Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

A similarly tricky question is, “Do you still abuse your spouse?” There is no right answer to that question. If you say yes, you’re a spouse abuser. If you say no, you have admitted you were once a spouse abuser.

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?

Suppose I asked you if you would lie to a terrorist to thwart a terror attack. Lying is generally considered unethical, but in this specific case, the benefits clearly outweigh the costs.

One of the most common decision-making errors you see in politics involves ignoring either the costs or the benefits of major decisions. This might include supporting an idea that would be terrific if it were free, but is in fact something taxpayers would never support.

The adult view is that the costs in the near term might be unpleasant, but we will come out ahead in the long term. A rational person considers all the costs and all the benefits of any plan. And those costs and benefits are also compared to alternative plans so you can see which one is best.

In political discussions, you rarely see anything like a full description of the costs and benefits. Political advocates focus on the costs of a plan when they hate it and the benefits when they like it. People who follow politics mimic the advocates and end up with halfpinions instead of full opinions. 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.

A useful rule of thumb for doing quick mental calculations is that money doubles in value every ten years, assuming you can earn an average 7 percent return per year. A diversified

In the business world, a project that doesn’t pay for itself in two to three years is generally a bad idea. The exception is when real estate is involved, because real estate rarely decreases in value over time unless something unusual happens. If you build a factory, the building and land will probably be worth something in ten years even if your underlying business goes bust.

As I often say, humans don’t use facts and reasons to make decisions on complicated topics. The opinions of average voters on how to address climate change are driven by fear, emotion, team play, and other irrational factors.

We have to choose our targets wisely, which is a problem, because we do not have a wise public or a wise government.

The best examples are insurance products and mobile phone service. Most consumers can’t tell which companies offer the best deals because they can’t sort through the complexity. If you do an Internet search on “confusopoly,” you will find it referenced by economists around the world. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.” —The president of Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in Ford Motor Co., 19032 “The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most.” —IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, saying the photocopier had no market large enough to justify production, 19593

Similarly, we observe there is a lot of energy going into blockchain technologies, which doesn’t tell you much about the future of any particular product or company, but we can safely predict that blockchain will be around for a while. 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. That is helpful to understand when predicting a future that doesn’t travel in straight lines.

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

If your only complaint about another person’s behavior is that it might normalize something, you might not have any reasons to back your opinion.

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.

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.

Refusing to admit your errors, or your team’s errors, locks you into a team sport mentality. That’s a mental prison. It makes you appear small and it doesn’t advance anyone’s interests. You’re more focused on the fight than the fix. To escape that mental prison, admit you are wrong, put it in context, and explain what you plan to do to fix it. Then you’re free. If your best response to a credible accusation against your team is that the other side does it too, you are locked in loserthink.

Humans apparently evolved to prefer fairness in situations where they don’t have the option of being on top.

A good use of an analogy would be, for example, Otto von Bismarck’s famous quote that laws and sausages are two things people shouldn’t see being made. That does a good job of conveying the point that making laws is an ugly business and the public would lose their faith in government if they could observe the lawmaking process. In this context, Bismarck is just explaining a new idea to us in a memorable way. That is a good use of analogy.

How you feel about President Trump’s criticisms of the press depends on how accurate you think the press has been when covering him. If you believe the press has been willfully inaccurate to the point of delegitimizing itself, any criticism of the press is warranted, even if it comes from a president. If you think the press has been an honest broker of facts, you might believe that criticizing the free press is something only dictators do.

I often say on social media, and elsewhere, that analogies are useless for persuasion. Analogies are also useless for predicting what happens next, especially if the analogies are of the “history repeats” type. Analogies are great when used for humor. They are also handy for describing a new concept. But I try to avoid using analogies in the service of persuasion or prediction because analogies are not good for that.

If your goal is zero illegal immigration, walls and fences won’t get you there. But if your objective is to substantially reduce illegal immigration, border barriers almost certainly have an impact by adding friction. And you can test how much difference it makes by building a bit of it and measuring how it changes behavior. I guarantee that adding friction changes behavior, in the case of immigration and in everything else in life.

Adding friction to any human choice will reduce the number of people making that choice. To assume otherwise is loserthink.

The problem is that “doing your own research” on political topics generally leads people to conclusions that agree with their starting opinions. Confirmation bias looks exactly like knowledge gained from doing your own research. When it comes to political topics, and probably religion too, we humans can’t tell the difference between rational opinions and confirmation bias. But we think we can. That’s a problem.

