Thread by @jposhaughnessy

1/ Book recommendation

"A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity."
~@AdamMGrant

amazon.com/Think-Again-Po…

2/ I often say that becoming prematurely certain of *anything* can lead you to the wrong conclusions. In this book, @AdamMGrant offers many strategies for how to continually rethink things to keep them in the 'thinking' and not the 'proving' category where many of us spend

3/ far too much time.

"Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
~George Bernard Shaw

Grant reminds us that we too quickly revert to opinions that *feel* right--often simply because of how long we've held them.

4/ He notes "Phil Tetlock's [observation] that as we think and talk, we often slip into the mindsets of three different professions : preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. In each of these modes, we take on a particular identity and use a distinct set of tools"

5/ Preachers preach. We enter the Preacher mode when our most deeply held beliefs are challenged. We "sermonize" in a manner that leaves no openings for honest questions or challenges to those beliefs.

Often seen here on Twitter as "hills I would die on"

6/ These beliefs are often "unfalsifiable" in that there is no logical way to either prove or disprove them. They often make up the core of many deeply held beliefs, and the ability to dispassionately challenge them is essentially nil.

7/ The prosecutor mode is turned on when we see flaws in others arguments and often try to overwhelm them with facts that we think prove the other belief wrong. The problem here, is that an ounce of emotion is equal to a pound of facts, and trying to prosecute oftens only

8/ makes the other party cling to their belief *more* rather than less. (See @waitbutwhy's amusing take on "flat-earthers")

We shift to the politician mode when trying to win approval and win others over to our point of view. This can also fairly be called pandering and you see

9/ it more and more as society atomises into smaller and smaller Tribes that seek out those with similar views and are most comfortable in an echo chamber, were rather than discussing or debating, others present simply reinforce our beliefs. Not great for rethinking.

10/ Grant notes: "The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we’re right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don’t bother to rethink our own views."

He then suggests trying to think like a scientist, where a process helps

11/ us approach thinking and rethinking in a more structured, process-oriented way. Grant says "We move into scientist mode when we’re searching for the truth: we run experiments to test hypotheses and discover knowledge."

https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/1300859801979809793

12/ The problem, of course, that trying to stay in this scientific mode of thought can be mentally exhausting and may lead you away from 'certainty'--which many of us crave very deeply--toward the far more provisional land of 'maybe.' Many people are willing to pay a very

13/ high price for what is actually just an illusion of certainty, as the real thing is virtually impossible to achieve.

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
~ Voltaire

Grant then proceeds to guide the reader through many strategies that can help you

14/ move slowly into a better habit of learning how to rethink your positions on, well, everything. Doing so allows you to continually recalibrate and hopefully improve your mental models so that your "accuracy" improves as your mental strategies improve.

15/ He does a good job covering all of the biases that "can actually contort our intelligence into a weapon against the truth," by giving good examples of how this happens and how the biases can lead seriously mislead us.

16/ He notes: "If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom. Scientific thinking favors humility over pride, doubt over certainty, curiosity over closure."

He then goes to great lengths to help you understand why being open minded and humble will get you much

17/ further in your quest to be a better thinker and rethinker.

In the current environment, with rapid change occurring in every field and new ideas bombarding us, this is no longer a luxury, it's now a required skill.

Grants book delivers sound methods to help you rethink

18/ things and end up a little less confused than you were before reading the book.

I highly recommend it.

19/ Finally, I addressed some of these idea tangentially in this thread: (happy thinking and rethinking!)

20/

https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/1343371350493319169

21/ Addendum with some more good thoughts from the book:

"Our convictions can lock us in prisons of our own making. The solution is not to decelerate our thinking—it’s to accelerate our rethinking."
~A.G.

22/ or, as Robert Anton Wilson put it a bit more bombastically: “Convictions cause convicts. Whatever you believe imprisons you."

"Neuroscientists find that when our core beliefs are challenged, it can trigger the amygdala, the primitive “lizard brain” that breezes right past

23/ cool rationality and activates a hot fight-or- flight response. The anger and fear are visceral:it feels as if we’ve been punched in the mind."
~A.G.

What I call "the Prover" Grant refers to as "totalitarian ego, and its job is to keep out threatening information."

24/ Grant notes that framing matters, a lot. By framing a dispute as a debate rather than a disagreement, people are more open to each other's ideas. He further notes that taking an adversarial approach is often counterproductive, as it makes the other party put their guard up.

25/ Another of his I really like is it's far more effective to begin with a "steel man" framework, which considers your "opponents *strongest* arguments rather than the vastly more popular "strawman" which presents the weakest of their ideas.

26/ Finally, when writing or talking with others about things like this, I've found it is received far better when I remove it from "you" or "your beliefs or emotions" and present it as HumanOS or Tim Leary and Wilson's concept of "reality tunnels" but I think Grant has found

27/ an even better term--he quotes psychologist George Kelly observation that our beliefs are like pairs of "reality goggles" and "a threat to our opinions cracks our goggles, leaving our vision blurred. It’s only natural to put up our guard in response— and Kelly noticed

28/ that we become especially hostile when trying to defend opinions that we know, deep down, are false. Rather than trying on a different pair of goggles, we become mental contortionists, twisting and turning until we find an angle of vision [that's consistent with our priors]"

29/ I like "Reality Goggles" or "Reality Glasses" quite a bit as we're all familiar with glasses either distorting or improving our vision and I think it translates well when talking about mental models and how we might proceed in upgrading them.

I'll use the term going forward

30/ when writing or talking about these ideas and see if it helps connect people with the process better.

Again, great book that I recommend you read!