Loserthink

Author: Scott Adams

Summary

This book is about how to dispense with counterproductive thought-patterns in order to break out of our mental prisons.

According to Adams, the first step in escaping our mental prisons is learning to ignore the “cultural gravity” of peer pressure that discourages success, uniqueness, and finding one’s own best path in life.

“People are not fundamentally rational when it comes to many of life’s bigger questions. We tend to make one irrational choice after another, and then concoct reasons for those choices to cover our tracks. We are not so much a rational species as a species that experiences the illusion of rationality. If you don’t understand that basic quality of human nature, you’ll be forever trapped in your mental prison. Your persistent belief in your own rationality is the primary illusion that controls your life.”

“The most important thing you will ever understand about the human experience: being absolutely right and spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same.”

Quotes and Concepts

• People cut corners whenever they think they can get away with it.
• No matter how smart you are, if you don’t have experience across multiple domains, you’re probably not acquainted with the most productive ways of thinking.”
• The sunk cost principle: money spent shouldn’t influence future decisions, but for psychological reasons, it often does.
• When protracted debate over a controversial topic mounts to a level requiring expertise beyond that of the debaters, most people simply default to their original position.
• Prediction models are not science. They are intelligent combinations of scientific thinking, math, human judgement, and incomplete data.

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

• It is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which complexity and large amounts of money are involved… When lots of money and lots of complexity are in play, fraud is nearly guaranteed.
• The fields of economics and psychology have shown us that we are influenced by myriad forces that we do not understand.
• If you have studied psychology and economics, you would understand that the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists could easily be more wrong than right, and that this would not be unusual in human history.
• Ego can be a mental prison in blinding us to possibilities that conflict with how we see ourselves.
• Negativity can be a mental prison in generating self-fulfilling prophecies about unhappiness and failure.
• Keep track of occasions when you thought you couldn’t possibly be wrong. Over time, this will help you realize that certain sets of facts sometimes have explanations that you cannot imagine.
• No one should be confident in the face of complexity.

Your certainty about your opinion should not exceed your certainty that you have ALL relevant data.

• Truth has two important dimensions: accuracy and direction. It is possible for something to point in the right direction, even if it doesn’t quite hit the mark.
• Stories and data can be persuasive while also being misleading.
• Luck is attracted to energy and action. It will not come looking for you on your couch.
• Confirmation bias looks and feels exactly like legitimate knowledge. We humans cannot tell the difference between rational opinions and confirmation bias — but we think we can… There would be no such thing as confirmation bias if we could recognize it when it happened.
• Doing one’s own research is often a good idea, with one important exception: politicized topics that are big and complicated. Doing your own research on such topics will teach you primarily that there are studies and experts on both sides of the issue — and you are not qualified to settle the dispute.

If the press had a choice between scaring you and telling you that everything is fine, one of those paths is more profitable. Fear sells.

• Certainty is no assurance of accuracy. Notice that people who disagree with each other are apt to feel equally certain that the other person is wrong — and on that point, they might both be right!
• If you have something you would like to achieve, rather than waiting until you feel you can do it perfectly, a better strategy is to just start doing it imperfectly, and to take advantage of all the free advice that usually follows such attempts.
• When we are presented with a story for which we do not know the full context, we will not be able to tell which relevant details may have been strategically omitted.
• When we judge people according to their mistakes, we’re likely to end up with an inaccurate ranking since we can only judge the mistakes we know about — and because some people are able to hide their mistakes better than others.
• Since differing explanations can always be made to fit a given set of facts retrospectively, the best way to test the accuracy of your opinions and perspectives is their predictive power.

People who understand that embarrassment isn’t fatal have something very much like a super power.

Extended Observations & Personal Notes

Competition Among Scientists

In order for competition to improve the accuracy of scientific findings, I suspect a few additional conditions need to be present:

• The one contesting the popular view must believe that his chance of success is great enough to justify the humiliation of possible failure.
• He must be able to find funding for an unpopular project.
• If he’s successful, he must find some way of sharing his dissenting discovery with a wider audience.
• In short, he needs balls and backers. Without these, current scientific views will continue to hold sway, even if they’re outmoded and misleading. Scientists, too, have their dogma.

Stock Picks: Playing The Odds

What are the odds of three consecutive stock picks being good bets? The scam works because its targets (a statistically predictable subset of the larger initial group) aren’t shown the picks that were bad bets. The targets, therefore, lack this important context. In order to gauge a predictor’s accuracy, you need a ratio, not just a number. You need to know misses as well as hits.

Cortisol

Time spent in a state of worry or fear can elevate stress, which releases cortisol, which:

• Curbs bodily functions that are nonessential to fight or flight.
• Alters immune responses.
• Suppresses digestion, growth, and the reproductive system.
• Alters mood and motivation.

