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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Robson
Read between
April 1 - July 27, 2019
In these cases, it is always worth asking why you feel strongly about a particular viewpoint, and whether it is really central to your identity, or whether you might be able to reframe it in a way that is less threatening.
Studies have shown that this practice really does reduce motivated reasoning by helping you to realise that your whole being does not depend on being right about a particular issue, and that you can disentangle certain opinions from your identity.39
Like many liberal people, I had once opposed GM crops on environmental grounds – yet the more I became aware of my news sources, the more I noticed that I was hearing opposition from the same small number of campaign groups like Greenpeace – creating the impression that these fears were more widespread than they actually were.
‘We initially went for the low-hanging fruit – television psychics, astrology, tarot card reading,’ Shermer told me. ‘But over the decades we’ve migrated to more “mainstream” claims about things like global warming, creationism, anti-vaccination – and now fake news.’
A genial attitude is, I later found out, crucial for putting many of his opponents off their guard, so that he can begin to understand what motivates them.
Vähän niin kuin Perttu Häkkinen?
Shermer may not use the term, but he now offers one of the most comprehensive ‘inoculations’ available in his ‘Skepticism 101’ course at Chapman University.43 The first steps, he says, are like ‘kicking the tyres and checking under the hood’ of a car. ‘Who’s making the claim? What’s the source? Has someone else verified the claim? What’s the evidence? How good is the evidence? Has someone tried to debunk the evidence?’ he told me. ‘It’s basic baloney detection.’ Like the other psychologists I have spoken to, he is certain that the vivid, real-life examples of misinformation are crucial to
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‘anomalies-as-proof’
Attempts to reconstruct the Krema gas chamber have, in fact, found the presence of these holes, meaning the argument is built on a false premise – but the point is that even if the anomaly had been true, it wouldn’t have been enough to rewrite the whole of Holocaust history.
The lesson, then, is to beware of the use of anomalies to cast doubt on vast sets of data, and to consider the alternative explanations before you allow one puzzling detail to rewrite history.44
He also advises us all to step outside of our echo chamber and to use the opportunity to probe someone’s broader worldviews;
intellectual humility, actively open-minded thinking, emotion differentiation and regulation, and cognitive reflection
These include Benjamin Franklin’s moral algebra, self-distancing, mindfulness and reflective reasoning, as well as various techniques to increase your emotional self-awareness and fine-tune your intuition. And in this chapter, we have seen how
trap of cognitive fluency,
hard to pause and think
Some ruokkii kun pitää olla nopea.
Silvia Mamede has shown, even a simple pause in our thinking can have a powerful effect.
And although these skills are not currently cultivated within a standard education, they can be taught. We can all train ourselves to think more wisely.
(It was an accolade that none of Terman’s cohort would achieve.) Feynman also helped uncover the physics behind
Tää on kivan tarinallinen kirja, alussa kerrotaan Termiiteistä ja sitten heihin palataan. Jännää että Feynmanin ÄO oli vain 125.
Despite his apparent inaptitude for drawing and foreign languages, he later learnt to be a credible artist, to speak Portuguese and Japanese, and to read Mayan hieroglyphs – all with the relentlessness that had driven his education as a child.
‘He was never content with what he knew, or what other people knew . . . He pursued knowledge without prejudice.’7
Mallia tästä!
Despite their early promise, many of the Termites reached old age with the uneasy feeling that they could have done more with their talents. Like the hare in Aesop’s most famous fable, they began with a natural advantage but failed to capitalise on that potential.
‘The real fun of life’, he wrote to a fan in 1986, just two years before he died, ‘is this perpetual testing to realize how far out you can go with any potentialities.’9
claiming that he had ‘no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men’.10
Älykäs muttei huippuälykäs, mutta sitäkin uteliaampi.
And when modern psychologists have turned to these tools, they have found that curiosity can rival general intelligence in its importance over our development throughout childhood, adolescence and beyond. Much of that research on curiosity had examined its role in memory and learning,14
This isn’t just a question of motivation: even when their additional effort and enthusiasm is taken into consideration, people with greater curiosity still appear to be able to remember facts more easily.
Brain scans can now tell us why this is, revealing that curiosity activates a network of regions known as the ‘dopaminergic system’. The neurotransmitter dopamine is usually implicated in desire for food, drugs or sex – suggesting that, at a neural level, curiosity really is a form of hunger or lust. But the neurotransmitter also appears to strengthen the long-term storage of memories in the hippocampus, neatly explaining why curious people are not only more motivated to learn, but will also remember more, even when you account for the amount of work they have devoted to a subject.16
Tiedonjano nälkään verrattava tunne? Vrt. vaikka olisi muita kiireisiä hommia, menen kansalliskirjastoon koska haluan selvittää tämän *heti*.
