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

by Alan Jacobs

“The question is, ‘Could you show to those people a set of facts that would lead them to abandon what we consider to be their outlandish views?’ ” said Fish. “The answer to that question is no, because all people who have a story to which they are committed are able to take any set of counter-evidence and turn it back, within the perspective of the story they believe in.”*9

And his point is a strong one. But it’s strong actuarially, as it were, not philosophically. It’s true that most people don’t change their minds. But as we have seen repeatedly in this book, some people do—they really do change “the story they believe in.” And that’s a remarkable and encouraging thing.

Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning. For instance, machine imagery, which began to pervade our thought in the seventeenth century, is still potent today. We still often tend to see ourselves, and the living things around us, as pieces of clockwork: items of a kind that we ourselves could make, and might decide to remake if it suits us better. Hence the confident language of “genetic engineering” and “the building-blocks of life.”*10

The myths we choose, or more likely simply inherit, do a tremendous amount of intellectual heavy lifting for us. Even more than the empty words and phrases of Orwell’s “tired hack on the platform,” these myths do our thinking for us. We can’t do without them; the making of analogies is intrinsic to thinking, and we always and inevitably strive to understand one thing in relation to another thing that we already know. (When we call this process the “association of ideas”—association from social, society—we’re engaging in this kind of mythmaking, treating ideas as though they’re little communities. See?) And every analogy helps—but also, as Kenneth Burke reminds us, if it directs our attention one way it also turns our attention aside from other things. To consider the brain as a computer is to ignore its biochemical character and its embodied state—and such a metaphor encourages us to believe that we understand the brain better than we do.

As Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky remind us, nothing is to be gained by demanding that we adhere to a standard of objective rationality that no human being can manage.

The straw man is an evidently stupid argument that no one actually holds: refuting the ridiculous straw-man argument is easier than refuting the argument that someone actually made, so up in flames goes the figure of straw.

There are two debaters, Alice and Bob. Alice takes the podium, makes her argument. Then Bob takes her place, but before he can present his counter-argument, he must summarize Alice’s argument to her satisfaction—a demonstration of respect and good faith. Only when Alice agrees that Bob has got it right is he permitted to proceed with his own argument—and then, when he’s finished, Alice must summarize it to his satisfaction.*15 And Sloan comments: “The first time I saw one of these debates, it blew my mind.” This

it is so rare in the world of argument as war.

This kind of writing is dangerous because it goes beyond (mere) argumentation; it becomes immersion, method acting, dual-booting. To make your argument strong, you have to make your opponent’s argument stronger. You need sharp thinking and compelling language, but you also need close attention and deep empathy. I don’t mean to be too woo-woo about it, but truly, you need love. The overall sensibility is closer to caregiving than to punditry.

I didn’t pause because I realized that I was in-other-wordsing with the worst of them. I didn’t pause because I realized that I was treating debate as war and was desperately eager for victory. I paused because my hands were shaking so violently I couldn’t type accurately. That’s how angry I was. So I had to “give it five minutes”; I didn’t have a choice. And during that enforced break I did start to realize what I was doing—what I was becoming. I wasn’t offering “close attention and deep empathy”; my sensibility did not overlap with “caregiving” at any point.

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...

Charles Darwin thought often about this problem, and commented in a letter that taxonomists tend to have strong tendencies in one direction or the other. The ones who like to put organisms in existing categories he called “lumpers”; the ones who like to create new categories he called “splitters.”

we are all inveterate taxonomists, and go through our days lumping and splitting like crazy. And we tend to taxonomize according to the heuristics—the strategies of simplification that relieve cognitive load—that I’ve been discussing throughout this book: identifying ingroups and outgroups, deploying keywords, and the like.

In general, our culture is a lumping one. And maybe all cultures are. If so, there would be, I think, two reasons.

Sometimes the need for triage isn’t about ruling something (someone) in or out but about deciding what, if anything, to do next:

We use these heuristics, these strategies of simplification, all the time; we just don’t like them used on us.

