Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

If you have only one mortal risk, it might make sense to spend huge amounts of money to drive that risk to zero. But if you have multiple mortal risks, it might make more sense to allocate your money across several risks.

the word confusopoly to describe an industry in which price competition is eliminated by making products and services so confusing that customers can’t tell what they are getting for their money.

If you find yourself experiencing certainty in a complex situation, you are probably experiencing loserthink.

A terrible way to predict the future is to assume things will keep going the way they have been going. The terrible way is also the most common way.

Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. The idea is that whenever we humans see a huge problem coming at us in slow motion, the odds are excellent that we will figure out a solution.

Over the long term, straight-line predictions are loserthink, because history rarely travels in a straight line.

If you are accusing someone of making inappropriate moral equivalences, you are probably experiencing loserthink of the mind reader variety.

If your only complaint about another person’s behavior is that it might normalize something, you might not have any reasons to back your opinion.

If you find yourself calling a plan problematic and you can’t give some reasonable-sounding examples to back up your opinion, you might be engaging in loserthink.

Refusing to admit your errors, or your team’s errors, locks you into a team sport mentality. That’s a mental prison. It makes you appear small and it doesn’t advance anyone’s interests. You’re more focused on the fight than the fix.

you make a mistake and your best response is that other people do similar things, you are engaging in loserthink.

as a practical matter, fairness is an impossible standard, because it is always a matter of opinion.

Politicians are advocates for their constituents, not referees for fairness.

in everyday life, fairness is an illusion, and complaining about the lack of fairness is rarely productive.

As a practical matter, things usually end up wherever there is the least complaining. That’s as close as we can get to “fair.”

Arguing for fairness is loserthink because no two people will agree on what it looks like. The exception is when you are trying to persuade, in which case rationality matters less.

Your preferred news source intentionally manufactures fake patterns almost every day. Fake patterns add color and interest to boring news stories.

analogies are useless for persuasion.

If you find that your best argument depends on the predictive or persuasive characteristics of analogies, you are likely in a mental prison of your own making.

Adding friction to any human choice will reduce the number of people making that choice. To assume otherwise is loserthink.

If two or more items are mentioned in the same conversation, that doesn’t mean anyone is comparing them for relative value.

For big, complicated political questions, “doing your own research” is a waste of time.

we humans can’t tell the difference between rational opinions and confirmation bias. But we think we can. That’s a problem.

Doing your own research is usually better than not doing any research, but don’t assume you can tell the difference between actual knowledge and your own confirmation bias. There would be no such thing as confirmation bias if we could recognize it when it happened.

a more productive way of thinking about your experience in this life is that you are what you do.

you can change who you are by changing what you do.

One of the best mental habits you can develop is to think in positive terms even when you don’t feel positive.

Never be yourself if you can make yourself into something better through your conscious actions. You are what you do.

People who sacrifice their lives for causes—including evil causes—are the opposite of cowards. If they were cowards, they wouldn’t do what they did.

It is loserthink to call people cowards after those people risked their lives for a cause.

When your critics have strong arguments, they gleefully offer them. But when those critics have weak arguments, they often try to slap a label on you and hope no one notices the missing reasons. It’s a common loserthink strategy.

If your response to a disagreement is to assign your opponent a dismissive label, you have surrendered the moral and intellectual high ground to wallow in loserthink.

we are primed by life to believe almost anything could be done faster.

There is no such thing as being soon enough.

If someone does something you appreciate, it is loserthink to ask why it didn’t happen sooner.

I’ve never discovered a good way to respond to the “Why didn’t you do it sooner?” criticism. I can’t offer you a solution, but I recommend asking your critics if this is a new standard by which they are also willing to be judged.

It is easy to lose sight of the big picture: the world is doing well by historical standards, and the rate of improvement is increasing.

Given human nature, a dictator who crosses the line into full-on irrationality would soon be removed by his own inner circle and military. While the odds of dictators being labeled crazy by adversaries are 100 percent, the odds of a completely irrational leader staying in power long enough to wage war seems vanishingly small in this day and age.

am certain that the historical reasons for war have nearly evaporated, at least in terms of the largest military powers. Today, economic war makes far more sense,

The business model of the press guarantees you will see more negativity than the facts support. Things are often better than they seem, especially in the long run.

Every culture has its own feelings about success. I call that cultural gravity. If your culture celebrates success, you have low cultural gravity, and you can rise according to your talents and efforts. But if your culture disapproves of success, you’ll feel it dragging you back to earth every time you try to succeed.

If you allow the opinions of unsuccessful people in your culture to hold you back, you’re engaged in loserthink. If you can learn to think of yourself as free from the cultural gravity of your peers, it will pay off in the long run.

Loserthink involves waiting until you know how to do something right before you do anything at all. That strategy makes sense only when it is physically or financially dangerous to make a mistake.

If you can’t figure out how to do a task the right way, do it the wrong way and watch how quickly you get free advice.

I recommend being selfish when it comes to your health, fitness, diet, and education.

Your first priority should be you. If you don’t take care of yourself first, you won’t be much use to anyone else. But hurry up—the world has lots of problems and maybe you can help.

Probably the single biggest error that humans make in their decision-making is ignoring relevant context.

Reports about famous people and other newsworthy topics are either wrong or misleading about 60 percent of the time, often because they lack context. Wait a few days before forming an opinion on anything new, just in case context is missing. It usually is.

people who do financial predictions on complicated situations are wrong most of the time. And when they are right, it is luck.

We live in a world in which it is dangerous to ignore the advice of experts, but it is almost as dangerous to follow their advice. The trick is to know when the experts are the solution and when they are the jailers of your mental prison.