Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

We humans give greater weight to things that have names.

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.

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.

One form of loserthink is having too much confidence in your own rightness and your ability to divine the future.

Another form of loserthink involves waiting too long to develop confidence in your worldview before acting.

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

One of the most dangerous forms of loserthink is the notion that people should “be themselves” or be “authentic”—whatever that means.

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.

we are a species that makes one irrational decision after another and then we cover our tracks by concocting “reasons” after the fact.