, tired and with David becoming cranky.  The concierge recommended a nearby trattoria where he said we could get a quick meal; but it was Friday night and we found a long waiting line.  We joined the line, imagining it was the best we could do.  Soon the maître d' came by and scolded us: "You can't let the bambino wait for food at this hour!  Come with me."  He seated us, brought a roll for David, and said he would immediately bring a plate of pasta for him.  "The two of you can wait for your food, but he must eat."

  A later memory, this one concerning Abby:  We were driving with her through the Veneto in 1983; she was 12 at the time.  It was foggy—I could  barely see the road ahead.  As we rounded a curve, the fog broke in patches and Abby shouted, "Stop, Daddy!"  Fearing that I was about to hit something, I brought the car to a quick halt.  But Abby had yelled because she had been staggered by suddenly seeing the 16^th-century Villa Barbero, a Palladian masterpiece, through a gap in the fog.  Luck was with us: the villa was open that day, so we could feast our eyes on its marvelous architecture and its still-vibrant Veronese frescos.  It was then, I am sure, that Abby decided to become an architect.

Villa Barbero

    Still later, when visiting Abby in Florence in 1992, where she was studying on a college semester abroad: Abby had absorbed Helen's and my love of Italy and the Italians.  As she took us to the many out-of-the-way sights and restaurants that had become her favorites, I was charmed by how patiently everyone encouraged her to speak in her adequate but still-faltering Italian, urging her with smiles to finish her sentences.  The Italians must be the most child-centric people in the world.

  There are so many more threads in the pastiche of my memory:  The infinite variety of pasta dishes; pasta is surely the primordial tranquilizer, which must partially account for the serenity of the Italian soul.  The delight of participating in a national pastime— watching opera—especially in provincial opera houses like the beautiful one in Trieste, a mixture of La Fenice on the inside and La Scala on the outside.  The surprise that even I—an inveterate hater of shopping, especially in big cities—actually enjoy the experience in Milan, where focused boutiques limn the elegance of Italian clothing design.  The joy of staying in small towns like Asolo, a jewel of the Veneto.

  Our favorite spot in the country?  That has to be Portofino, which we visited time and time again.  It was to be Abby's wedding site until the 9/11 catastrophe struck just a few weeks before, and the wedding plans there had to be canceled.  Helen often said that she wanted her ashes to be strewn in the hills above that lovely town, although I haven't been emotionally able to accede to that wish.  

Portofino

  A final, wrenching memory: a last boat ride with Helen and Abby in Venice in 1998, on the way to the airport just before returning to the U.S., where Helen died a few months later.  I am so glad that she got to enjoy la bella Italia once again in her final days.

Helen's Farewell to Italy

Mogie

  There's an elephant in my family.  Not a real one of course, though neither is he pure fantasy.  He has been with us for almost forty years, first appearing when my daughter Abby was three or four.  I had gone into her room to awaken her, and—tired of her imaginary friends, Blink and Blank, who she insisted were real—I was on all fours as a diversion from them, trumpeting like an elephant and swaying my head.  Abby immediately joined the make-believe. 

  She named her new friend "Mogie," because that's what his call sounded like. They were soon roaming around the house, she leading Mogie with her arm around his head, identifying all the rooms and furnishings to him and making a home for them under the dining table.  As Abby became firm friends with Mogie, he and Daddy became ever more distinct in her mind—one or the other might be present, but never both simultaneously.  Blink and Blank were never heard from again.

  Originally Mogie could say just one word, "Mogie"—yet by modulating its intonation and tempo, he could make his feelings known.  Abby soon taught him a small English vocabulary, which he learned to pronounce within the constraints of his vocal mechanism.  His syntax was never very good, but he and Abby were able to talk in a sort of pidgin.  He would say, "Mogie no like Abby go school leave Mogie 'lone," to which Abby would reply, "Abby have go school, bring Mogie-food for Mogie when come back."

  Mogie was an especially valuable friend when Abby's brother David, six years older than she, teased her.  She would scream "MOGIE!" and Mogie would charge into the room, roaring his own name, knocking David over and trampling him.  The first time this happened, David was shocked; still, he was smart enough to adopt his own alter ego, a little dog Jerry who snapped at Mogie's legs.  The teasing was soon forgotten amid the general uproar of Mogie and Jerry battling while Abby tried to separate them.

