Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

mocking people for lying probably helps to reduce future lies and make the world a better place, whereas mocking people for things they can’t change is just being a jerk.

about mocking

Assuming scientists are human, you would expect lots of peer-reviewed studies to be flawed.

its just the start of the book

One thing I can say with complete certainty is that 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.

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.

fraud triangle

Whenever you have money, reputations, power, ego, and complexity in play, it is irrational to assume you are seeing objective science.

If something is legal and profitable, it will happen, a lot.

pros and cons summed into one

We humans think we are good judges of what others are thinking. We are not. In fact, we are dreadful at it. But people being people, we generally believe we are good at it while also believing other people are not.

If your opinion depends on knowing the inner thoughts of a stranger, or even someone close to you, then you might be in a mental prison.

When I need to dial up my ego, I remind myself that the people I am about to deal with are a lot like me, in the sense that they too are only pretending

The common situation—and the one you should treat as true—is that we are deeply flawed humans pretending to be otherwise.

When you become a good question-asker, you look like the most confident person in the room, and your questions give you a sense of control over the situation, which is good for your confidence.

Being good at anything makes you more confident in unrelated things.

also have a bad history with the self-checkout stations at my local Safeway grocery store. In my defense, the instructions for those things were obviously written by Russian spies as part of their plan to rip apart the fabric of our society.

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.

If your cave-dwelling ancestors were enamored with the beauty of the scenery instead of, let’s say, the herd of carnivorous dinosaurs stampeding their way, they would not have survived to create the miracle that is you.

Thanks to the miracle of technology, I can feel angst about every problem in the known universe, so long as those problems can be described in words or pictures.

As a rule, we can’t always tell the difference between the people who are far smarter than us and the people who are dumber. Both groups make choices we can’t understand. That’s

We imagine people care about our situations more than they do.

Trust is the glue that holds social groups together. We are hardwired to prefer the truth.

For example, going to college and continuously learning new skills prepares you for lots of different opportunities, but you can’t always predict where that will lead.

A goal gives you one way to win, whereas a system can surface lots of winning paths, some of which you never could have imagined.

The more you care about a topic, the more susceptible you are to assigning meaning to coincidences.

his maxim that it is often easier to solve a problem if you express it as its opposite.

People who are trained in decision-making know it is not rational to ask someone to prove a negative.

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.

step one

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.

to pick up skills that will complement your talent stack.

In general, when you see a lot of energy in a particular area, spread across multiple companies, the technology or industry is likely to stay around even if the players change.

Praise is an effective way to get more of what you want.

I predict big strides over the next two decades in lowering the cost of healthcare, transportation, energy, education, Internet access, and housing. And that means lower-paying jobs will be sufficient for enjoying a quality life.

Don’t trust data from people who have a financial incentive to find lots of whatever it is you are tracking.

That teasing, especially at a young age, created a cultural gravity. The message was clear: if I wanted to be cool, I couldn’t also be a good student.

When you do something the wrong way, the people who know how to do things the right way will generally jump in to tell you what you are doing wrong. Take advantage of all that free advice.

It means you just learned that embarrassment doesn’t kill you. And that, my friends, is like a superpower. If

But if your boss consistently makes you choose work over health, look for a new job.

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.

We are better off encouraging insincere but positive opinions, because they are self-fulfilling to a degree. Reward what works.