I have been a fan of BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits methodology for breaking bad habits and learning good (often new) habits. BJ Fogg did not write this book. James Clear did, with methodologies that are strongly drawn from Fogg's work.

Fogg's new habit forming process is 1. start small (like, way smaller than you just thought for "small"), 2. piggyback on an existing routine, and 3. reward yourself immediately after doing the new habit. Fogg has shown much success at Stanford with this process, and I love it. It works very, very well for me.

Fogg does not have a book about this particular technique of developing good habits. With this book, James Clear does.

Atomic Habits is pretty much a long version of those three steps from BJ Fogg. Until Fogg writes a book on them, this is a fantastic substitute, interpretation of Fogg's work.

Much of the book is rah-rah, how-to-internalize-good-internal-chatter, "obvious," self-help rhetoric, which, let's face it, if you're picking up this book to learn good habits, you actually need. And, while I'm not a fan of the "habit journal" (you can draw lines on a notebook page for the same effect), I do appreciate the habit making guides in the book.

For anyone not a Fogg fan or even aware of BJ Fogg, I strongly recommend this book. If you don't have good habits, aren't the person you want to be, ignore the kabillion quotes I have from the book here, grab a copy and read it.

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.
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Improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run.
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Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
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In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
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Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
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Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
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Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.
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Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.
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It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.
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It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.
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True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.
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Doing the right thing is easy. After all, when your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be.
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Many people walk through life in a cognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity.
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The more deeply a thought or action is tied to your identity, the more difficult it is to change it. It can feel comfortable to believe what your culture believes (group identity) or to do what upholds your self-image (personal identity), even if it’s wrong.
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We do not change by snapping our fingers and deciding to be someone entirely new. We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self.
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First, decide who you want to be. This holds at any level—as an individual, as a team, as a community, as a nation. What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?
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Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?”
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But the true question is: “Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?” The first step is not what or how, but who. You need to know who you want to be.
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Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.
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The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become. Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
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This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn, try differently.
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Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom.
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The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.*
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Because the cue is the first indication that we’re close to a reward, it naturally leads to a craving.
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Cravings are the second step, and they are the motivational force behind every habit. Without some level of motivation or desire—without craving a change—we have no reason to act. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.
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Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state.
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The response is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action.
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a habit can occur only if you are capable of doing it.
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Finally, the response delivers a reward. Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us.
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The first purpose of rewards is to satisfy your craving.
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Your brain is a reward detector.
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All behavior is driven by the desire to solve a problem. Sometimes the problem is that you notice something good and you want to obtain it. Sometimes the problem is that you are experiencing pain and you want to relieve it. Either way, the purpose of every habit is to solve the problems you face.
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How to Create a Good Habit The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious. The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive. The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy. The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.
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How to Break a Bad Habit Inversion of the 1st law (Cue): Make it invisible. Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving): Make it unattractive. Inversion of the 3rd law (Response): Make it difficult. Inversion of the 4th law (Reward): Make it unsatisfying.
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Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself: How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?
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Every goal is doomed to fail if it goes against the grain of human nature.
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Your habits are shaped by the systems in your life.
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A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible. Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.
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Consider hunger. How do you know when you’re hungry? You don’t necessarily have to see a cookie on the counter to realize that it is time to eat. Appetite and hunger are governed nonconsciously.
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As habits form, your actions come under the direction of your automatic and non-conscious mind. You fall into old patterns before you realize what’s happening. Unless someone points it out, you may not notice that you cover your mouth with your hand whenever you laugh, that you apologize before asking a question, or that you have a habit of finishing other people’s sentences.
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If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
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If you’re still having trouble determining how to rate a particular habit, here is a question I like to use: “Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?” Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good. Habits that conflict with your desired identity are usually bad.
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If you waste time online, notice that you are spending your life in a way that you do not want to.
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Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem more real. It adds weight to the action rather than letting yourself mindlessly slip into an old routine.
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With enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it. Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing. The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.
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The sentence they filled out is what researchers refer to as an implementation intention, which is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement a particular habit.
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Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentions are effective for sticking to our goals,
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Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.
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If you aren’t sure when to start your habit, try the first day of the week, month, or year. People are more likely to take action at those times because hope is usually higher. If we have hope, we have a reason to take action. A fresh start feels motivating.
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Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an urge to do the right thing at the right time, even if you can’t say why.
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Social skills. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don’t know yet.
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Finances. When I want to buy something over $ 100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing.
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One way to find the right trigger for your habit stack is by brainstorming a list of your current habits.
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People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.
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In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that makes a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f (P, E).
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Given that we are more dependent on vision than on any other sense, it should come as no surprise that visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior. For this reason, a small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do. As a result, you can imagine how important it is to live and work in environments that are filled with productive cues and devoid of unproductive ones.
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Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out.
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Making a better decision is easy and natural when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.
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Environment design is powerful not only because it influences how we engage with the world but also because we rarely do it. Most people live in a world others have created for them.
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Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
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Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.
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The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment. It helps to escape the subtle triggers and cues that nudge you toward your current habits.
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Habits thrive under predictable circumstances like these. Focus comes automatically when you are sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space designed for that purpose.
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Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment.
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The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs about bad habits because it challenged the conventional association of unhealthy behavior as a moral weakness.
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The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture.
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When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
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The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often.
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Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy.
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One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
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This practice is an inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change. Rather than make it obvious, you can make it invisible.
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Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
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People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.
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One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it. Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.
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The 1st Law: Make It Obvious 1.1: Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them. 1.2: Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].” 1.3: Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].” 1.4: Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible.
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Inversion of the 1st Law: Make It Invisible 1.5: Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.
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A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality—like a beak with three red dots or an egg the size of a volleyball—and it elicits a stronger response than usual.
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The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming. Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in.
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Interestingly, the reward system that is activated in the brain when you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward. This is one reason the anticipation of an experience can often feel better than the attainment of it.
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Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.
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Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
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You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.
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Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory known as Premack’s Principle. Named after the work of professor David Premack, the principle states that “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”
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It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.
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Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to
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We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.
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Often, you follow the habits of your culture without thinking, without questioning, and sometimes without remembering.
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We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful.
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Proximity has a powerful effect on our behavior.
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We pick up habits from the people around us. We
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As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits.
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One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day.
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Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.
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Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
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Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.
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This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
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Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior. We are constantly scanning our environment and wondering, “What is everyone else doing?”
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The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual.
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There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
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When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
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Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige, and status.
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Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive.
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Look at nearly any product that is habit-forming and you’ll see that it does not create a new motivation, but rather latches onto the underlying motives of human nature.
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Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.
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Habits are all about associations. These associations determine whether we predict a habit to be worth repeating or not. As we
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our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
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You have been sensing the cues the entire time, but it is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action.
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A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.
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You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience.
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You simply practice associating your habits with something you enjoy, then you can use that cue whenever you need a bit of motivation.
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It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change:
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We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
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If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it? Sometimes we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or to be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen. And that’s the biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
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If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit. You just need to practice it.
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To build a habit, you need to practice it. And the most effective way to make practice happen is to adhere to the 3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it easy.
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Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity best seller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one. Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible.
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You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state.
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Certainly, you are capable of doing very hard things. The problem is that some days you feel like doing the hard work and some days you feel like giving in. On the tough days, it’s crucial to have as many things working in your favor as possible so that you can overcome the challenges life naturally throws your way. The less friction you face, the easier it is for your stronger self to emerge.
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For example, when deciding where to practice a new habit, it is best to choose a place that is already along the path of your daily routine. Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.
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Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.
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As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine.
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The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.
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It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
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Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.
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I really need to do my book reviews immediately after reading the book, lest I, like in this instance, not recall what I actively thought about the book as I was reading it.

