by Sam Savage
In his 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman divides the human thought process into a fast, intuitive component, System 1, and a slower analytical side, System 2. This is a useful dichotomy, and I refer to these systems as "the seat of the pants" and the "seat of the intellect," as sensitively portrayed by Jeff Danziger in my 2009 book, The Flaw of Averages.
Kahneman claims that System 1 is bad at understanding statistics because it can only focus on one thing at a time, and System 2, which can handle many things at once, is slow and lazy and may not be consulted in the heat of decision making.
But when you put System 1 and System 2 on what Steve Jobs called a Bicycle for the Mind (a computer), you can connect the seat of the intellect to the seat of the pants and fundamentally change your thought process.
This is one of the advantages of SIPmath for performing probabilistic analysis. First the SIP itself, as an array of thousands of potential outcomes, is "one" thing that contains "many" things. Second, because SIPmath simulations in Excel yields results in real time by evaluating thousands of possibilities per keystroke, it can tap into our limbic system, with its tens of millions of years of evolution.