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

by Alan Jacobs

Relatively few people want to think.

Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?

when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”*5

The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

We just need to learn how to be more aware, how to act more responsibly.

The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

http://apenwarr.ca/​log/​?m=201407#01.

when people have limited or nonexistent emotional responses to situations, whether through injury or congenital defect, their decision making is seriously compromised.

What System 1 does for us is to provide us with a repertoire of biases, biases that reduce the decision-making load on our conscious brains. These biases aren’t infallible, but they provide what Kahneman calls useful “heuristics”: they’re right often enough that it makes sense to follow them and not to try to override them without some good reason (say, if you’re someone whose calling in life is to help homeless people). We simply would not be able to navigate through life without these biases, these prejudices—the cognitive demands of having to assess every single situation would be so great as to paralyze us. That’s why the English essayist William Hazlitt wrote, “Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life. Reason may play the critic, and correct certain errors afterwards; but if we were to wait for its formal and absolute decisions in the shifting and multifarious combinations of human affairs, the world would stand still.”

When people cease to be people because they are, to us, merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate, then we, in our zeal to win, have sacrificed empathy: we have declined the opportunity to understand other people’s desires, principles, fears. And that is a great price to pay for supposed “victory” in debate.

the real intellectual work begins when you realize that “for reasons that seem to transcend cultural peculiarities, and may lie deep within the architecture of the human mind, we construct our descriptive taxonomies and tell our explanatory stories as dichotomies, or contrasts between inherently distinct and logically opposite alternatives.” That is, we have an inbuilt and powerful disposition toward dichotomizing—but one that we don’t have to obey. Once you know that the tendency to think dichotomously and militaristically is not just a local phenomenon, pertaining to this or that particular case, but exemplary of “our deeper error in parsing the complexities of human conflicts and natural continua into stark contrasts formulated as struggles between opposing sides,” then you have set yourself a task, not completed one. For now you must try to figure out how these nondichotomous forces work in relation to one another.

Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure; but peacemaking is long, hard labor, not a mere declaration.

About some things—about many things!—we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.

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.

the average person whose sunk costs have made him so irrationally stubborn that he has effectively reached intellectual bankruptcy just trundles right along, mostly, sustained by habits and social structures that prevent him from paying the full price for his error.

“A book is like a mirror: if a donkey looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

And once your RCO becomes not so O and therefore somewhat less R, you might come to realize that, with a different turn of Fortune’s wheel, there you could have been also. You suddenly imagine yourself, though perhaps faintly at first, as someone different from what you are, someone with a different set of what philosophers call “plausibility structures”; and once you imaginatively place yourself within the frame of another mind, then your own views come to seem…not inevitable.

Instability of this kind—the kind that makes you wonder whether your ingroup is helping you draw closer to the truth of things or blocking you from seeing that truth—is pretty much impossible to live with for the long term. You simply can’t thrive in a state of constant daily evaluation of the truth-conduciveness of your social world, any more than a flowering plant can flourish if its owner digs up its roots every morning to see how it’s doing.*2