  Abby's Mommy also had to contend with Mogie.  If she was being cross with Abby, he would charge at her, pushing her into a corner with his head.  She sometimes had to pour water over him or slap him with a dish towel to defend herself, reducing Abby to tears.  Mommy would say that Mogie would be put out of the house if he didn't behave himself, and Abby would plead with Mogie to calm down.  It isn't easy to pacify a stampeding elephant.

  Mogie was soon traveling with the family on vacations.  Now it was Daddy's turn to complain: he was infuriated at having to buy two adjoining airplane seats for Mogie so that he could fly comfortably, and to rent station wagons with enough room for him in the back.  On some trips there were occasions when Mogie got separated from the family.  Once, in Italy, because he had binged on pasta, he got stuck between the walls of a narrow lane on Capri; his plight went unnoticed by the family in their concern for Abby, who had fallen ill.  When Mogie finally found his way back the next day to their hotel on the mainland, he was furious with Abby, who had by then recovered: "Mogie stuck 'tween walls Capri, shout 'HELP!!'  Abby no come.  Stuck six hours.  Firemen need crowbars pry Mogie out.  Miss last boat, sleep on wharf.  Abby no love Mogie no more, leave him Capri."  Abby rubbed his chafed sides, cooed to him, and shared some of the food that Mommy had ordered from room service.

  Although Mogie started out to be just a way for Abby and Daddy to have fun, he later became an extra way for them to relate to each other.  When Daddy was grumpy or preoccupied or inattentive—which Abby thought was excessively often—she could unfailingly get his attention and affection by yodeling, "Mogie, Mogie, Mo-oh-gie, Mo-oh-oh-oh-gie," until Mogie had to respond, and soon they were giggling and cavorting.  And when Abby was blue or sulky, or when Daddy felt he needed a few big hugs and couldn't rouse Abby to give them, all he needed to do was drop to his hands and knees, wag his head from side to side, and mewl "Mo-oh-gie?" in the softest voice.  Abby would rush to him, hug him, and say, "Oh, what a good elephant!"

  As Abby approached her teens, Mogie started saying that he was really a little girl's companion and, as Abby was no longer a child, Mogie would have to leave.  Abby couldn't stand hearing this.  Not only would Mogie leave, but Daddy would become just plain, unmagical Daddy.  She would get panicky (no make-believe here!) and beg both Daddy and Mogie not to let this happen.  Daddy realized that he too would miss Mogie if he were to leave; Mogie's moments with Abby were really special.  Daddy and Mogie decided, as one of Abby's presents for her thirteenth birthday, to give her Mogie forever.  They felt that they were giving themselves a gift too, one that all three of them would enjoy for a long time.

  I eventually wrote a book about Mogie's adventures with the family.  It was illustrated by the very talented Bryan Johnson-French—actor, musician, and artist in many media, whose latest artistry is masquerading.  His tesselated illustration for the cover of the book tells the whole story:

  Mogie is still part of the family, graying along with me.  My grand-daughters were raised in his presence: when they were younger they frolicked with him as Abby had.  He is not as spry as he was forty years ago, and his bellowing sounds a bit irritable.  Aged or not though, he has been a wonderful family member to have had all this time!

 

  

Aging

  "You're slumping again, Dad," says my daughter Abby.  "Yeah, and tilting to the left too," echoes my son David.

  It is their youth redux, when they could win any battle by joining forces against their common enemy, me.  I remember their old tricks and make a valiant attempt to fend them off:  "Well," I say, "I'm pretty old, and old people do tend to slump.  Anyhow, it would be nice if you were to mind your own business.  I am comfortable in my own skin."  I say this as grumpily and peevishly as possible to accentuate my age (not hard to do).

  They are having none of it.  "You're not old," they cry in unison to this octogenarian.  "Anyway," says Abby, "Mom made me promise not to let you become an old man!"  She says this as if she could stop time in its tracks.  As if I were in denial, not she.

  Don't get me wrong.  I love my children and appreciate their concern for me.  Nonetheless, I am reminded of the joke I heard on TV in the 1960s, told by comedian Sam Levenson (1911-1980) as he complained about the changing relationship between parents and children:  "When I was a boy and my father said 'Jump!', I asked 'How high?'  Now when my son says 'Jump!', I ask 'How high?'  When's my turn?"