Doing your own research is usually better than not doing any research, but don’t assume you can tell the difference between actual knowledge and your own confirmation bias. There would be no such thing as confirmation bias if we could recognize it when it happened.

a more productive way of thinking about your experience in this life is that you are what you do. And you have some executive control over what you do. In other words, you can change who you are by changing what you do. For example, learning good manners and making it a habit to use them often will turn you into a polite person even if you weren’t “born that way.”

So I set out to change that with a simple technique that I borrowed from another friend: if I need to talk about something negative, I pair it with at least one positive thought.

Never be yourself if you can make yourself into something better through your conscious actions. You are what you do.

If your intention is to avoid real debate, hurling dismissive labels at your nemesis works great. One has no social obligation to debate with a nemesis that has been labeled into filthy irrelevance. But avoiding debates doesn’t move anything forward, it doesn’t persuade, and it doesn’t make the world a better place.

Radical Islamic Wars I see no end in sight for radical Islamic terror attacks because the normal cost-benefit analysis of life on earth doesn’t apply to people who believe their payoff comes after martyrdom. But the brief tenure of the so-called ISIS caliphate in Syria shows us what happens when overachieving terrorists try to hold territory: it turns them into easier targets. The advantages of being a secret terror society evaporate when you try to hold territory.

I also predict a massive job market for renovating existing buildings to make them more energy efficient and more suited for modern living. Robots will soon be able to build new homes by following directions, but they will have a tough time navigating all the decisions that go into a renovation. The

renovation market should produce an increasing number of jobs for humans for a long time.

Innovation and Technology In 2018, Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and J.P. Morgan teamed up to create a better healthcare solution, at a lower cost, for their U.S. employees.15 That effort is in its early stages, but it looks like it is the right team to innovate and attack some of the toughest cost problems in healthcare.

The business model of the press guarantees you will see more negativity than the facts support. Things are often better than they seem, especially in the long run.

I believe no mental prison could hold me, and I’ve lived my life that way.

If you allow the opinions of unsuccessful people in your culture to hold you back, you’re engaged in loserthink. If you can learn to think of yourself as free from the cultural gravity of your peers, it will pay off in the long run.

If you don’t know the right way to do something, try doing it wrong, so long as it is not dangerous to do so. Doing things wrong is an excellent way to figure out how to do things right. I became one of the most successful cartoonists in the world by doing just about everything wrong until I figured out how to do it right. I became one of the highest-paid speakers at major events by being terrible at it until I understood what worked and what didn’t.

Loserthink involves waiting until you know how to do something right before you do anything at all. That strategy makes sense only when it is physically or financially dangerous to make a mistake. For most ambitions in life, we can jump in, make some mistakes, and figure it out from there. If you get embarrassed in the process,

Your first priority should be you. If you don’t take care of yourself first, you won’t be much use to anyone else. But hurry up—the world has lots of problems and maybe you can help.

submitted samples of my work to the major syndication companies that sell comics to newspapers all over the world. Four of the companies receiving my samples, staffed by the top experts in the world on the commercial value of comic strips, rejected me. One syndication company said yes. Dilbert went on to become one of the most successful comic properties of all time. Four out of five experts were wrong about my potential.

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.

Influence—by Robert Cialdini The Power of Habit—by Charles Duhigg Thinking, Fast and Slow—by Daniel Kahneman Win Bigly—by Scott Adams

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.

Using those two techniques, I have evolved from being embarrassed about just about everything to having almost no sense of shame whatsoever. Like most things in life, practice matters. If you practice controlling your ego, you can learn to do it effectively over time. It doesn’t happen overnight, but if you work at it, you’ll see big gains in a year. And the gains will accumulate.

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

If you’re similar to most people, you judge others by whatever mistakes you believe they have made. I was the same way for much of my life. But I eventually realized it was a form of loserthink. A smarter way of thinking is to judge people by how they respond to their mistakes.

One big problem with judging people by their mistakes is that what you are actually doing is judging people by the mistakes you are aware of. The people you have judged to be angels might simply be better, or luckier, at getting away with their transgressions against humanity. That would result in an inaccurate ranking of human beings on your personal judgment scale. There’s no point in being a judgmental person if you can’t accurately rank people. That’s just guessing.

But what you can do is 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. If you try it for a year, you’ll have a hard time going back to the old hypocritical way of judging people by their mistakes—a standard you would not like applied to you.