Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

don’t make the mistake of believing that history matters in situations in which all it does is limit how you think about your options.

History (even the fake kind) can be useful for persuading others through guilt. But don’t make the mistake of persuading yourself that history should matter to your choices today.

In the simplest form, if a white male in America has ten ways to succeed and an African-American only has eight, it isn’t productive to focus on the difference. It is more productive to pick a path to success and take it. In the long run, nothing persuades like success.

This is deeply problematic.

Focusing on the past when the present offers sufficient paths to success is loserthink. It is better to focus on your own systems for success, and when you succeed, watch how winning fixes most problems.

There are three important things to know about human beings in order to understand why we do the things we do. Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition. And they don’t know it.

“history repeats” has no more predictive power than observing that people were selfish, brutal, and violent in the past, so you can reasonably expect more of that in the future.

The assumption that people haven’t changed much since the start of recorded history feels accurate and useful. But once you extend that observation about people to an observation about a situation, you’re on shaky ground.

The authors who consistently wrote one bestseller after another were fiction authors. Consumers of fiction want more of the kind of writing they like, only next time with different characters and stories.

Consumers of nonfiction books apparently think some version of “I already know what that author has to say.” Especially when the topic seems to be in the same domain as the previous book. The defense against that pattern, for nonfiction writers, is to write books on entirely new topics if the audience lets you get away with it,

We humans are not good at knowing which history is the one that will repeat.

we generally have more than one historical pattern in play. And we usually don’t know which ones will be the most predictive.

The smartest people in the investment world will tell you the quality of management is the most predictive variable. They will also advise you to buy index funds instead of individual stocks because no one can consistently predict how managers will perform.

unmanaged index funds almost always beat the individual stock-pickers.

history repeats until it doesn’t. And you never know when the “doesn’t” phase starts.

A/B testing, in which you are heading steadily toward a good outcome while appearing to observers as if you are failing most of the way, at least until something works.

A pattern of consistent failure looks a lot like A/B testing that isn’t yet complete. One is bad news and the other is good news about to happen. They look the same.

We usually can’t tell which patterns are most predictive, which means we literally don’t know if we are looking at good news or bad coming our way. But we imagine we can.

if you were sure you noticed history repeating a thousand times, it wouldn’t tell you anything unless you knew how many times it did not repeat when it might have.

when you do see history apparently repeating, ask yourself if you needed to know history to make your prediction.

History doesn’t repeat, at least not in any way you can use to accurately predict the future. (The exceptions are simple situations.)

My objection to the slippery slope argument is that everything is a slippery slope until it isn’t.

Literally everything would be a slippery slope if not for counterforces.

Belief in slippery slopes is loserthink. It is more useful to look at forces and counterforces to see where things are likely to end up.

if your desire for some specific forms of privacy is fear based, you might be creating a mental prison for yourself that you don’t want.

If you think more privacy is always better, that is a case of loserthink. Every situation is different. Sometimes privacy is the problem that prevents the solution.

Let’s label this phenomenon professional jealousy, although there are a variety of motivations for mocking the last employee on the job.

As a general rule, it’s always smarter to criticize people who aren’t around.

If experts are routinely skeptical of other experts, shouldn’t you be skeptical of experts too?

For simple situations, experts usually agree. The problem comes with complicated situations in which there are opportunities for lots of judgment calls.

If you are wondering how skeptical you should be about expert advice on complicated issues, keep in mind that the next expert probably has no respect for the last expert. And vice versa.

sometimes the cause of a problem is not the best place to look for a solution, and engineers are trained to understand that.

Every overdose death leaves at least one family with permanent damage. Waiting for the addicts to solve the opioid problem because they are the ones “most responsible” for it is loserthink.

Loserthink pairs the solution with the blame. A more productive way to think is that solutions can come from anywhere.

Society works best when people are held accountable for their own actions when it comes to money or the law. But it is a mistake to take the idea of personal accountability and apply it to every situation and every problem.

the best solution can be independent of how we feel about the cause of the problem.

The best solution to a problem is often unrelated to who is at fault. It is loserthink to believe otherwise.

It is childlike thinking to insist in all cases that the people who cause problems are the only people who should solve them. A little bit of flexibility can go a long way.

If you analyze a complicated situation with multiple variables in play, and you conclude that only one of them was decisive, there’s a good chance you are practicing loserthink.

You can often know you are heading in the right direction, which matters a lot, while the precision of your estimates is secondary.

Truth has two important dimensions: 1) accuracy, and 2) direction. If you don’t know which of those dimensions is more important, you might be in a mental prison.

It’s easy to tell when another person is rationalizing (as opposed to being rational), but it is nearly impossible to know when you are doing it yourself.

A more productive way to see the world involves understanding that, for many types of truth, directional accuracy is all you need.

We all want to live in a world in which facts and reason, along with empathy and ethics, of course, influence our decisions, and nothing else gets in the way. But we don’t live in that world. We do live in a world in which we can often know which direction we want things to move, but rarely can we know with any precision what we should do to get there, and how it will all turn out.

If you find yourself obsessing over the accuracy of facts versus the direction those facts will lead you, you might be in a mental prison.

Twitter, where creative exaggeration is normal,

the important context that the government enforces all major laws by threat of violence. That’s how laws work.

It is loserthink to take political hyperbole literally.

It is loserthink to attack an opponent by acting as dumb as they act. It might feel good, but it isn’t a winning strategy.

When it comes to your personal life, business life, and political opinions, it makes sense to favor systems over goals whenever that is practical. A goal gives you one way to win, whereas a system can surface lots of winning paths, some of which you never could have imagined.

Goals are for loserthinkers. Systems are for winners.