Lumping is a powerful strategy for information management, and a certain filtering out of individuality is the price we simply have to pay to get our choices under some kind of control.

All social taxonomies are prone to these forces of consolidation and dissolution, assembly and disassembly, because, unlike biological taxonomies, they’re all temporary and contingent—and are often created by opposition. Those who are subject to the same forces, the same powers-that-be, can find themselves grouped together, sometimes to their own surprise and discomfort: for example, homosexuals and Jews in Nazi Germany.

But gradually, as the pigs come to dominate, that statement receives its famous amendment: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

The question has general relevance: Who, we might ask in any given situation, controls whom? Who is sovereign over whom? Who benefits from adopting these categories—and who is victimized by them?

There are too many people! But we absolutely must remember what those taxonomies are: temporary, provisional intellectual structures whose relevance will not always be what it is, or seems to be, today.

But here I think we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view.

having seen the ways lumping helps us manage information overload and create group solidarity, we should become aware of the temptations it poses to us—to all of us.

So let me conclude this chapter with a celebration of splitting—of the disciplined, principled preference for rejecting categories whenever we discern them at work.

Again, this is not to say that we can live without them, but rather that we need to cultivate skepticism as a first response.

but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.

puto—“I am human, and nothing human is alien to me”

nothing human is beyond his capacity to understand, at least in part.

“Timothy is not like that because he is Igbo. He is like that because he is Timothy.”

“When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?”

we really don’t want to be or want anyone else to be permanently and universally open-minded.

I like Chesterton’s gustatory metaphor: it suggests that when the mind is governed by properly settled convictions, only then can it be truly nourished.

To understand this problem and begin addressing it, we need to think in terms of the old Aristotelian language of virtue and vice, in which a virtue lies midway between two opposing vices. We don’t want to be, and we don’t want others to be, intractably stubborn; but we don’t want them to be pusillanimous and vacillating either. Tommy

while knowledge may be analog, decision making is often digital, that is, binary.

but when I go into the voting booth I’m not allowed to vote 70 percent for Candidate A and 30 percent for Candidate B.

sometimes the evidence is insufficient or contradictory, especially when we’re trying to predict the future consequences of today’s actions,

Economists speak of sunk costs as investments in a particular project that cannot be recovered, and some of them have pointed out that sunk costs have a disproportionate influence on decision making.

The more people have invested in a particular project, the more reluctant they are to abandon it, no matter how strong the evidence indicating that it’s a lost cause. Poker players who have bet heavily on a hand don’t want to fold and lose it

Such people are fixated on their sunk costs, on what is irretrievably past, rather than on the best available decision right now;

The book in which Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter recorded their experience, When Prophecy Fails,

called South Sea Bubble.

The South-Sea project remained until 1845 the greatest example in British history of the infatuation of the people for commercial gambling.

The “true believer” of Hoffer’s title is someone who belongs not to the few but to the many, someone who strives to bring the entire group (the church, the nation, the world even) within the grip of one narrative, the force of one body of belief, the authority of one charismatic Leader.

That is, true believers’ beliefs are not falsifiable: everything can be incorporated into the system—and indeed, the more costs true believers have sunk into the system, the more determined and resourceful they will be.

it’s fair to say that if you cannot imagine circumstances that would cause you to change your mind about something, then you may well be the victim of the power of sunk costs.

You can know whether your social environment is healthy for thinking by its attitude toward ideas from the outgroup.

G. C. Lichtenberg issued a wise warning centuries ago: “A book is like a mirror: if a donkey looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable with, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely defiled by supposedly literate adults….We are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.

Wallace calls the essay “Authority and English Usage” because the fundamentally intractable problem of any democratic order is, precisely, authority

usage, and for Wallace the miracle of Garner’s writing is its ability to prescribe without triggering the you’re-not-the-boss-of-me reflex.