Actually, system one can handle a surprising amount of abstraction; I don't have one handy, but any comprehensive description of conceptual synesthesia should do a good job of explaining it.
I'd certainly be interested in that. My own definitions are aimed at teaching people not to abstract away from experience, including emotional experience. Certainly there is some abstraction at that level, it's just a different kind of abstraction (ISTM) than system 2 abstraction.
In particular, what I'm calilng system 1 does not generally use complex sentence structure or long utterances, and the referents of its "sentences" are almost always concrete nouns, with its principal abstractions being emotional labels rather than conceptual ones.
The fact that I can literally see that the concept 'deserve X' depends on the emotional version of the concept 'should do X', because the pattern for one contains the pattern for the other, makes it very clear to me that such abstractions are not dependent on the rational processing system.
I consider "should X" and "deserve X" to both be emotional labels, since they code for attitude and action towards X, and so both are well within system 1 scope. When used by system 2, they may carry totally different connotations, and have nothing to do with what the speaker actually believes they deserve or should do, and especially little to do with what they'll actually do.
For example, a statement like, "People should respect the rights of others and let them have what they deserve" is absolutely System 2, whereas, a statement like "I don't deserve it" (especially if experienced emotionally) is well within System 1 territory.
It's entirely possible that my definition of system 1/2 is more than a little out of whack with yours or the original S&W definition, but under my definition it's pretty easy to learn to distinguish S1 utterances from S2 utterances, at least within the context of mind hacking, where I or someone else is trying to find out what's really going on in System 1 in relation to a topic, and distinguish it from System 2's confabulated theories.
However, since you claim to be able to observe system 1 directly, this would seem to put you in a privileged position with respect to changing yourself - in principle you should be able to observe what beliefs create any undesired behaviors or emotional responses. Since that's the hard part of mind hacking IME, I'm a bit surprised you haven't done more with the "easy" part (i.e. changing the contents of System 1).
In particular, what I'm calilng system 1 does not generally use complex sentence structure or long utterances, and the referents of its "sentences" are almost always concrete nouns, with its principal abstractions being emotional labels rather than conceptual ones.
Yep, it mostly uses nouns, simple verbs, relatedness catgegorizations ('because') , behavior categorizations ('should', 'avoid with this degree of priority'), and a few semi-abstract concepts like 'this week'. Surprisingly, I don't often 'see' the concepts of good or bad - they seem ...
A currently existing social norm basically says that everyone has the right to an opinion on anything, no matter how little they happen to know about the subject.
But what if we had a social norm saying that by default, people do not have the right to an opinion on anything? To earn such a right, they ought to have familiarized themselves on the topic. The familiarization wouldn't necessarily have to be anything very deep, but on the topic of e.g. controversial political issues, they'd have to have read at least a few books' worth of material discussing the question (preferrably material from both sides of the political fence). In scientific questions where one needed more advanced knowledge, you ought to at least have studied the field somewhat. Extensive personal experience on a subject would also be a way to become qualified, even if you hadn't studied the issue academically.
The purpose of this would be to enforce epistemic hygiene. Conversations on things such as public policy are frequently overwhelmed by loud declarations of opinion from people who, quite honestly, don't know anything on the subject they have a strong opinion on. If we had in place a social norm demanding an adequate amount of background knowledge on the topic before anyone voiced an opinion they expected to be taken seriously, the signal/noise ratio might be somewhat improved. This kind of a social norm does seem to already be somewhat in place in many scientific communities, but it'd do good to spread it to the general public.
At the same time, there are several caveats. As I am myself a strong advocate on freedom of speech, I find it important to note that this must remain a *social* norm, not a government-advocated one or anything that is in any way codified into law. Also, the standards must not be set *too* high - even amateurs should be able to engage in the conversation, provided that they know at least the basics. Likewise, one must be careful that the principle isn't abused, with "you don't have a right to have an opinion on this" being a generic argument used to dismiss any opposing claims.