  Aging is a strange process indeed.  Things that seemed quintessentially important decades ago turn out to have no importance at all.  Activities that were the center of one's life recede into dim memory.  (My doctor once told me of a long-retired patient who, when asked what he had done in his career, furrowed his brow and said, "I think I was a dentist.")  Soul-disrupting emotions—anger, impatience, disapproval—become ever so much less intense.  Time quickens—I do what I would have previously considered nothing and find out that a day has passed quite enjoyably.

  (I have a theory about that:  As one's metabolism slows, so does one's internal clock compared to the external world's.  One internal second, long ago synchronized to an external second, now passes while several external seconds have gone by.  To convince you of my point, I only have to ask you to compare two time spans: how long a summer vacation from school seemed to last when you were young and how fast summer goes by today.)

    There are pluses and minuses in aging.  The greatest benefit for me is a sense of peace: fewer and fewer things rile me, and the equanimity I seek, which I have frequently mentioned in this blog [1, 2, 3], comes easier and easier.  Retirement, which for me started 18 years ago, became—after a year or two of decompression—a blissful way of life in which I can do all those things that I hadn't time for in "real life," including writing the diary that is this blog.  I can control my own calendar, scheduling as many or as few items on it as I want, with only a scattering of "musts" imposed by outside forces.

  So far there are blessedly few minuses: more aches when arising in the morning; slower perambulation; the unseemly effort entailed in getting up off the floor after I've sat down on it with my younger grand-daughter; after half a lifetime playing tennis, hanging up my racquet because slowing reactions have taken the fun out of it.  A heightened awareness compared to younger days that my life after all is not of infinite extent; an almost-detached curiosity about how fate will contrive to end it.  But these latter thoughts aren't maudlin, as equanimity now rules my psyche.

  So too does Ecclesiastes now govern my philosophy:  "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."  It is my favorite book of the Bible, for—although it is usually interpreted as pessimistic—in my age I see it simply as a wise understanding and acceptance of the natural cycle of life and the cosmic insignificance of worldly striving.  "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun."

  Now, if I could only get my kids off my (slumping) back …

Philosophy, Schmilosophy!

  You've already been introduced to my son David, for I've linked to two of his songs elsewhere in this blog [1,2], and he wrote a guest posting praising the LSD-induced creativity of the 1950s-1960s Bay Area [3]. 

  Recently, David has seen several of his friends' fathers die.  More acutely aware of the inevitable, he has suddenly increased the frequency of his visits to me from London.  It's a gesture that has deeply touched me.  Still, I feel like any or all of the Jewish mothers in this venerable joke:

Mother 1:  "My son is an entrepreneur, starting companies left and right, but—bless him!—he writes to me every day!"

Mother 2:  "Huh!  My son runs a big multinational company, yet he finds the time to call me each day from all parts of the world!"

Mother 3:  "That's nothing!  My son, as busy as both of yours combined, spends an hour a day just talking to his doctor about me!"

(Joking aside, I should here also thank my architect daughter Abby, who calls me almost every evening—from all parts of the world!—to chat and wish me good night.)

  On his most recent trip to California a few weeks ago, David and I explored our very different views of the universe.  My universe is random at its core and is without any transcendental meaning.  His has a cosmic unity of which everything is a related part, so he sees the whole and his place in it as having an ethereal purpose.  Although neither of us is religious in the practicing sense, I think our contrasting world views roughly register the difference between two of the faces of the Jewish God that I earlier discussed: Elohim and Adonai.  The former, the Creator of the universe, lets it unfold in chaotic ways and cares not a fig for us mortals as we wend our way through His maelstrom.  The latter acts as an agent who transforms the chaos of creation into order and sanity, representing our striving to make sense of our existence.  I relate to Elohim; I believe that David would more likely cleave to Adonai.  Of course, since the central precept of Judaism is that God is One, a true believer must accept the whole of this Janus-like deity, a position I think neither of us can accept.

