I just finished reading of a pre-print paper on AI (Shaw & Nave, 2026). It is a paper I expect to be the subject of a longer post in the future, but I was struck by a sentence in the “Societal Implications” section of the “General Discussion.” The authors write, “Just as ‘trust your gut’ may align and sway judgement towards System 1 intuition, ‘trust the data’ may sway people towards System 3.”
System 1 refers to the intuitive thinking that is common in Kahneman (2011) and Tversky’s fast thinking, ang System 3 is the artificial thinking Shaw and Nave are suggesting we add to that two-part system. I suggest ‘trust your brain’ could be added to my quoted sentence to refer to System 2 which is Kahneman and Tversky’s deliberative cognition.
The title of this post is intended to be snarky. For decades, we have been saying in education, we need to ‘trust the data.’ Every decision we make, every bit of evidence for drawing conclusions about students, every item we record in the gradebook is to be grounded in data.
We finally have students giving us exactly what we have been asking for. When they give us AI generated answers, they are cutting to the chase. They are giving us “data,” but with nothing else.
I propose educators are getting exactly what that have asked for, but they find it deeply dissatisfying. This is because we were asking for something that does not matter.
References
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.
Shaw, S. & Nave, G. (2026) Thinking—Fast, slow, and artificial: How AI is reshaping human reasoning and the rise of cognitive surrender. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yk25n_v1. The Wharton School Research Paper. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6097646 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6097646