I liked this book enough to say, "This book belongs on my bookshelf." Rather than reading a borrowed copy from the library and returning it, likely never to read it again, I bought a copy of the book to keep on my shelf, to pull down and perhaps read again, or to loan to a friend.

The book has elements of Stoicism in it, always an attraction to me these days, but also includes some active how-tos and exercises on surviving these end of days. There are elements of journaling, active reflection, some disassociation, and whoa whoa whoa wait is that true? that help one, well, stay sane.

I"m not sure I'd recommend the book to anyone not actively asking for a book on how to settle, even if just a little bit, but I will strongly recommend this one to, even buy a copy for, anyone who does, indeed, ask for a guidebook on growing up, staying sane, and existing as an adult.

Our ways of bonding to others; how we trust; how comfortable we generally feel with ourselves; how quickly or slowly we can soothe ourselves after an upset have a firm foundation in the neural pathways laid down in the mammalian right brain in our early years.
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You may be aware of the influence of both what I am calling the left and the right brains when you experience the familiar dilemma of having very good reasons to do the sensible thing, but find yourself doing the other thing all the same. The
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1. Self-Observation Socrates stated that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ This is an extreme stance, but I do believe that the continuing development of a non-judgemental, self-observing part of ourselves is crucial for our wisdom and sanity.
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2. Relating to Others We all need safe, trusting, reliable, nourishing relationships.
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... someone who not only listens but reads between the lines and perhaps even gently challenges us.
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The right kind of stress creates positive stimulation. It will push us to learn new things and to be creative, but it will not be so overwhelming that it tips us over into panic.
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4. What’s the Story? (Personal Narrative) If we get to know the stories we live by, we will be able to edit and change them if we need to.
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We may have beliefs that start with ‘I’m the sort of person who …’ or ‘That’s not me; I don’t do that …’
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The ability to observe and listen to feelings and bodily sensations is essential to staying sane.
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There is a difference between saying ‘I am angry’ and saying ‘I feel angry’. The first statement is a description that appears closed. The second is an acknowledgement of a feeling, and does not define the whole self.
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It may help to think of our self-observing part as a distinct component of ourselves. It is self-accepting and non-judgemental. It acknowledges what is, not what should be, and does not assign values such as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It notices emotions and thoughts but gives us space to decide how to act on them.
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To begin self-observing, ask yourself these questions: What am I feeling now? What am I thinking now? What am I doing at this moment? How am I breathing?
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What do I want for myself in this new moment?
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... take time to notice what I call post-rationalization, which could also be called self-justification. This describes the way we have of mentally ‘tidying up’ what is going on inside and outside of ourselves, often coming up with convenient explanations which may actually be nonsense, to justify our behaviour.
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Instead we can increase our tolerance for uncertainty, nurture our curiosity and continue to learn.
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A feeling cannot be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It is how we act out our feelings that is moral or immoral.
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What you write is up to you. I am a fan of random memories, as well as what you are thinking and feeling at the moment of writing. I also like dreams.
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... stream-of-consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning just after waking, has been found to be effective in raising self-awareness.
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If you read your diary back to yourself you may identify some of your behavioural and emotional habits. For example, can you spot how much justification or reasoning you are using, or how much compassion you show yourself, or how much of what you write is fantasy?
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Our heads are always full of chatter, littered with phrases, images, repeated messages, running commentaries on our actions and thoughts. Much may be harmless, but some can be toxic:
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Throughout our lives we have a desire and a need to be acknowledged and understood. Although this is most productively achieved in conjunction with another person, contemplative practice is one way we can achieve this on our own.
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A brain, like a neuron, is not much use on its own. Our brains need other brains –or, as we more often put it, people need people.
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We run about, earning a living, achieving things and making a decent show of it all (or not), but what affects us most are the people around us: our parents, our children, our lovers, our colleagues, our neighbours and our friends.
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In crowded countries such as Japan and Britain we tend to have ‘negative-politeness’. This means that people are aware of others’ need for privacy, and their desire not to be intruded upon. In countries where there is more space, like the USA, people are more inclined to practise ‘positive politeness’, where the emphasis is on inclusion and openness. The anthropologist Kate Fox says that what looks like stand-offishness in a negative-politeness culture is really a sort of consideration for people’s privacy.
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I really wish I had kept track of where books are recommended to me. Difficulty with that is that it means I'm actually curating my to-read pile and not using serendipity to read something interesting.