Informational Parasitism

When you combine human brains that are wired to notice problems with a press that is financially incentivized to publish stories involving huge problems, you get a parasitic relationship that feels advantageous to viewers, but isn’t: an information service whose very business model selects for sensationalized half-truths over even-handed data delivery.

Proving A Negative

It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative — probably because proof is something inherently positive, something best suited for showing what is, rather than what is not. The widespread lack of appreciation for this fact suggests a blindspot in our understanding of how proof works. Proving that a thing does not exist, whether God or Bigfoot, requires something like comprehensive knowledge; whereas proving that something does exist only requires specific, localized knowledge.

Pattern Recognition

• Humans use pattern recognition to understand the world.
• Humans are not good at pattern recognition.
• They don’t know this.

We can’t tell the difference between patterns that are predictively useful and patterns that simply remind us of something we have observed before.

Systems vs. Goals

Goals offer a single way to succeed — a way that must be foreseeable when the goal is made. Systems approach success by maintaining and enhancing preparedness for opportunities that cannot be foreseen and therefore cannot be aimed at. Goals are like single bullets. Systems are like buckshot.

Single-variable Thinking

We often slip into one-variable thinking, even though outcomes in real life are almost always a matter of multiple, complex variables. The temptation to single-variable analysis is greatest in the following situations:

• Trying to figure out why a relationship isn’t working.
• Trying to understand the motivation of friends and family.
• Making business decisions in complicated situations.

Ends/Means or Costs/Benefits?

When someone wants to discuss whether the “ends justify the means,” the conversation will be morally loaded. To avoid the trap of moralizing (given the absence of a mutually accepted moral authority), suggest discussing the topic in terms of costs and benefits. As long as decisions are framed in terms of costs and benefits, people may disagree on the ultimate decision, but almost no one will disagree with the method.

Indirect Problem-Solving

Sometimes, addressing the proximate cause of a problem is not the best path for changing outcomes. This can be seen in the domain of healthcare costs. We may rightly object to the soaring prices of healthcare, but our objections themselves are very unlikely to result in lower prices. A more indirect approach — that of bringing a superior alternative to market — has a great track record on convincing other providers to reduce their margins.

On Expert Advice

“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 be able to tell when the expert is the solution when they are the jailers of your mental prison… For situations where there is no historical precedent, where there is a great deal of complexity, and where experts disagree — we should regard their advice as no more than an educated guess.”

Upholding the Appearance of Rationality

“If people were rational, you would observe that they change their opinion on topics such as religion and politics when confronted with new information that contradicts existing beliefs.”

• Despite being unresponsive to such information, we hold so tightly to the conviction that we are exercising clearheaded rationality (possibly mainly because we want to be sure others continue to see us in that light?). It’s as if we clearly understand the virtue of honesty and objectivity, but we can’t see, or won’t admit, where we leave it behind.

The Magic Question

Since getting on the same page (especially with strangers) can be notoriously difficult, here’s a question that can help: What’s one thing you believe on this topic that you think I don’t believe? Courteously repeating this technique will erode your interlocutor’s confidence in their ability to read your mind. In order to build trust, express your agreement with as much of the other person’s position as you can before taking up the part you disagree with.

Things to Remember

• Don’t engage in mind-reading. It isn’t a human skill.
• Think of your ego as a tool, not as your identity.
• Track your predictions to build up some useful humility.
• Put yourself in embarrassing situations regularly.
• Don’t let your attachment to the past control your decisions today.
• If you haven’t mentioned the best alternative to your proposal, you haven’t said anything at all, and smart people would be wise to ignore you.
• If you’re arguing over the definition of a word, instead of the best way forward, you’re not part of the productive world.
• If you’re sure one variable is all you need to grasp a complicated topic, the problem is probably on your end.
• Ockham’s Razor, the idea that the simplest explanation is usually correct, is often misused: we all think our opinions are the simplest explanations.
• Fairness cannot be obtained in most cases, because of its subjective nature. The closest you can get is equal application of the law.
• If your argument depends on that one time something happened, you do not have an argument; you have an anecdote.
• If your argument depends entirely on the so-called slippery slope, beware. Not all slopes lead unstoppable to the conclusions you may imagine.
• If your argument depends entirely on not knowing how else to explain a coincidence, you have a poor imagination, not an argument.
• Don’t use analogies to predict. Look to causes and effects.
• Don’t judge a group by its worst five percent. If you do, you’re probably in the worst five percent of your group.
• Understand the limits of expert advice, and be skeptical of experts who have financial incentives to mislead.

The Author in Action

One source of power in Adams’ approach to persuasion is that he’s coming from a place of empathy. His explicit goal is to help “set others free from their mental prisons.” This interview is a great demonstration of how effective his approach is.