Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

But there is a way forward. It is not a solution that relies on half-baked policy ideas—particularly given that I have come to view our political system as a big part of the problem. Rather, the solution requires an attitudinal change. This attitude is embodied by something called Bayes’s theorem, which I introduce in chapter 8. Bayes’s theorem is

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I suggested that one key to resisting an affective death spiral is the principle of “burdensome details”—just remembering to question the specific details of each additional nice claim about the Great Idea. (It’s not trivial advice. People often don’t remember to do this when they’re listening to a futurist sketching amazingly detailed projections

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People are struggling, and the market is flooded with think pieces on whether inflation is real or the complexities of geo-politics. It’s interesting that the instinct is to try to make sense of every new thing that happens in the world (now that is a hampster wheel) rather than to understand the things that will never change.

Emotional reactivity d... See more