Wait....

Okay, this book is, self-described, better titled "How We Are All Fucked." Yang does a phenomenal job of describing society not from the loftiest learned lofts, nor from the victor's viewpoint, but from the viewpoint of the normal person, the non-famous, the person who is middle class or below, has a family or doesn't, has an education or doesn't, and is making it or isn't.

The book describes the global and federal and societal forces that shape the success of those lives, though not successfully and not well, because the normal person is definitely losing this war. The realization of which should cause everyone to both thank Yang, and read this book.

Read this book, because there is hope at the end. The hope requires effort, something we seem to keep forgetting.

There is really only one entity—the federal government—that can realistically reformat society in ways that will prevent large swaths of the country from becoming jobless zones of derelict buildings and broken people. Nonprofits will be at the front lines of fighting the decline, but most of their activities will be like bandages on top of an infected wound. State governments are generally hamstrung with balanced budget requirements and limited resources.
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It was less the buildings and surroundings and more the people. They seemed despondent and depressed, like their horizons had been lowered to simply scraping by.
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As for me, I had gone from being an underdog to one of the guys with the answers, from finding the most marginalized or excluded person in the room to finding the richest person and making him or her feel special.
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spent a lot of time with people who had already won, which was not what I’d envisioned.
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Think of your five best friends. The odds of them all being college graduates if you took a random sampling of Americans would be about one-third of 1 percent, or 0.0036.
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Google “Adsum” by Iamus and take a listen.
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Surgeons are among the highest-trained, most highly compensated doctors because cutting people open is a big deal. Yet their highest-value work is, for the most part, manual and mechanical.
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Some patients also might prefer seeing a human doctor, though I suspect this preference will fade over time.
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There’s a big distinction between humans as humans and humans as workers. The former are indispensable. The latter may not be.
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It’s worth considering whether humans are not actually best suited for many forms of work. Consider also the reverse: Are most forms of work ideal for humans? That is, if we’re not good for work, is work good for us?
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Voltaire wrote that “Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” The total absence of work is demonstrably a bad thing for most people.
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Part of this understanding in America is a high level of commitment to work—educated Americans are working longer hours than they did 30 years ago, and many are expected to be available via email on nights and weekends, even as working hours have dropped in other developed countries.
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Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, argues that if a cashier’s job were a video game, we would call it completely mindless and the worst game ever designed. But if it’s called a job, politicians praise it as dignified and meaningful. Hunnicutt observes that “Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy—all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job.” Most jobs today are a means for survival. Without their structure and support, people suffer psychologically and socially, as well as financially and even physically.
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Whether work is good for humans depends a bit on your point of view. We don’t like it and we’re almost certainly getting too much of it. But we don’t know what to do with ourselves without it. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” Unfortunately that may describe the vast majority of us.
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The challenge we must overcome is that humans need work more than work needs us.
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Betting against new jobs has been completely ill-founded at every point in the past.
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History repeats itself until it doesn’t.
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The United States instituted universal high school; in 1910 only 19 percent of American teenagers were in a high school, and barely 9 percent of 18-year-olds graduated.
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In college, I learned about the efficient capital market hypothesis: stock market prices reflect all available information, and attempts to beat the market are going to be ineffective over time. Now, most every investment professional believes that this is grossly incorrect or at least incomplete given the financial crash, the rise of behavioral economics, the success of certain hedge funds, and the fact that trading firms are investing millions in having a faster pipe to the exchanges to front-run other traders.
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The employment market is loaded with friction. We all know that in real life. Yet so much of our policy assumes a dream world where people are infinitely mobile across state lines, know what jobs are there, have the savings to wait it out, make wise decisions about school, are endlessly resilient, and encounter understanding employers who are rooting for them and can see their merits.
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The demise of retail could make drone pilots more of a need over time. The
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Short story - drone pilot to deliver, dodge other drones trying to steal delivery
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Successfully retraining large numbers of displaced workers would require a heroic number of assumptions to prove true. The government needs to be able to identify displaced workers over a range of industries and have both the resources to pay for mass retraining and the flexibility to accommodate individual situations. Each person needs to have the capacity and will to be retrained in an in-demand field. The government needs to be an effective disseminator of information to thousands of individuals in real time. The worker needs to actually learn new marketable skills from the course or school in question. Last, there need to be new employers in the region that want to hire large numbers of newly trained middle-aged workers as opposed to, say, younger workers.
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We should 100 percent invest in successful retraining of employees. But we should also know that we’re historically very bad at it even in situations where we know displacement is happening.
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There are presently a record 95 million working-age Americans, a full 37 percent of adults, who are out of the workforce.
Page 78

Ryan Avent of the Economist poses a theory that technology has created an abundance of labor, both human and machine, and that companies when faced with both low labor costs and a low-growth environment invest less in new technology, which leads to lower productivity growth. This would suggest that we’re in an environment where employers are faced with low incentives to innovate because people are quite cheap to hire.
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The way management teams work is that we generally try to grow and take advantage of opportunities. We try to operate efficiently, but it’s not our number one priority all of the time. We also don’t walk around trying to be jerks in periods of relative prosperity.
Page 81

We joked at Venture for America that “smart” people in the United States will do one of six things in six places: finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine, or academia in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC. Conventional wisdom says the “smartest” things to do today are to head to Wall Street and become a financial wizard or go to Silicon Valley and become a tech genius.
Page 85

