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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ozan Varol
Read between
June 22 - August 3, 2021
Over time, our beliefs begin to blend into our identity.
When your beliefs and your identity are one and the same, changing your mind means changing your identity
Opinions are defended, but working hypotheses are tested.
At conferences, instead of saying “I argue…,” I began to say “This paper hypothesizes.
I was the one who came up with the ideas, but once they were out of my body, they took on a life of their own. They became separate, abstract things I could view with some objectivity. It was no longer personal.
even a working hypothesis is an intellectual child that can generate emotional attachment. One remedy, as we’ll see in the next section, is to have multiple children.
Francis Bacon
“It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than negatives.”
Robertson Davies
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
you like someone, you’ll tend to overlook their flaws. You’ll find signals from a love interest—or a spacecraft—even when they’re not sending any.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
how do you generate conflicting ideas? How do you find the countermelody to your melody? One approach is to actively look for what’s missing.
Robert Cialdini explains, “It is easier to register the presence of something than its absence.”
An experimenter walks into a room and gives you these three numbers: 2, 4, 6. She tells you that the numbers follow a simple rule, and your job is to discover the rule by proposing different strings of three numbers. The experimenter will then tell you whether the strings you propose conform to the rule. You get as many tries as you want, and there’s no time limit.
The unsuccessful participants believed they found the rule early on and proposed strings of numbers that confirmed their belief. If they thought the rule was “increasing intervals of two,” they generated strings like 8, 10, 12 or 20, 22, 24. As the experimenter validated each new string, the participants grew increasingly more confident in their initial brilliant hunch and assumed they were on the right track.
The successful participants took the exact opposite tack. Instead of trying to prove themselves right by generating strings that confirmed their hypothesis, they tried to falsify it.
Our instinct in our personal and professional lives is to prove ourselves right. Every yes makes us feel good.
But every no brings us one step closer to the truth. Every no provides far more information than a yes does. Progress occurs only when we generate negative outcomes by trying to rebut rather than confirm our initial hunch.
Peter Cathcart Wason, who coined the term confirmation bias.
Karl Popper had termed falsifiability,
scientific hypotheses must be capable of being proven wrong.
A scientific theory is never proven right. It’s simply not proven wrong.
Most facts have a half-life.
Falsification is what separates science from pseudoscience.
“I don’t like that man,” Abraham Lincoln is said to have observed. “I must get to know him better.”
How many things am I dead wrong about?42 Poke holes in your most cherished arguments, and look for disconfirming facts (What fact would change my mind?).
Our goal should be to find what’s right—not to be right.
“The road to self-insight,” psychologist David Dunning said, “runs through other people.”
I gave trusted advisers early drafts of this book and asked them to point out not what’s right, not what they loved, but what’s wrong, what should be changed, what should be taken out. This approach provides psychological safety to those who might otherwise withhold dissent for fear of offending you.
opposite, the steel man. This approach requires you to find and articulate the strongest, not the weakest, form of the opposition’s argument.
We don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.
botched?
flinging
“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”
nothing went as we’d planned,” he responded, “but everything was within the scope of what we prepared for.”29
For every half hour of argument, a lawyer can expect an average of forty-five questions.
Emotional appeals may work before a jury, but not before nine of the greatest legal minds in the country.
There’s a question that’s commonly asked by companies to customers in pricing experiments: How much would you pay for this pair of shoes? Think about it. When was the last time someone asked you this question in real life? My guess is never.
An iinteresting criticism to the 'Willingness to Pay' model.
when it comes to reporting their own behavior, people tend to bend the truth.
Filling out a survey about reading a newspaper, and the actual act of reading a newspaper, are two different things.
observation is far more accurate than self-reporting.
They pop into comedy clubs unannounced to test their material in a low-stakes environment filled with strangers.
The Observer Effect
By observing a phenomenon, you can affect that phenomenon.
When people know they’re being observed, they behave differently.
abysmally
Clever Hans the horse.
Its owner, Wilhelm von Osten, would ask the audience for a math problem.
a young psychology student named Oskar Pfungst who figured out what was really going on. Hans could find the right answer only if he could see the human questioner. His mathematical genius disappeared if he was wearing blinders or otherwise couldn’t see the human intermediary. In the end, it was the human questioners who were unwittingly providing cues to the horse.
