Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

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

Your best defense against the negativity served up by your own filters on the world is to intentionally seek out positive thoughts and stories, which I sometimes call managing your mental shelf space.

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

I’ve seen lots of wannabe cartoonists with sufficient talent to succeed. But rarely do you find one who understands how to get out of ego jail.

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.

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.

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 common situation—and the one you should treat as true—is that we are deeply flawed humans pretending to be otherwise.

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