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The risk of mockery changes behavior. I would go so far as to say it is one of history’s most powerful forces.
.eq .ooda
If all you know is how many times someone hit a target, it is loserthink to judge how accurate they are. You also need to know how many times they missed.
.ooda
it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved.
.ooda
Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen.
.value
Most of our problems with resource shortages are solved, or solvable, so long as we get our mental game in order.
.technium .metamodernism
Being absolutely right and being spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same.
.eq .ooda
If your opinion depends on reliably knowing another person’s inner thoughts, you might be experiencing loserthink.
.eq .reminders
If an ordinary explanation fits the facts, but you have chosen an extraordinary interpretation instead, you might have too much confidence in your opinion.
.reminders .eq
If your criticism depends on assigning labels instead of cause-and-effect reasoning, you are engaged in loserthink.
.eq
In a scientific setting, the simplest explanation that fits the facts is generally preferred. But in the messier nonscientific world, we all think our explanations of the world are the simplest ones.
.ooda
The sweet spot for self-confidence involves operating with a belief that you can do more than the available evidence suggests, but not so much more that it would be crazy.
.eq .mastery
Once you embrace the reality that we all present the “enhanced” versions of our real selves, all the time, you can relax a bit and get into character.
.syntheism .metamodernism
You aren’t the one defective person in the room. Ever.
.eq .reminders
For your convenience, I summarize these techniques here. Tell yourself, “I’m good at this” Learn to breathe properly Improve your posture Manage your body language If you are an introvert, keep some questions in your back pocket so you can guide conversations and always have something to say Make a good first impression with a solid handshake and eye contact Remind yourself of the skills you are good at Exercise regularly to drain off nervous energy
.reminders .eq
Keep a few examples of your wrongness fresh in your memory so you can generate the right level of humility about your omniscience in future situations.
.reminders .eq
Choosing ego over effectiveness is classic loserthink.
.eq .mastery
Put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations on a regular basis for 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.
.mastery .reminders
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.
.reminders .mastery
when a person who is otherwise smart says something that sounds dumb to me, I remind myself that, in this situation, I might be the dog.
.reminders
If you can’t imagine any other explanation for a set of facts, it might be because you are bad at imagining things.
.reminders
Our tiny brains don’t have the capacity to grasp the complexities of life and then process that knowledge to make smart decisions. We only think we can. What we do instead of rational decision-making is employ a sloppy form of pattern recognition to make sense of our world.
.ooda .metamodernism
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.
.eq .ooda
Often it helps to hold both your suspicion and the opposite of your suspicion as equally possible until you know for sure.
.eq .ooda
The secret to thwarting couch lock of any sort is to stop imagining everything you need to do, and start imagining the smallest step that you can do without much real effort.
.eq .mastery .reminders
Do what you can do, not what you can’t. Then build on the momentum.
.reminders .mastery
Loserthink involves imagining the entire task ahead and letting it stun you into inaction. The opposite of loserthink is breaking down a big task into the tiniest step you are willing to do right now. Then build from there, one tiny task at a time.
.mastery .change
Successful people, and people who will someday be successful, seem to believe they can steer their fate by their actions. Whether they are right about that or not, it’s a winning mindset.
.eq .mastery
As a general rule, people have to go find luck; it doesn’t find them. Luck is attracted to action and energy; it doesn’t come looking for you on the couch.
.reminders
Find a way to test your assumption in a small way so no one gets hurt.
.mastery .ooda
One of the most consistent rules of life is that bad behavior happens almost 100 percent of the time whenever you have this combination of variables: There is money to be made from the bad behavior The odds of detection are low Lots of people are involved
.governance
When people ask you if the ends justify the means, they are trying to frame themselves as the moral player in the conversation while framing you as the unethical weasel. Don’t answer the trick question. Instead, restate the question in this form before answering: I think you mean: Are the benefits greater than the costs?
.ooda .value
People who have been trained in decision-making understand that you can’t evaluate things in isolation.
.ooda .value .governance
plan. If you are not explicitly comparing your preferred plan to the next best alternative, you are not involved in rational thinking.
.ooda .governance
If your opinion considers only the benefits or only the costs of a plan, you might be in a mental prison.
.ooda .value. governance
Ideally, you want to consider all the impacts of your decisions, both now and later. But the present has one quality that the future does not: certainty.
.ooda
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.
.ooda .governance
If you find yourself experiencing certainty in a complex situation, you are probably experiencing loserthink.
.ooda
Straight-line predictions are generally wrong, and dangerous if you act on them. Still, they are not useless. Sometimes a straight-line prediction can encourage people to make the changes necessary to avoid a bad outcome. And sometimes you can rule out some possible outcomes, which can be helpful. But don’t confuse helpful with accurate.
.ooda .metamodernism
If you are accusing someone of making inappropriate moral equivalences, you are probably experiencing loserthink of the mind reader variety.
.eq
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.
.eq
If your job is to persuade, arguing for fairness can be an effective approach because humans are spring-loaded to prefer fairness. But in everyday life, fairness is an illusion, and complaining about the lack of fairness is rarely productive.
.eq
If you think an analogy is helping you predict the future, you might be in a mental prison. Analogies don’t have that power. To predict the future, look for causation, not patterns.
.ooda
Confirmation bias looks exactly like knowledge gained from doing your own research.
.ooda
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. Do not play defense. Attack the standard for being absurd and unworkable.
.eq
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.
.mastery
Probably the single biggest error that humans make in their decision-making is ignoring relevant context. Sometimes we do it intentionally, as in avoiding news and information sources that would give a competing explanation of reality. That problem can be fixed simply by broadening your information sources. But a bigger problem comes from not knowing what you don’t know.
.ooda
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.
.eq .reminders
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.
.ooda
