How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

Robin Sloan’s post on the Long Now debates draws together many of the themes of this chapter, indeed of this whole book. I want to expand now on two of his metaphors. The first is “method acting.” The method actor tries to become the character she is to portray, to work her way into that alien sensibility. And yet on some level, method acting—perhaps all acting—brings one to see that that sensibility is not so completely alien after all. My friend Mark Lewis, an actor and longtime teacher of acting, tells his students that the key to playing a really nasty character, and saying and doing the really nasty things that make up that character, is to realize that in different circumstances you could be that person. Similarly, the life-transforming event in the life of the Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came when, in prison, he looked at the guard who treated him cruelly and realized that had their circumstances been reversed, had by some turn of fate he been a guard, he would have treated prisoners cruelly too. Solzhenitsyn, like a method actor, projected himself into the life of another and discovered that they had far more in common than he would ever have wanted to believe. Sloan’s second metaphor is “dual booting,” which means having two operating systems, say Windows and Linux, installed on the same computer, so that you can use the computer with either one or the other. If you do this, and alternate between the two systems, you’ll learn that most of wh...