Instead of seeing college as a period of intellectual exploration, many young people now see it as a mass sort or cull that determines one’s future prospects and lot in life.
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It turns out that depressed, indebted, risk-averse young people generally don’t start companies. This will have effects for decades to come.
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This is a disaster in the making because technology is transforming society and our economy while politicians are left responding to the effects ineffectively years after the fact or, worse yet, ignoring them.
Page 95

Occasionally we see people leave for a more hospitable or child-friendly environment. We envy them a little, while also patting ourselves on the back for sticking it out. Professional empathy is limited.
Page 95

On some level, most of us recognize that we are servants to the tide of innovation and efficiency. As the water rises, we will protest as we clamber to higher ground.
Page 96

The underlying logic of the meritocratic system is this: If you’re successful, it’s because you’re smart and hardworking, and thus virtuous. If you’re poor or unsuccessful, it’s because you’re lazy and/ or stupid and of subpar character. The people at the top belong there and the people at the bottom have only themselves to blame.
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Being good at these tests, however, has very little to do with character, virtue, or work ethic. They just mean you are good at the tests.
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We say success in America is about hard work and character. It’s not really. Most of success today is about how good you are at certain tests and what kind of family background you have, with some exceptions sprinkled in to try to make it all seem fair. Intellect as narrowly defined by academics and test scores is now the proxy for human worth. Efficiency is close behind. Our system rewards specific talents more than anything.
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The meritocracy was never intended to be a real thing—it started out as a parody in a British satire in 1958 by Michael Young. At the time, a world where “intelligence fully determined who thrived and languished was understood to be predatory, pathological and far-fetched,” observes journalist David Freedman.
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gives everything a tinge of justice. It makes the suffering of the marginalized more palatable, in that there’s a sense that they deserve it. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that they often agree—they think they deserve it, too. They’re wrong. Intelligence and character aren’t the same things at all.
Page 98

People in the bubble think that the world is more orderly than it is. They overplan. They mistake smarts for judgment. They mistake smarts for character. They overvalue credentials. Head not heart. They need status and reassurance. They see risk as a bad thing. They optimize for the wrong things. They think in two years, not 20. They need other bubble people around. They get pissed off when others succeed. They think their smarts should determine their place in the world. They think ideas supersede action. They get agitated if they’re not making clear progress. They’re unhappy. They fear being wrong and looking silly. They don’t like to sell. They talk themselves out of having guts. They worship the market. They worry too much. Bubble people have their pluses and minuses like anyone else.
Page 98

Yuval Harari, the Israeli scholar, suggests that “the way we treat stupid people in the future will be the way we treat animals today.”
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also thought—correctly—that even if it didn’t work out I’d be fine. My story is one of relative abundance, and it should feel familiar.
Page 102

There’s a substantial correlation between one’s socioeconomic background and starting a successful company.
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The truth is that it’s a lot easier to start a company if you have a few things going for you. In addition to resources, you have a mindset of abundance. After you make one thing work out, you kind of think you can make anything work out.
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But the mechanics of entrepreneurship make it a lot more accessible to people who can realistically gather meaningful resources, defer money, and take on risk.
Page 104

That’s an environment of abundance. Money comes to you and good things happen to you seemingly for no reason, though the real reason is where you happen to be sitting.
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A mindset of scarcity is more than just “stress”—it actually makes one less rational and more impulsive by consuming bandwidth.
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We all respond poorly to scarcity.
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One could argue that it is essential for any democracy to do all it can to keep its population free of a mindset of scarcity in order to make better decisions.
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A culture of scarcity is a culture of negativity. People think about what can go wrong. They attack each other. Tribalism and divisiveness go way up. Reason starts to lose ground. Decision-making gets systematically worse. Acts of sustained optimism—getting married, starting a business, moving for a new job—all go down.
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When jobs leave a city or region, things go downhill pretty fast.
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They don’t want to move because this is what they are used to. Do you want to go and do your own thing, or be with your family? They say places are what you make of them, but it’s hard to make something beautiful when it is shit.”
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The central point is this: In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, trust, and cohesion—the stuff of civilization—are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship.
Page 116

In a growing organization, people are more optimistic, imaginative, courageous, and generous. In a contracting environment, people can become negative, political, self-serving, and corrupt.
Page 116