  Our differing viewpoints sometimes lead us to loggerheads.  David holds that I am denying a vital link to a spiritual mind-essence unifying all of creation.  (I believe philosophers would call him a panpsychist.)  I can't fathom this: I point to my head and insist, "What I am is only what's in here, no more, no less!"  On the other hand, he cannot understand my passive acquiescence in an underlying dominion of chance.  Since our universes are so different and each is so much a matter of metaphysical axiom, I often try to bring our discussion to a close by using Wittgenstein's admonition, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."  I see no point in arguing about axioms.

  On a more mundane level, though, our disagreement is a study in irony.  I, believing in the suzerainty of disorder, have striven to establish localized order in my minute corner of the cosmos, an attempt I liken to the possible but vastly improbable spontaneous rushing of all air molecules into one corner of a room.  He, convinced that there is a oneness in all of existence, is unconcerned with random dislocations and anomalies, which he thinks will work themselves out as a matter of karma.  So here's the paradox: I try to construct a preternaturally orderly life in spite of universal turbulence, and he—who is unconcerned that life is buffeted by turbulence—calms his mind, almost as a Buddhist, with a sense of cosmic unity and peace.  Starting from such incompatible foundations, we seem to have arrived at similar places, each with its own sort of equanimity.

 

  Are our lives therefore that much different, given the polar philosophical axioms from which we start?  Except for a 35-year difference in age and therefore a generational difference in outlook, and very different financial statuses, I'd say "No."  We share the same concerns about inequity and iniquity in the world, the same worries about the environment, the same political outlook, the same moral code.  In a word, our vast difference about the grand question of the nature of the universe seems not to reflect itself all that much in how we conduct ourselves in it.  We should be on different channels altogether, but it seems we operate instead mostly on the same one. 

  Does that not say something about the value in everyday life of philosophical disputation?  The old New York Jew that I am wants to say, "Philosophy, schmilosophy!"

Intuition and Expertise

Originally published March 21, 2012: 

  Today I challenge Nobelist Daniel Kahneman on his own ground.  Wait!  Let me have my say before you cry chutzpah!  Then you can decide for yourself whether I'm bonkers or not.

  In a recent book for the lay reader, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman summarizes his life's work: understanding how we make decisions.  He postulates that we use two mental mechanisms for this purpose.  One is fast and intuitive ("System 1"), the other slower and more analytic ("System 2").  System 1, the focus of the book, probably developed evolutionarily so that we could reflexively act when we sensed the presence of a saber-toothed tiger.  We still use it to jump out of the way of a speeding car.

  But Kahneman asserts that System 1 also makes snap intuitive decisions in non-emergency situations.  These are more likely than not to be wrong, he says, because we are led astray by factors irrelevant to the problem at hand.  We are influenced by special insights we think we have and biases we do have. We may unwittingly replace a hard problem we are trying to solve with an easier problem we know how to solve.  Or we simply may be dyspeptic from a meal we just ate.  Kahneman lists many such extraneous factors, of which we are generally unaware, and demonstrates their deleterious effects by presenting data from numerous sociometric and psychometric experiments. 

  I have no quibble with him so far.  I agree that our distant ancestors, in learning to leap away from saber-toothed tigers, made it all too easy for us to leap to conclusions.  But Kahneman has given intuition an unwarrantedly bad name.  The thrust of his work has been to show that we largely act through irrational, error-ridden intuitive impulses.  He therefore gives short shrift to a huge domain where the intuitive impulse is rational and reliable: expertise-driven intuition, or expert intuition for short.

  Kahneman has relegated this domain to a tiny sliver of his book, only one of 38 chapters, where he describes his extended "adversarial collaboration" with Gary Klein, a defender of expert intuition.  In other chapters, Kahneman harps monotonously on examples of "experts" being derailed as readily as non-experts by extraneous factors.  Alas! the poor man has spent much of his life--and most of this book--studying "experts" like stock market analysts, CEOs and pundits.  Not my kind of expert or expertise, nor Klein's.

  As I use the term, expert intuition involves the years-long migration of expertise developed by System 2 into System 1.  Even Kahneman notes that while a chess novice might spend minutes or hours slowly thinking through the likely results of any move (System 2), a grandmaster can intuit the same results from a glance at the board (System 1).  Klein has studied how experienced firefighters can intuit from subliminal sensory cues when a building is about to collapse, without knowing quite how they do it, and act instantly on that intuition. 

