Verbal reasoning seems to be a cesspool of poor thinking, compared to writing things out as formulae, on graphs, in spreadsheets, in code, or as formally posed logical arguments.

Throughout the history humans have almost always used verbal reasoning for everything. Why aren’t we better at it? And how can a reasoning style that was used much less by our ancestors be much more effective?

Perhaps we evolved to be bad at accurate verbal reasoning because it was mostly for the purposes of deceiving ourselves and others into believing convenient falsehoods (the same way a prosecutor in court doesn’t need to worry about being accurate, only persuasive).

It’s possible that thinking through problems formally and avoiding turning to the slick verbal component works because it routes around the parts of our mind that are particularly prone to bias our thinking. Maybe it’s better precisely because it’s an “unnatural” way to do things, and so hasn’t been broken.