One of the great myths in American life is that everything self-corrects. If it goes down, it will come back up. If it gets too high, it will come back down to earth.
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Historically, virtually all American cities had more businesses open than close in a given year, even during recessions. After 2008, that basic measurement of dynamism collapsed.
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realized that, if you’re managing in a contracting environment, it’s possible that leaving the urinal duct-taped might be a perfectly reasonable way to go. Optimism could be stupid. When you’re used to losing people and resources, you make different choices.
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Getting married is an act of optimism, stability, and prosperity. It also can be expensive.
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Women are now the clear majority of college graduates—in 2017 women comprise 57 percent of college graduates, and the trend is expected to continue in the coming years.
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Single mothers outnumber fathers more than four to one.
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J. D. Vance made the same observation about school being something boys were supposed to ignore: “As a child, I associated accomplishments in school with femininity. Manliness meant strength, courage, a willingness to fight, and later, success with girls. Boys who got good grades were ‘sissies’… studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor.”
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Frederick Douglass wrote that “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
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I realized that there are many similarities between being a parent and being an entrepreneur. Here is a partial list: • Everyone’s got an opinion. But no one knows what they’re doing. • The first two years are brutal. • No one cares as much as you do. • On its best days it fills you with meaning and purpose. • People lie about it all the time. • Choose your partner wisely. • Heart is more important than money. But money helps. • It is very, very hard to outsource. • You find out who your friends are. And you make some new ones. • Occasionally the responsibility blows your mind. • If you knew what it entailed you might not get started. But you’re glad you did. • There will be a thousand small tasks you never imagined. • How you spend your time is more important than what you say. • Everything costs more than you thought it would. • Most of the work is dirty, thankless, and gritty. • You learn a lot about yourself. You get tested in ways that you can’t imagine. • When you find someone who can really help you’re incredibly grateful. • You have to try to make time for yourself or it won’t happen. • Whatever your weaknesses are, they will come out. • You think it’s fragile. But it will surprise you. • You sometimes do things you weren’t sure you were capable of. • When it does something great, there’s nothing like it. • You start out all-important. Yet the goal is to make yourself irrelevant. • People sometimes give you too much credit. • There is a lot of noise out there, but at the end of the day it’s your call. • It gives your life a different dimension. You grow new parts of yourself. • It’s harder than anyone expects. It’s the best thing ever.
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A study showed that one out of every 550 patients started on opioid therapy died of opioid-related causes a median of 2.6 years after their first opioid prescription.
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The percentage of working-age Americans who received disability benefits was 5.2 percent in 2017, up from only 2.5 percent in 1980.
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Disability payments received by beneficiaries in these five states exceed $ 1 billion per month.
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One judge who administers disability decisions said that “if the American public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits.”
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J. D. Vance writes of how the people in Ohio became angry that they were working hard and scraping by while others were doing nothing and living off of government checks.
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The numbers have grown to a point where more Americans are currently on disability than work in construction.
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We pretend that our economy is doing all right while millions of people give up and “get on the draw” or “get on the check.” It’s a $ 143 billion per year shock absorber for the unemployed or unemployable, whose ranks are growing all of the time.
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And it’s likely easier to think of yourself as genuinely disabled than as someone cheating society for a monthly draw.
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They speak to a primal set of basic impulses—to world creating, skill building, achievement, violence, leadership, teamwork, speed, efficiency, status, decision making, and accomplishment. They fall into a whole suite of things that appeal to young men in particular—to me the list would go something like gaming, the stock market, fantasy sports, gambling, basketball, science fiction/ geek movies, and cryptocurrencies, most of which involve a blend of numbers and optimization. It’s a need for mastery, progress, competition, and risk.
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How exactly are these game-playing men getting by? They live with their parents.
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You experience a continuous feeling of progress and accomplishment.
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We have entered an age of transparency where we can see our institutions and leaders for all of their flaws. Trust is for the gullible. Everything now will be a fight. Appealing to common interests will be all the more difficult.
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We are the most heavily armed society in the history of mankind—disintegration is unlikely to be gentle.
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In his book Ages of Discord, the scholar Peter Turchin proposes a structural-demographic theory of political instability based on societies throughout history. He suggests that there are three main preconditions to revolution: (1) elite oversupply and disunity, (2) popular misery based on falling living standards, and (3) a state in fiscal crisis. He uses a host of variables to measure these conditions, including real wages, marital trends, proportion of children in two-parent households, minimum wage, wealth distribution, college tuition, average height, oversupply of lawyers, political polarization, income tax on the wealthy, visits to national monuments, trust in government, and other factors.
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By his analysis, “the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s [before the Civil War] and, more surprisingly, with… France on the eve of the French Revolution.” He projects increased turmoil through 2020 and warns that “we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp at which American society will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval.”
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Even now, people of color report higher levels of optimism than poor whites, despite worse economic circumstances. It’s difficult to go from feeling like the pillar of one’s society to feeling like an afterthought or failure.
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Contributing to the discord will be a climate that equates opposing ideas or speech to violence and hate. Righteousness can fuel abhorrent behavior, and many react with a shocking level of vitriol and contempt for conflicting viewpoints and the people who hold them. Hatred is easy, as is condemnation. Addressing the conditions that breed hatred is very hard.
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However, it would be nearly impossible to curb automation for any prolonged period of time effectively across all industries.
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Time only flows in one direction, and progress is a good thing as long as its benefits are shared.
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Doing nothing leads to almost certain ruin. Trying to forestall progress is likely a doomed strategy over time.
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When you’re left with no other options, the unthinkable becomes necessary.
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Robert Kennedy famously said that GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play… it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
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Peter Frase, author of Four Futures, points out that work encompasses three things: the means by which the economy produces goods and services, the means by which people earn income, and an activity that lends meaning or purpose to many people’s lives.
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Twelve thousand dollars a year is not enough to do more than scrape by. Very few people will quit their jobs because of a guaranteed income at this level unless they were in a marginal or exploitative situation. The available data bears this out. On the other hand, the benefits would be absolutely enormous: • It would be a massive stimulus to lower-cost areas. • It would empower people to avoid making terrible decisions based on financial scarcity and month-to-month needs. • It would be a phenomenal boon to creativity and entrepreneurship. • It would enable people to more effectively transition from shrinking industries and environments to new ones. • It would reduce stress, improve health, decrease crime, and strengthen relationships. • It would support parents and caretakers for the work that they do, particularly mothers. • It would give all citizens an honest stake in society and a sense of the future. • It would restore a sense of optimism and faith in communities around the country. • It would stimulate and maintain the consumer economy through the automation wave. • It would maintain order and preserve our way of life through the greatest economic and social transition in history. • It would make our society more equitable, fair, and just.
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Putting money into people’s hands and keeping it there would be a perpetual boost and support to job growth and the economy.
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Businesses will benefit immensely from the fact that their customers will have more money to spend each month—most Americans will spend the vast majority of their money locally.
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You may not recall that the U.S. government printed over $ 4 trillion in new money for its quantitative easing program following the 2008 financial collapse. This money went to the balance sheets of the banks and depressed interest rates. It punished savers and retirees. There was little to no inflation.
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With the Freedom Dividend, money would be put in the hands of our citizens in a time of unprecedented economic dislocation. It would grow the consumer economy. It’s a stimulus of people. The vast majority of the money would go directly into the economy each month, into paying bills, feeding children, visiting loved ones, youth sports, eating at the local restaurant, piano lessons, extra tutoring help, car repairs, small businesses, housing improvements, prenatal vitamins, elder care, and so on. Most Americans are so cash-strapped that most of the money would be spent locally and quickly.
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To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Americans will always do the right thing. After they’ve tried everything else.”
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We’re trying relative deprivation and it’s not working. Half-measures are wasting time. Scarcity will not save us. Abundance will.
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Money has to come from somewhere. We’re used to the government spending billions wastefully to no great effect.
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By definition, none of the money would be wasted because it goes to citizens. It’s analogous to a company giving dividends or moneys to its shareholders. No one regards that as a waste of money, because the shareholders theoretically are the owners of the company.
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Are we not, as the citizens of the United States, the owners of this country?
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You know what’s really expensive? Dysfunction. Revolution. Keeping people and families functional will largely pay for itself.
Page 182

