Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

I find it most useful to believe experts when the situation is simple and there is some historical situation much like it. In those cases, experts have a good handle on what works and what doesn’t. But for situations in which there is overwhelming complexity, there is no historical pattern that is predictive, and experts ...

It is one thing to disagree with an opposing viewpoint, but it is a far bigger problem if you have never heard it. And that is a common situation in American politics.

Four-Point Check: News that is true will generally be reported the same on right-leaning news sites Fox News and Breitbart, as well as on left-leaning CNN and MSNBC. If they all say a hurricane is heading your way, pack your bags. If only the right-leaning news sites or only the left-leaning news outlets report something as fact, it probably isn’t.

Team Bias: The “side” that is out of power is more likely to generate fake news.

The news outlet whose political side is out of power does the most fearmongering because that’s what sells to their viewers.

Mind Reading: Look for signs that news pundits are reading the minds of politicians to find problems. That usually means things are not as bad as the headlines suggest.

Doom Predictions: Look for signs that the reported bad news is really a prediction of doom from someone who is a political partisan.

Manufactured Outrages: Look for signs that pundits are actively misinterpreting, or taking out of context, someone’s comments that would have been no big scandal without the devious sleight of hand.

Absurdity: If you see news that is so absurd it is literally unbelievable, that’s usually because it isn’t true.

News that is reported the same by news outlets on both the left and the right is probably true. If you only see a story reported by news sites that lean in one direction, it probably isn’t true.

The most important thing one learns as a hypnotist is that people are not fundamentally rational when it comes to many of life’s biggest questions.

If people were rational, you would observe that they changed their opinions on topics such as religion and politics when presented with new information that contradicts existing beliefs. But we don’t see anything like that, at least not commonly.

We humans can be rational about the little stuff, when we have no emotional investment.

If you think humans are rational about their biggest priorities, you are poorly equipped to navigate life.

Put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations on a regular basis just to maintain practice. If you get embarrassed as planned, watch how one year later you are still alive. Maybe you even have a funny story because of it.

Note how other people’s embarrassments mean little to you when you are an observer. That’s how much your embarrassments mean to them: nothing.

To think more effectively, improve your fitness, diet, and sleeping.

A smarter way of thinking is to judge people by how they respond to their mistakes.

make a decision to judge people’s lesser transgressions by how they respond to their mistakes, as opposed to judging the mistakes. I find that approach to be the most useful way of judging people.

the best response a person can make to a mistake follows this pattern: Fully acknowledge the mistake and its impact. Display genuine-looking remorse. Explain what you plan to do to make amends. Explain how you plan to avoid similar mistakes.

Judging people by their response to mistakes, as opposed to the mistakes alone, will allow you to feel better about your own mistakes,

When you feel offended by someone else’s statement, make it a habit to wait forty-eight hours. You’ll be surprised how often you’ve misinterpreted the message. And that’s not a coincidence.

it is extraordinarily common for people to be misinterpreted. The Forty-Eight-Hour Rule gives people the benefit of the doubt consistent with the odds.

It is loserthink to imagine you can accurately discern the intentions of public strangers. It is better to ask people to clarify their opinions and accept that as the best evidence of their inner thoughts.

the most productive—and reasonable—way to respond to an offensive statement is to wait for the clarification or apology.

Once you have better context and more reliable facts, you’re on more solid ground to act as if you understand the offender’s point and intention.

We can’t be the thought police. It isn’t a practical way to run a society. But it is both practical and useful to insist that people do and say the right things. If you have evil thoughts, but consistently do and say things that are good for the world, you’re a good person in my book.

You are what you do, not what you think.

We can’t have a successful culture based on condemning people for presumed thoughts.

When you see an “unbelievable” story in the press that is based on interpreting someone else’s meaning, it is generally fake news. Wait for the clarification to see if there is a perfectly ordinary explanation.

It is loserthink to judge people by their much younger selves. People change. And they usually improve.

Hallucinations generally involve adding imaginary things to the environment.

What you rarely or never see is a hallucination that subtracts something from the existing reality.

hallucinations are usually additions to reality, not subtractions.

the press, politicians, spiritual leaders (except yours, of course), and special-interest groups are brainwashing the public with falsehoods all the time.

Your favorite news source is almost certainly doing as much brainwashing as informing,

The only practical way to test your worldview is to see how well it predicts.

If you belong to a group whose interpretation of reality does a good job of explaining the past (or so it seems) yet is bad at predicting the near future, you are probably in a cult, or something that acts like one.

knowing cults brainwash their members won’t help you determine if you are in one. Brainwashing wouldn’t work if you knew it was happening to you.

Once you learn to embrace the realization that being right and being wrong feel exactly the same, you’re halfway out of your mental prison.

Being absolutely right and being spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same.

The clearest signal you’re in a cult is that other members of the group actively try to prevent you from e...

there are only about a dozen people in the United States—perhaps six on the political right and six on the left—who decide what the public thinks about politics. That small group routinely influences how the news is framed, and the rest of the pundits simply amplify the messages and brainwash the public through repetition.

If your view of reality is consistent with the past but fails to do a good job predicting the near future, you might be in a cultlike organization with a manufactured worldview. If members of your group discourage you from listening to opposing views, it’s time to plan your escape.

If you have ever tried to win a debate by providing better facts and reasoning, you know it almost never works.

people are confident in their own abilities to understand the world. That confidence should be your target, not the totality of the argument.

Rarely can you free someone from mental prison in one try. You will need to chip away at their sense of confidence about their opinions first, to weaken the prison walls u...

People who have studied psychology and persuasion are already primed to know they can be confident and wrong at the same time. But almost everyone else thinks their sense of conf...

Confidence is not a reliable signal of rightness, at least not when it comes to the big political and social questions.

The most effective approach to addressing critics who misinterpret you, and then criticize their own misinterpretation as if it came from you, is this challenge: