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

Alan Jacobs, “How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds,” Penguin Random House, 2017, 156 pp.

The theme of this 156-page book is that people are not as good at thinking as they believe.  The author points out some items to be aware of and some guidance that can improve thinking for most of us.  In evolutionary terms, we have recently left our hunter-gather lifestyle and arrived in the modern world with many thinking processes that homo-sapiens developed prior to 10,000 years ago, skills not necessarily that useful in modern society.

Author Alan Jacobs is a cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper’s, as well as a professor in the honors program at Baylor University,  He proposes that in America’s culture wars, the big issues that divide us—political, social, religious—occur because the people involved simply aren’t thinking.  Thinking is trouble, it’s slow, and it’s a lot of work and can lose us friends.

Jacobs doesn’t argue that we must detach ourselves from our associations to think and think well. His central contention is that it’s actually as members of groups, primarily, that human beings engage in the process of thinking. “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,” he writes. He even goes so far as to say that “whatever we think we know, whether we’re right or wrong, arises from our interactions with other human beings.”  (I think this statement is kind of a ‘bridge too far.’  I think alone quite a bit, but must admit I do it while reading something and reflecting on it.  With others nowadays I mostly like to just listen if the subject is religious.)

Jacobs uses a lot of material from other authors I have read extensively; particularly two of the best-known psychologists that deal with thinking, Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow) and Jonathan Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion).  Books I’ve reported on in the past.

My Notes:

Pg. 12:  It is almost depressing in how many ways our thinking goes astray, so many paths that they have been given names.  Some are: Anchoring, availability cascades, confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the endowment effect, framing effects, group attribution errors, halo effects, in group and outgroup homogeneity biases, recency illusions… (Many of these are thoroughly explained in Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

Pg. 17:  Daniel Kahneman describes our thinking as composed of two kinds: intuitive and fast, the other slow and deliberate; system 1 and system 2.  Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind)  uses a different set of terms to describe this same thing: he thinks of intuitive thinking as an elephant and conscious decision-making as the rider.  The idea is that our intuitive thinking is immensely powerful and has a mind of its own, but can be gently steered—by a rider who is truly skillful and understands the elephant’s inclinations.  This book is largely about the rider rather than the elephant.  However Alan Jacobs, in this book, additionally argues that we go astray when we think of our task primarily as ‘overcoming bias.’  For Jacobs, the fundamental problem we have may best be described as an orientation of the will: we suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking.  Relatively few people want to think.  Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us.  Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or follow.  ‘Who needs thinking?”

Pg. 22:  Today’s wild torrent of what claims to be information but is often nonsense is no new thing.  As T.S. Eliot wrote a century ago: “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.”  Jacobs adds: ‘When we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”

(Today, we no longer have a majority of people getting news vetted through credible news sources.  Most get their ‘news’ on the internet from people similar to Steve Bannon, et.al.)

Pg. 37:  When we change our mind it is not because we thought this through by ourselves, we probably started thinking with different people.  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.’  (This paragraph is thought provoking but I immediately thought of Jim Bridger, alone, tracking through the West and pondering which route to take.  I don’t think he found thinking alone impossible or the elephant he was riding uncontrollable.  Nevertheless, the point made here is usually relevant).

Pg. 54:  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.  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. (I reported on The Righteous Mind in 2012).

Pg. 88:  A hundred years ago G.K.Chesterton wrote, ‘If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.  He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience.  He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections.  Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one.  The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.  The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.’

Pg. 138:  G.C.Lichtenberg issued a wise warning centuries ago: ‘A book is like a mirror: if a donkey looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.’

Pg. 155:  The Thinking Person’s Checklist:

1.      When faced with provocation to respond to what someone has said, give it five minutes.  Take a walk…

2.      Value learning over debating.  Don’t talk for victory.

3.      As best you can, online and off, avoid people who fan flames.

4.      You don’t have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness.

5.      If you do have to respond to signal your virtue or else lose status then you’re not in a community but in an inner-ring.

6.       Gravitate toward people who seem to value genuine community and can handle disagreement with equanimity.

7.      Seek out the best and fairest-minded of people you disagree with and listen to them and whatever they say, think it over.

8.      Patiently and as honestly as you can, assess your repugnancies.

9.      Sometimes the ‘ick factor’ is telling; sometimes it’s a distraction from what matters.

1.    Beware of metaphors and myths that do too much heavy cognitive lifting…(Some people apparently get all their deep-thoughts reading bumper stickers--Just Saying).

1    Try to describe others’ positions in the language that they use, without indulging in in-other-wording.