“It will destroy people’s incentives to work.” All of the available data shows that work hours stay stable or at most decrease modestly with a basic income.
Page 182

First, work is vital and the core of the human experience. Second, no one will want to work if they don’t have to. These two ideas are at complete odds with each other. Either work is a core of the human experience and we’ll do it even if we don’t necessarily have to, or work is something we have no interest in doing and we do it only to survive.
Page 182

“People will spend the money on stupid things, like drugs and alcohol.” The data doesn’t show this. In every basic income study, there has been no increase in drug and alcohol use. If anything, an improved sense of the future motivates people to figure out a plan for how to improve their lot.
Page 184

There are true addicts, and some people are self-destructive. But it’s not like a lack of money is presently keeping people from using opioids and alcohol—they find a way to get both money and drugs right now, sometimes illicitly.
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Here’s the thing—poor people tend to be much more careful with their money than rich people.
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The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth. There’s a tendency for rich people to dismiss poor people as weak-willed children with no cost discipline. The evidence runs in the other direction. As the Dutch philosopher Rutger Bregman and others put it, “Poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.”
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Many of the populations people are most eager to see employed and kept from idleness are among the least competent and able to be employed by the private sector. The natural tendency is to spend a lot of money on people doing things that aren’t actually that valuable.
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But an economy where most people work for the government has been tried and failed in many environments—
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Perhaps most crucially, endless new businesses would form. If you are in a town of 5,000 people in Missouri and everyone is struggling to get by, starting, say, a bakery may not be that attractive. But with a UBI, there will be an additional $ 60 million being spent in that town next year. You personally will have an income to fall back on if the bakery doesn’t work out.
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Time banking is a system through which people trade time and build credits within communities by performing various helpful tasks—transporting an item, walking a dog, cleaning up a yard, cooking a meal, providing a ride to the doctor, and so on.
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Some might ask, “Why create a new digital currency instead of just using dollars?” First, people will respond to points in a different way than they would if they were paid very low monetary amounts.
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Second, everyone will feel much more open and comfortable sharing balances if it’s a new social currency. You want people to advertise and reinforce their behavior. Behavior is much more likely to be reinforced if it’s social and recognized.
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Third, by creating a new currency, the government could essentially induce billions of dollars of positive social activity without having to spend nearly that amount.
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At present, the market systematically tends to undervalue many things, activities, and people, many of which are core to the human experience.
Page 198

First, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist system. There
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Our current form of institutional capitalism and corporatism is just the latest of many different versions.
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Now imagine a new type of capitalist economy that is geared toward maximizing human well-being and fulfillment.
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Human Capitalism would have a few core tenets: 1. Humanity is more important than money. 2. The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar. 3. Markets exist to serve our common goals and values.
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Our economic system must shift to focus on bettering the lot of the average person. Capitalism has to be made to serve human ends and goals, rather than have our humanity subverted to serve the marketplace. We shape the system. We own it, not the other way around.
Page 201

In addition to GDP and job statistics, the government should adopt measurements such as: • Median income and standard of living • Levels of engagement with work and labor participation rate • Health-adjusted life expectancy • Childhood success rates • Infant mortality • Surveys of national well-being • Average physical fitness and mental health • Quality of infrastructure • Proportion of elderly in quality care • Human capital development and access to education • Marriage rates and success • Deaths of despair/ despair index/ substance abuse • National optimism/ mindset of abundance • Community integrity and social capital • Environmental quality • Global temperature variance and sea levels • Reacclimation of incarcerated individuals and rates of criminality • Artistic and cultural vibrancy • Design and aesthetics • Information integrity/ journalism • Dynamism and mobility • Social and economic equity • Public safety • Civic engagement • Cybersecurity • Economic competitiveness and growth • Responsiveness and evolution of government • Efficient use of resources
Page 201

I’m no fan of big government. The larger an organization is, the more cumbersome and ridiculous it often gets.
Page 203

We have so many brilliant doctors—they should be innovators, detectives, guides, and sources of comfort, not glorified assembly line workers. And freeing health care from being locked to a job would be a massive boon to economic growth and dynamism.
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Similar to health care, the automation wave should lead us to invest more people in education and human capital development. It should also drive us to dramatically increase our emphasis on technical and vocational training and apprenticeships at the high school level to take advantage of the jobs that will continue to exist.
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In an age with less and less employment, the abilities to self-manage and socialize will become the new keys to success in life. We
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Grit, persistence, adaptability, financial literacy, interview skills, human relationships, conversation, communication, managing technology, navigating conflicts, preparing healthy food, physical fitness, resilience, self-regulation, time management, basic psychology and mental health practices, arts, and music—all of these would help students and also make school seem much more relevant.
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The purpose of education should be to enable a citizen to live a good, positive, socially productive life independent of work.
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People teach other people. If you want to teach thousands of students well, you teach one student well. Then you do it thousands of times.
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Climb to the hilltop and tell others behind us what we see. What do you see? And build the society we want on the other side.
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Okay, so, I read this book at the beginning of the year, but for reasons I cannot recall, I didn't review it immediately after finishing it. Which meant I should either not review it, or, you know, reread it. I recalled the book took me about two hours to read it the first time. Given the title, and my general inclination to liking thinking, I figured I'd read it again. Unsure how to count this in my book total for the year, I'll probably count it twice.

I so enjoyed this book. All of about a tenth into it, I recalled how much I enjoyed the book the first time. Unlike The Art of Thinking Clearly, which is a list of all the various biases and quirks people have in thinking, this book is a journey about how one should approach thinking. We, in general, don't want to think. It's hard, effort is required. We have to go against much of the social conditioning we've been in for the thousands of years of evolution we've needed to survive to this point. And thoughts are the result of reactions to others' thoughts. All of this is explored in Jacobs' writing.

The book hops down various paths related to thinking, and circles back around in a wonderful way. I enjoyed this book the first reading, and the second reading 11 months later. Recommended and worth a read.

This is what thinking is : not the decision itself but what goes into the decision , the consideration , the assessment . It’s testing your own responses and weighing the available evidence ; it’s grasping , as best you can and with all available and relevant senses , what is , and it’s also speculating , as carefully and responsibly as you can , about what might be . And it’s knowing when not to go it alone , and whom you should ask for help .
Page 14

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 ,
Page 17

or at least complicate our relationships , with those we admire or love or follow . Who needs thinking ?
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After the first few moments of the speaker’s lecture , Fried had effectively stopped listening : he had heard something he didn’t agree with and immediately entered Refutation Mode — and in Refutation Mode there is no listening . Moreover , when there is no listening there is no thinking . To enter Refutation Mode is to say , in effect , that you’ve already done all the thinking you need to do , that no further information or reflection is required .
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It could be coincidence , or synchronicity , or fate ; but sometimes there’s a blessed convergence between what you read and what you need . A
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In a 1994 essay called “ Puritans and Prigs , ” Robinson challenges the contemptuous attitudes many people have toward the Puritans — the very word is no more than an insult now — and gives a more generous and accurate account of what they thought and why they thought it .
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Puritanism . ” That is , the kinds of traits we label “ puritan ” — rigidity , narrowness of mind , judgmentalism — are precisely the ones people display whenever they talk about the Puritans . *
Page 20

“ Very simply , ” Robinson writes , “ it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged , when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved . ”
Page 20

The word doesn’t have any meaning as such , certainly not any historical validity ; it’s more like the password to get into the clubhouse .
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Robinson further comments that this kind of usage “ demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry , ”
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The more useful a term is for marking my inclusion in a group , the less interested I will be in testing the validity of my use of that term against — well , against any kind of standard .
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They are invested , for the moment anyway , in not thinking .
Page 21

T . S . Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth 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 . ”
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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 .
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( Social bonding is cemented by shared emotion , shared emotion generates social bonding . It’s a feedback loop from which reflection is excluded . )
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Human beings are not built to be indifferent to the waves and pulses of their social world .
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The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures , confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup .
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It’s very rewarding to show them not necessarily that their beliefs are wrong , but that they haven’t defended them very well , haven’t understood their underlying logic , haven’t grasped the best ways to commend
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their views to skeptical Others . *
Page 25

Harding’s essay is “ Representing Fundamentalism : The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other , ”
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The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us , all of us , and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “ the war of every man against every man . ”
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simply knowing the forces that act on us to prevent genuine reflection , making an accurate diagnosis of our condition , is the first course of treatment .
Page 29

Eno and Schmidt called the card deck Oblique Strategies because they knew that when an artist is blocked , direct approaches meant to fix the problem invariably make it worse . In a similar way , sometimes you can get better at thinking only by turning your attention to matters other than thinking .
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We’re probably all subject to what the literary critic Gary Saul Morson calls “ 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 .
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This ending deprives us of the easy comforts that Sapere aude stories tend to offer — the reassurance that , though life in the bigger world may be hard at times , may even be miserable , it is nonetheless the right trade to make because the security of community is not really the most vital thing in the long run . Le Guin’s swerve from the more familiar form of the trope says : We don’t know that . 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 .
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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 . ”
Page 37

This is a point worth dwelling on . How often do we say “ she really thinks for herself ” when someone rejects views that we hold ? No : when someone departs from what we believe to be the True Path our tendency is to look for bad influences . She’s fallen under the spell of so - and - so . She’s been reading too much X or listening to too much Y or watching too much Z . Similarly , people in my line of work always say that we want to promote “ critical thinking ” — but really we want our students to think critically only about what they’ve learned
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at home and in church , not about what they learn from us . *
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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 ,
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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 or wrong , arises from our interactions with other human beings .
Page 39

Gladwell assumes that if Wilt had been thinking rationally , the only thing he would have
Page 45

been concerned about was success in his job . But that’s because Gladwell , like many of us , seems to have unwittingly internalized the idea that when professional athletes do the thing they’re paid to do , they’re not acting according to the workaday necessity ( like the rest of us ) but rather are expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts , and doing so in a way that gives them delight . We need to believe that because much of our delight in watching them derives from our belief in their delight .
Page 45

