You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

by David McRaney

The less you know about a subject, the less you believe there is to know in total. Only once you have some experience do you start to recognize the breadth and depth you have yet to plunder.

you are not very good at estimating your own competence.

the unskilled are the least aware of it.

Charles Darwin said it best: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Education is as much about learning what you don’t know as it is about adding to what you do.

novice to amateur to expert to master,

the time it takes to go from novice to amateur feels rapid, and that’s where the Dunning-Kruger effect strikes. You think the same amount of practice will move you from amateur to expert, but it won’t.

Apophenia

Coincidences are a routine part of life, even the seemingly miraculous ones. Any meaning applied to them comes from your mind.

tropes

without much explanation, plots that satisfy the mind of every viewer or reader.

Every story needs a strong protagonist with whom you can identify. If they are down on their luck or recently fell from grace, you see them as being approachable. If they are plucky and face great odds, again, you root for them without having to think about it. Early on, the protagonist will save someone without having to, and you start to like him or her. On the other side, you need a dastardly antagonist who harms someone for no reason, a person who ignores the rules and wants only to satisfy him- or herself no matter the cost. The hero or heroine leaves his or her normal world and enters into a new life full of adventure. Just when it seems as though the protagonist will fail, he or she overcomes whatever has been in the way, in order to defeat the antagonist, sometimes even sav...

Joseph Campbell made it his life’s work to identify the common mythology in all humans, the stories you and everyone else know in your hearts. He cal...

the hero’s journey is a monomyth that plugs into your mind like a key into a lock.

pareidolia.

Apophenia is refusing to believe in clutter and noise, in coincidence and chance.

Apophenia most often appears in your life when you experience synchronicity.

You need a sense of meaning to get out of bed, to push forward against the grain. Just remember that meaning comes only from within.

J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, Littlewood’s Miscellany. He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, you will experience 1 million events every thirty-five days. This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. The monthly miracle is called Littlewood’s Law.

Apophenia isn’t just seeing order in chaos, it is believing you were destined to see it. It is believing miracles are so rare you should stand up and take notice when they occur, so you can decode their meaning.

Brand Loyalty

You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.

the more expensive a purchase, the greater the loyalty to it.

brand loyalty—that nebulous emotional connection people have with certain companies, which turns them into defenders and advocates for corporations who don’t give a shit.

Fanboys defend their favorite stuff and ridicule the competition, ignoring facts if they contradict their emotional connection.

So what creates this emotional connection to stuff and the companies who make doodads? Choice.

unnecessary, like an iPad, there is a great chance the customer will become a fanboy because he had to choose to spend a big chunk of money on it. It’s the choosing of one thing over another that leads to narratives about why you did it, which usually tie in to your self-image.

Branding builds on this by giving you the option to create the person you think you are through choosing to align yourself with the mystique of certain products. Apple advertising, for instance, doesn’t mention how good their computers are. Instead, they give you examples of the sort of people who purchase those computers. The idea is to encourage you to say, Yeah, I’m not some stuffy, conservative nerd. I have taste and talent and took art classes in college.

Ownership adds special emotional value to things, even if those things were free.

sunk cost fallacy.

to prevent buyer’s remorse they try not to overwhelm you with choice. Studies show that if you have only a handful of options at the point of purchase, you will be less likely to fret about your decision afterward.

Costco

It’s purely emotional, the moment you pick. People with brain damage to their emotional centers who have been rendered into Spock-like beings of pure logic find it impossible to decide things as simple as which brand of cereal to buy. They stand transfixed in the aisle, contemplating every element of their potential decision—the calories, the shapes, the net weight—everything. They can’t pick because they have no emotional connection to anything.

The status and credentials of an individual greatly influence your perception of that individual’s message.

Neurologist Walter Freeman won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine in honor of his work—lobotomizing mentally ill people by jabbing a spike behind their eyeballs.

Even the sister of President John F. Kennedy was lobotomized.

The Argument from Ignorance

When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.

You look for cause and effect, but when the cause is unclear you commit a logical fallacy by thinking all the possible causes are equal.

argument-from-ignorance fallacy, or argumentum ad ignorantiam

this is when you decide something is true or false because you can’t find evidence to the contrary. You don’t know what the truth is, so you assume any explanation is as good as another.

Lack of proof neither confirms nor denies a proposition.

People who refuse to believe such things claim they need more evidence before they can change their minds, but no amount of evidence will satisfy them. Any shred of doubt allows them to argue from ignorance.

The Straw Man Fallacy

the human mind tends to follow predictable patterns when you get angry with other people and do battle with words.

Any time someone begins an attack with “So you’re saying we should all just . . .” or “Everyone knows . . . ,” you can bet a straw man is coming.

The Ad Hominem Fallacy

What someone says and why they say it should be judged separately.

You are dismissing the other person’s argument by attacking the person instead of the claim.

The ad hominem fallacy can also work in reverse. You might assume someone is trustworthy because they speak well, or have a respectable job.

You might be a great judge of character, but you need to be a great judge of evidence to avoid delusion.