“We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often miss out on the value of a challenge network.”
Podcast
Cindy Villanueva and I discussed this book on the “Stacking Knowledge” podcast on August 24, 2023, and you can listen to it here:
Highlights and Posts
Adam sees three areas that we fall into:
- Preaching: Once you preach it, it’s hard to go back (like Bitcoin)
- Prosecuting: You ignore facts that aren’t in your favor.
- Politicking: Adopting other views because we want to be liked and accepted by them.
We also have two biases that drive poor judgement:
- Confirmation Bias, where we see what we expect to see. If there are two viewpoints out there, and one is what we expected, then we’ll focus on that and ignore the other.
- Desirability Bias, where we see what we want to see. If I want to believe that my sports team will win the championship this year, I’ll likely seek out sources to validate my views. For sports, that can be a fun way to approach things. If you get into more important parts of life, like politics or vaccinations, this approach can lead to poor reasoning.
Your opinions require logic when spoken aloud
“When we find out we might be wrong, a standard defense is “I’m entitled to my opinion.” I’d like to modify that: yes, we’re entitled to hold opinions inside our own heads. If we choose to express them out loud, though, I think it’s our responsibility to ground them in logic and facts, share our reasoning with others, and change our minds when better evidence emerges.”
Are you in an idea cult?
“If you find yourself saying xxxx is always good or xxxx is never bad, you may be a member of an idea cult.”
Arguing can be a sign of respect
“In fact, when I argue with someone, it’s not a display of disrespect—it’s a sign of respect. It means I value their views enough to contest them. If their opinions didn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t bother.”
Open-minded versus actively open-minded
“Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong—not for reasons why we must be right—and revising our views based on what we learn.”
It’s similar to the idea of a “Steel Man” argument.
Where I’m ignorant
“We should all be able to make a long list of areas where we’re ignorant. Mine include art, financial markets, fashion, chemistry, food, why British accents turn American in songs, and why it’s impossible to tickle yourself.”
Most disagreements aren’t binary
“An antidote to this proclivity is complexifying: showcasing the range of perspectives on a given topic. We might believe we’re making progress by discussing hot-button issues as two sides of a coin, but people are actually more inclined to think again if we present these topics through the many lenses of a prism. To borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, it takes a multitude of views to help people realize that they too contain multitudes.”
This is similar to something that Shankar Vedantam has shared on his “Hidden Brain” podcast:
“If you think there should be, for example, zero immigration to the United States, you can call anyone who has even mildly pro-immigrant views a traitor. On the other hand if you think there should be open borders to the United States, you can call anyone who calls for any immigration restrictions a racist.”
You are what you value, not what you believe
“Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe. Values are your core principles in life—they might be excellence and generosity, freedom and fairness, or security and integrity.”
Other great quotes from Think Again:
- Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.
- Part of the problem is cognitive laziness. Some psychologists point out that we’re mental misers: we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones. Yet there are also deeper forces behind our resistance to rethinking. Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have changed, that what was once right may now be wrong. Reconsidering something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.
- We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995. We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.
- Unfortunately, when it comes to our own knowledge and opinions, we often favor feeling right over being right.
- What set great presidents apart was their intellectual curiosity and openness. They read widely and were as eager to learn about developments in biology, philosophy, architecture, and music as in domestic and foreign affairs. They were interested in hearing new views and revising their old ones. They saw many of their policies as experiments to run, not points to score. Although they might have been politicians by profession, they often solved problems like scientists.
- The goal is not to be wrong more often. It’s to recognize that we’re all wrong more often than we’d like to admit, and the more we deny it, the deeper the hole we dig for ourselves.
- Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe.
- Researchers have even suggested that gritty mountaineers are more likely to die on expeditions, because they’re determined to do whatever it takes to reach the summit. There’s a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness. Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting our teeth and turning around.
- How do you know? It’s a question we need to ask more often, both of ourselves and of others. The power lies in its frankness. It’s nonjudgmental—a straightforward expression of doubt and curiosity that doesn’t put people on the defensive.
- We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.
This is a fantastic book, and I highly recommend it. You can find it here on Amazon if you’ve not purchased it yet.
