Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

If you tried to describe what you meant by problematic, you might sound like this: “I don’t see any specific problems with your plan, but I feel as if there must be some.” You would be ignored or mocked for having such an empty opinion. But if you say the plan is problematic, you have suggested there is some sort of commonsense reason to expect problems, and geniuses such as yourself can recognize those problems. To be clear, you might be absolutely right about the risk of unspecified future problems. Some plans are so bad it would take all day to list all the ways they can go wrong. Those situations are indeed problematic. But in those cases, you can probably describe realistic scenarios for how things might go wrong. If the best you can do is label something problematic without offering some reasonable-sounding speculation on exactly how that might be the case, you are engaging in loserthink.