Many professional athletes have confessed that , while they do sometimes find great satisfaction and even , yes , delight in their work , they never forget that it is indeed work .
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In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind , Jonathan Haidt tries to understand why we disagree with one another — especially , but not only , about politics and religion — and , more important , why it is so hard for people to see those who disagree with them as equally intelligent , equally decent human beings .
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Central to his argument is this point : “ Intuitions come first , strategic reasoning second . Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously , long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started , and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning . ” Our “ moral arguments ” are therefore “ mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly , crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives . ”
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Such networks of affiliation are complicated , and discerning their presence requires what the ancients called “ prudence , ” a virtue that , like many virtues , is cultivated largely by avoiding certain vices : the kind of optimism that Scruton calls “ unscrupulous ” and its accompanying rushes to judgment , its reluctance to question its preferred means .
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Roger Scruton , The Uses of Pessimism ( Oxford University Press , 2010 ) , p . 17 .
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3 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 .
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Here we might recall the “ unscrupulousness , ” the headlong rush forward , of the optimists Roger Scruton critiques . When you believe that the brokenness of this world can be not just ameliorated but fixed , once and for all , then people who don’t share your optimism , or who do share it but invest it in a different system , are adversaries of Utopia . ( An “ adversary ” is literally one who has turned against you , one who blocks your path . ) Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable — indeed , it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries .
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is , I believe that it is reasonable and wise , in a democratic social order , to make a commitment to what political philosophers call proceduralism : an agreement that political adversaries ought to abide by the same rules , because this is how we maintain a peaceable social order .
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That belief is on its way to being comprehensively rejected by the American people . And I have seen this in both academic and ecclesial settings as well : using the existing rules against your opponents , or formulating new ones with the explicit purpose of marginalizing them , without pausing to ask whether such methods are fair , or even whether they might be turned against you someday , when the political winds are blowing in a different direction . Such is the power of sheer animus : it disables our ethical and our practical judgment .
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And this is why learning to think with the best people , and not to think with the worst , is so important . To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world , which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices . These best people will provide for you models of how to treat those who disagree with
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them :
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interlocutors . When people cease to be people because they are , to us , merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate ,
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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 .
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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 .
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Our social taxonomies are useful , but if we think of them as something more than that , if we employ them to enforce strict separation between one person and another , if we treat them as solid and impermeable barriers that make mutual understanding impossible , they serve us poorly .
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The problem , of course , and sadly , is that we all have some convictions that are unsettled when they ought to be settled , and others that are settled when they ought to be unsettled .
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one . Economists speak of sunk costs as investments in a particular project that cannot be recovered , and some of them have pointed out that sunk costs have a disproportionate influence on decision making . The more people have invested in a particular project , the more reluctant they are to abandon it , no matter how strong the evidence indicating that it’s a lost cause .
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Fundamentally , for Hoffer , mass movements are a psychological phenomenon — however many roots they may have in
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particular cultural and political circumstances . He called the book in which he explores this psychology The True Believer ( 1951 ) .
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You can know whether your social environment is healthy for thinking by its attitude toward ideas from the outgroup . If you quote some unapproved figure , or have the “ wrong ” website open in your browser , and someone turns up his nose and says , “ I can’t believe you’re reading that crap ” — generally , not a good sign . Even if what you’re reading is Mein Kampf , because there are actually good reasons for reading Mein Kampf .
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In short , the Usage Wars are a kind of miniature embodiment of Culture Wars in all their endless variety — and therefore a kind of test case for how we deal with disagreement , especially when there’s disagreement on matters we care about very deeply .
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If it’s not exactly clear what all this has to do with the Democratic Spirit , perhaps Wallace’s definition of that Spirit will help : 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 .
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( Which is more or less what this book is all about . I could take those three sentences as my epigraph . )
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failure . It is the failure to recognize other dialects , other contexts , other people , as having value that needs to be respected — especially , it’s tempting to say , if you want those people to respect your dialects and contexts and friends and family members , but perhaps what really matters is the damage this inability to code - switch does to the social fabric . It rends it .
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Remember : Humani nihil a me alienum puto . Human beings , like you , who happen through
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circumstance or temperament to have come to different conclusions than yours . This does not mean that their views are correct , or even as likely to be correct as your own ; you need not admit any such thing , but when they are wrong they’re wrong in the same way that you are , when that happens to you ( as it assuredly does ) .
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death . Better to follow the principle articulated by W . H . Auden : “ The same rules apply to self - examination as apply to auricular confession : Be brief , be blunt , be gone . ” *
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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 .
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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 . And working toward the truth is one of life’s great adventures .
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To cease thinking , as Thomas Aquinas explained , is an act either of despair — “ I can’t go any further ” — or of presumption — “ I need not go any further . ” * 2 What is needed for the life of thinking is hope : hope of knowing more , understanding more , being more than we currently are .
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The Thinking Person’s Checklist 1 . When faced with provocation to respond to what someone has said , give it five minutes . Take a walk , or weed the garden , or chop some vegetables . Get your body involved : your body knows the rhythms to live by , and if your mind falls into your body’s rhythm , you’ll have a better chance of thinking . 2 . Value learning over debating . Don’t “ talk for victory . ” 3 . As best you can , online and off , avoid the people who fan flames . 4 . Remember that you don’t have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right - mindedness .
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5 . If you do have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right - mindedness , or else lose your status in your community , then you should realize that it’s not a community but rather an Inner Ring . 6 . Gravitate as best you can , in every way you can , toward people who seem to value genuine community and can handle disagreement with equanimity . 7 . Seek out the best and fairest - minded of people whose views you disagree with . Listen to them for a time without responding . Whatever they say , think it over . 8 . Patiently , and as honestly as you can , assess your repugnances . 9 . Sometimes the “ ick factor ” is telling ; sometimes it’s a distraction from what matters . 10 . Beware of metaphors and myths that do
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too much heavy cognitive lifting ; notice what your “ terministic screens ” are directing your attention to — and what they’re directing your attention away from ; look closely for hidden metaphors and beware the power of myth . 11 . Try to describe others ’ positions in the language that they use , without indulging in in - other - wordsing . 12 . Be brave .
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