How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

All social taxonomies are prone to these forces of consolidation and dissolution, assembly and disassembly, because, unlike biological taxonomies, they’re all temporary and contingent—and are often created by opposition. Those who are subject to the same forces, the same powers-that-be, can find themselves grouped together, sometimes to their own s

A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a DS’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integ

And where is the line that separates (a) matching my writing to my audience from (b) telling people what they want to hear so that I can get into the pages of an influential magazine? I didn’t know where the line was—I still don’t know where the line is—but I know it exists.

the correctness of the conclusion would not erase the falsity of the premises. This should not in any way lessen our admiration for the boy’s ingenuity; but it should remind us that all of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons, and false things for good reasons, and that whatever we think we know, whether we’re right

Lumping is a powerful strategy for information management, and a certain filtering out of individuality is the price we simply have to pay to get our choices under some kind of control. But lumping can also be desirable for a very different—indeed, almost the opposite—reason, as a strategy of inclusion.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using such keywords—indeed, they’re necessary. In any gathering where human beings communicate with one another, some beliefs or positions will be taken for granted: we cannot and need not justify everything we think, before every audience, by arguing from first principles. But keywords have a tendency to be

What System 1 does for us is to provide us with a repertoire of biases, biases that reduce the decision-making load on our conscious brains. These biases aren’t infallible, but they provide what Kahneman calls useful “heuristics”: they’re right often enough that it makes sense to follow them and not to try to override them without some good reason

The myths we choose, or more likely simply inherit, do a tremendous amount of intellectual heavy lifting for us. Even more than the empty words and phrases of Orwell’s “tired hack on the platform,” these myths do our thinking for us. We can’t do without them; the making of analogies is intrinsic to thinking, and we always and inevitably strive to u

Wallace was wrong to say that “you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.” You really can’t do that, which, I believe, he discovered: his ceaseless self-examination caused him ceaseless misery and contributed in a major way to his early death.