The most interesting discovery has been the observation of a ‘spill-over effect’ – meaning that once the participants’ interest has been piqued by something that genuinely interests them, and they have received that shot of dopamine, they subsequently find it easier to memorise incidental information too. It primes the brain for learning anything.
For this reason, some psychologists now consider that general intelligence, curiosity and conscientiousness are together the ‘three pillars’ of academic success; if you lack any one of these qualities, you are going to suffer.
curiosity best predicted their ability to achieve those goals.19
Later on, the children were given the objects to inspect – and they were far more likely to touch and explore them if they had seen their parents doing the same.
‘Curiosity is contagious, and it’s very difficult to encourage curiosity in kids if you don’t have any experience of curiosity in your own life,’ Engel said.
Eli kannattaa antaa lasten tutkia, tutkia itsekin ja olla huutamatta jos kokeilevat jotain joka menee paskaksi.
There was nothing actually wrong with what they said – they were not notably uninterested ? but others used the opportunity to open up the subject, which would inevitably lead to a chain of further questions. The result was a far more curious and engaged child.
Toddlers may ask up to twenty-six questions per hour at home (with one child asking 145 during one observation!) but this drops to just two per hour at school.
expression of interest is directly correlated with the number of times a teacher smiles during the lesson.
‘growth mindset’. This concept is the brainchild of Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, whose pioneering research first attracted widespread attention in 2007 with a best-selling book, Mindset. But this was just the beginning.
Dweck felt that she could trip up at any moment, which made her scared to try new challenges.
logical puzzles. The children’s success at the puzzles was not necessarily linked to their talent; some of the brightest quickly became frustrated and gave up, while others persevered.
The difference instead seemed to lie in their beliefs about their own talents. Those with the growth mindset had faith that their performance would improve with practice, while those with the fixed mindset believed that their talent was innate and could not be changed.
‘For some people, failure is the end of the world, but for others, it’s an exciting new opportunity.’23
Presumably, they were so focused on their hurt feelings, they weren’t concentrating on the details of what was actually being said and the ways it might improve their performance next time.
Chile – the first sample across a whole nation. As the previous research would have predicted, a growth mindset predicted academic success across the group, but the team also examined the way it benefited the less privileged children in the group.
Growth mindsetistä tosi paljon hyötyä köyhille ym!
with many people misreading and misinterpreting her work. A Guardian article from 2016, for instance, described it as ‘the theory that anyone who tries can succeed’,30 which isn’t really a fair representation of Dweck’s own views: she is not claiming that a growth mindset can work miracles where there is no aptitude, simply that it is one of many important elements, particularly when we find ourselves facing new challenges that would cause us to question our talents. Common sense would suggest that there is still a threshold of intelligence that is necessary for success, but your mindset makes
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Ironically, Eddie Brummelman at the University of Amsterdam has found that excessive praise can be particularly damaging to children with low self-esteem, who may become scared of failing to live up to parental expectations in the future.31
an online course teaching schoolchildren about neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to rewire itself – reduces the belief that intelligence and talent are fixed, innate qualities.
curiosity and the growth mindset would already constitute two important mental characteristics, independent of general intelligence,
curiosity and the growth mindset can also protect us from the dangerously dogmatic, one-sided reasoning that we explored in earlier chapters.
Dan Kahan at Yale University. As you may recall, he found intelligence and education can exaggerate ‘motivated reasoning’ on subjects such as climate change – leading to increasingly polarised views.
As he had previously shown, greater knowledge of science only increased polarisation between left and right. But this was not true for curiosity, which reduced the differences. Despite the prevailing views of most conservative thinkers, more curious Republicans were more likely to endorse the scientific consensus on global warming, for instance.
In other words, their curiosity allowed the evidence to seep through those ‘logic-tight compartments’ that normally protect the beliefs that are closest to our identities.
Porter explained it to me like this: ‘If you have the fixed mindset, you are all the time trying to find out where you stand in the hierarchy; everyone’s ranked. If you’re at the top, you don’t want to fall or be taken down from the top, so any sign or suggestion that you don’t know something or that someone knows more than you – it’s threatening to dethrone you.’ And so, to protect your position, you become overly defensive. ‘You dismiss people’s ideas with the notion that “I know better so I don’t have to listen to what you have to say.” ’ In the growth mindset, by contrast, you’re not so
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could not drink a cup of tea without wondering why tea leaves gathered in
