Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling.

Verbal gaffes are fairly normal for people running for office. My bias is to prefer ordinary explanations for our observations as opposed to extraordinary ones, assuming the facts support both views.

Once you can embrace the educational value that comes with being wrong, you will find it easier to think, “But I might be wrong this time,” in any given situation. There will be occasions in which you want to dial down your ego to avoid looking like a jerk. For example, sometimes you might need to pretend in front of others that you have some doubt

If your opinion is that another person’s idea is terrible, you can only be sure that at least one of you is stupid. You can’t really know which one of you it is except in rare cases in which things can be objectively measured.

Once you embrace the reality that we all present the “enhanced” versions of our real selves, all the time, you can relax a bit and get into character.

The inevitable outcome of the press having a business model that rewards brain manipulation versus accuracy is what I call political warming. As the press becomes increasingly skilled at stimulating the emotion centers in our brains, one should expect the public to be in a continuous state of fight-or-flight anxiety.

The best and easiest defense is to have some questions prepared to fill any gaps.

From the moment technology allowed us to know which kinds of content influenced viewership the most, the old business model of the news industry was dead media walking. From that point through today, the business model of the press changed from presenting information to manipulating brains.

A more useful way to think of the political news is that nearly every major story is exaggerated to the point of falsehood, with the intention of scaring the public.

So if you are playing the odds, your confidence that you can see some evil in another person’s soul is probably closer to being batshit crazy than to being the first known human with psychic powers.