  Kahneman and Klein did come to some agreement, among them conditions under which the intuition of experts can be valid, namely an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable, and an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice.  Those conditions apply to problem solving in engineering, so it is a good platform from which to launch my paean to intuition.

  I was fortunate to have been taught by a grandmaster of engineering intuition: MIT Professor Ernst Guillemin.  I still smile almost 65 years later, remembering how his gnome-like body would practically dance across the front of the classroom, showing us how he thought an electron would think and act in trying to make its way through a circuit he had drawn on the board.  "You have to think like an electron to understand this circuit!" he would exclaim. 

  Many years later my daughter Abby, then a pre-architecture student taking a structures course, was given the problem of constructing a truss from a given amount of poster board.  The function of the truss was to support the greatest amount of weight when suspended between two table edges separated by a given distance.  I told her, "You have to think like the truss!  Imagine yourself suspended face down with hands on one table, feet on the other, a weight tied to your midriff.  Where would you hurt most?  Use your limited resources to reinforce the truss in those places."  I am proud to say that her truss supported more weight than any of her classmates', even more than her professor's.

  In 1976, I wrote an article, "In Praise of Intuition," for a student engineering magazine.  I tried to define intuition as applied to engineering problem-solving and to show how it can be developed.  A precise definition of engineering intuition still eludes me, but, as then, I think it consists of at least the following abilities, successively refined over a long time:

  -- To know how to approach the problem without quite being sure how you know.

  -- To recognize what is peripheral and what is central, without having fully understood the problem.

  -- To perceive in advance the general nature of the solution.

  -- To instantly connect a problem in one field to analogous problems in other fields and import the analogous knowledge into the problem at hand.

  -- To sense when a solution must be right, just because "it feels right," and to suspect a solution that feels wrong and continue to gnaw at it.

  I suspect that Kahneman would vigorously argue against at least the last ability, calling it an "illusion of validity" likely to be biased by overconfidence.  But I hold my ground.  For engineering problems, and likely much more broadly, I think it is indeed possible to learn the abilities I listed above, including the last, through inculcation of certain habits of mind.  Among these habits are:

  Systematically fashioning knowledge and experience into an integrated whole.  Like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, a new idea snaps into place more easily as you amalgamate your knowledge into a coherent pattern and as you gain experience at fitting pieces into that pattern. And the more complete the overall pattern, the more easily you sense what is missing.  This pattern of knowledge embeds itself into your intuitive thinking.

  Persevering in understanding.  Studiously avoid shrugging off the mysterious as beyond your ken.  What is novel and counter-intuitive on first exposure can become part of your intuition after repeated, usually laborious re-examinations.

  Looking at a problem and tentative results from multiple viewpoints.  If you are a mechanical engineer examining an electrical circuit, think of its mechanical analog, which you are more likely to understand.

  Projecting the general from the particular and checking the particular against the general.  Like Archimedes in the bathtub with his famed Eureka!moment, if you find that 3+9=9+3 and 4+2=2+4, immediately conjecture that x+y=y+x.  Conversely, if someone asserts that x+y=y+x, immediately make sure that 3+9=9+3 and 4+2=2+4.

  Focusing on the core of a problem without initially getting bogged down with matters of peripheral importance.  If your car's engine isn't running, forget for now about waxing it.

  Perhaps hardest, not fearing mistakes.  Don't be frozen into indecisiveness because "all the facts aren't in yet."  You will never have all the data you need, but you can still make a decision based on your expert intuition, knowing that you might be wrong.  The hard trick is to know when to act.  I believe that comes from learning the boundary between when a solution feels right and when it still feels wrong and needs more gnawing.

  I don't think expert intuition can be taught in a straightforward manner, beyond championing the rules above and demonstrating them in practice, as Professor Guillemin did for me.  If anything, teaching expert intuition is a process like the Zen Buddhist use of koans: that is, teaching intuition intuitively.  But even if not easily teachable, expert intuition can nonetheless be learned, by inculcating these habits of mind over tens of thousands of hours of practice. The discipline of doing so, Kahneman's pessimism notwithstanding, can inure one to many of the destructive influences he cites.  And there's a bonus: That discipline will apply beyond the field in which one spent all of those hours.  The habits of mind themselves will migrate into System 1, available for more general problem solving.