How to Think

Review & Highlights of the Book ‘How to Think’ by Alan Jacobs

How to Think by Alan Jacobs

I just completed reading Alan Jacob’s book, How to Think and it really opened my mind and changed my perspective on my thought process. In particular it changed the way I approach people I disagree with. In 2018, not sure there is a more important book. Below are some highlights that really stuck with me and I wanted to share.

1. {Overcoming bias} — For me, the fundamental problem we have may best be described as an orientation of the will: we suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?
2. What can be done about biases? How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us? — The short answer is that little can be achieved without a considerable investment of effort.
3. Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved” — especially in an online environment where the social approval of one’s attitude is so much easier to acquire, in the currency of likes, faves, followers, and friends?
4. That instinct for consensus is magnified and intensified in our era because we deal daily with a wild torrent of what claims to be information but is often nonsense. Again, this is no new thing. T.S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the 19th century. “When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.” “When we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts”
5. People invested in not knowing, not thinking about, certain things in order to have “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved” will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified — and wrathful when it is thwarted. Social bonding is cemented by shared emotion, shared emotion generates social bonding. It’s a feedback loop from which reflection is excluded. — Simply knowing the forces that at on us to prevent genuine reflection, making an accurate diagnosis of our condition, is the first course of treatment.
6. “Backshadowing” — “foreshadowing after the fact,” that is, the temptation to believe that we can look into the past and discern some point at which the present became inevitable.
7. To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.
8. To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And When people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean, “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of”
9. When we believe something to be true, we tend also to see the very process of arriving at it as clear and objective, and therefore the kind of thing we can achieve on our own; when we hold that a given notion is false, we ascribe belief in it to some unfortunate wrong turning, usually taken because an inquirer was led astray.
10. In one of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast episodes he looks at human irrationality, as manifested by Wilt Chamberlain. One of his greatest weaknesses was foul shots, he noted that only during a brief period in his career when he shot free throws underhanded did his percentage from the charity stripe improve. Why, then, did he go back to shooting in a more conventional but less successful style? Because, Wilt later admitted, he was embarrassed to shoot the ball in a way that might be perceived as girlish or sissy. How astonishingly irrational! cries Gladwell. To sacrifice success in your vocation because you’re afraid of what people might think or say.
11. Thomas Frank wrote a book called, “What’s the Matter with Kansas Problem.” The book famously tries to address what is to him an astonishing puzzle: why so many people in the American heartland vote in defiance of their “best interests.”
12. BINDING AND BLINDING — Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
    Our moral intuitions accomplish two things: they bind and they blind people. “People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they come blind to alternative moral worlds.”
13. But what triggers the formation of a “moral matrix” that becomes for a given person the narrative according to which everything and everyone else is judged? — the idea of a second or unwritten system. (An Inner Ring) — I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. — The Inner Ring discourages, mocks, and ruthlessly excludes those who ask uncomfortable questions. “The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole — the church, party, nation — and not to his fellow true believer.”
14. Americans today do not simply feel animus toward those who disagree with them politically; they are increasingly prepared to act on it. Iyengar and Westwood’s research discovers a good deal of racial prejudice, which is to be expected and which is likely to go worse in the coming years, but people seem to think that they shouldn’t be racists or at least shouldn’t allow it. Not so, when the difference has to do with ideology: “Despite lingering negative attitudes toward African Americans, social norms appear to suppress racial discrimination, but there is no such reluctance to discriminate based on partisan affiliation.” * That is, many Americans are happy to treat other people unfairly if those other people belong to the alien tribe. And — this is perhaps the most telling and troubling finding of all — their desire to punish the outgroup is significantly stronger than their desire to support the ingroup. Through a series of games, Iyengar and Westwood discovered that “outgroup animosity is more consequential than favoritism for the ingroup”
15. Bulverism — Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet.
16. OVERCOMING BIAS — attractions and repulsions alike are simply biases, and biases interfere with our ability to asses evidence and therefore should be “overcome,” eliminated. The habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings… when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analyzing spirit remains with its natural complements and correctives. When people have limited or nonexistent emotional responses to situations, whether through injury or congenital defect, their decision making is seriously compromised. They use reason alone — and, it turns out, reason alone is an insufficient guide to action.
17. 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. Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life.
18. As a wise man once said, one of the key tasks of critical reflection is to distinguish the true prejudices by which we understand from the false ones by which we misunderstand* — Learning to feel as we should is enormously helpful for learning to think as we should.

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probably that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is more the logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. — This passage makes a lot of sense when applied to Trump & Kanye.

19. 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. — If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church*

20. The identification of argument with war is so complete that if you try to suggest alternative way of thinking about what argument is — It’s an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It’s a means of clarifying our views — you’re almost certainly going to be denounced as a wishy-washy, namby-pamby sissy-britches. We fixate so immovably on this notion of argument as war in part because human beings, generally speaking, are insanely competitive about everything; but also because in many arguments there truly is something to be lost, and most often what’s under threat is social affiliation. Losing an argument can be a personal embarrassment, but it can also be an indication that you’ve sided with the wrong people, which means that you need to find a new ingroup or else learn to live with what the Marxists call “false consciousness”.

21. When people cease to be people because they are, to us, merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate, then we, in our zeal to win, have sacrificed empathy: we have declined the opportunity to understand other people’s desires, principles, fears. And that is a great price to pay for supposed “victory” in debate.

22. Fish points out that this is true of many communities of conspiracy theorists, those who believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that Lyndon Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassination. “The question is, ‘Could you show those people a set of facts that would lead them to abandon what we consider to be their outlandish views?’” said Fish. “The answer to that question is no, because all people who have a story to which they are committed are able to take any set of counter-evidence and turn it back, within the perspective of the story you believed in.”

23. 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 understand one thing in relation to another thing that we already know. When we call this process the association of ideas. — In search of social belonging, and the blessed shortcuts that we can take when we’re in the presence of like-minded people, we come to rely on keywords, and then metaphors, and then myths — an dat every stage habits become more deeply ingrained in us, habits that inhibit our ability to think.

24. In biology, taxonomy is the study of classification — the classification of living things. We are all inveterate taxonomists, and go through our days lumping and splitting like crazy. We use these heuristics, these strategies of simplification, all the time; we just don’t like them used on us. We don’t want our lives summarized with an acronym, or our deaths with a bitterly ironic joke. We’re funny that way. We don’t like our distinctiveness, our me-ness, compromised or ignored.

25. Just as we cannot do without our metaphors and myths, we cannot do without a social taxonomies. There are too many people! But we absolutely must remember what those taxonomies are: temporary, provisional intellectual structures whose relevance will not always be what it is, or seems to be, today.

26. But here I think we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view.

Cultivate skepticism as a first response to what you hear.

We want to have the mental flexibility and honesty to adjust our views accordingly when the facts change.

We need to be able to make reliable assessments about the state of our knowledge, in such a way that when necessary we can hold back from taking any position until we learn more; and we need to accept that while knowledge may be analog, decision making is often digital, that is, binary.

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 integrity — 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.

We shouldn’t expect moral heroism of ourselves. Such an expectation is fruitless and in the long run profoundly damaging. But we can expect to cultivate a more general disposition of skepticism about our own motives and generosity toward the motives of others. And — if the point isn’t already clear — this disposition is the royal road that carries us to the shining portal called Learning to Think.

I just want to emphasize, here at the end, that you won’t profit from this book if you treat it as offering only a set of techniques. You have to be a certain kind of person to make this book work for you: the kind of person who, at least some of the time, cares more about working toward the truth than about one’s current social position

• By Alan Jacobs