# How People Think
source: https://ift.tt/Sr2JLO5 tags: #literature #insights #favorites uid: 202212291148 —
1. Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.
2. What people present to the world is a tiny fraction of what’s going on inside their head.
When you are keenly aware of your own struggles but blind to others’, it’s easy to assume you’re missing some skill or secret that others have. Sometimes that’s true. More often you’re just blind to how much everyone else is making it up as they go, one challenge at a time.
3. Prediction is about probability and putting the odds of success in your favor. But observers mostly judge you in binary terms, right or wrong.
4. We are extrapolating machines in a world where nothing too good or too bad lasts indefinitely.
Good times plant the seeds of their destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving.
We know that in hindsight. It’s almost always true, almost everywhere.
But we tend only to know it in hindsight because we are extrapolating machines. Drawing straight lines when forecasting is more straightforward than imagining how people might adapt and change their behavior.
5. There are limits to our sanity. Optimism and pessimism always overshoot because the only way to know the boundaries of either is to go a little bit past them.
The only way to find the limits of people’s moods — the only way to find the top — is to keep pushing until we’ve gone too far, when we can look back and say, “Ah, I guess that was the limit.”
It’s tempting to watch things go from boom to bust and think, “Why are people doing this? Are they crazy?”
Probably not. They’re just rationally looking for the limits of what everyone else can handle.
6. Ignoring that people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.
One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
this is exactly what the article about envy says
7. We are pushed toward maximizing efficiency in a way that leaves no room for error, despite room for error being the most important factor of long-term success.
So many people strive for efficient lives, where no hour is wasted. But when no hour is wasted you have no time to wander, explore something new, or let your thoughts run free — which can be some of the most productive forms of thought. Psychologist Amos Tversky once said “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” A successful person purposely leaving gaps of free time on their schedule can feel inefficient. And it is, so not many people do it.
8. The best story wins.
George Packer echoes the same:
The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires.
This drives you crazy if you assume the world is swayed by facts and objectivity — if you assume the best idea wins. But it’s how people think. And it’s actually optimistic, because when you realize you can change the world by explaining an old thing in a new way vs. creating something new, you start to see so much potential.
9. We are swayed by complexity when simplicity is the real mark of intelligence and understanding.
Simplicity is the hallmark of truth— we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give for an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated and leaves the lecture hall commenting to each other: “That was rather trivial, wasn’t it? The sore truth is that complexity sells better.
See also: Minimizing Complexity Should Be The Goal 202212271453
One is that length is often the only thing signaling effort and thoughtfulness. Consumers of information rarely try to dissect an argument objectively; that’s too hard. When reading they just try to figure out whether the author is credible or not. Does this sound right? Does it pass the smell test? Has the author put more than a few seconds of thought into this argument? Length and complexity are often the only indication that an argument was thoughtful vs. a random gut feeling.
A second is that things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do. When you understand things I don’t, I have a hard time judging the limits of your knowledge in that field, which makes me more prone to taking your views at face value.
10. Your willingness to believe a prediction is influenced by how much you want or need that prediction to be true.
There are so many things in life that we think are true because we desperately want them to be true. People do this with their relationships, careers, investments, political views — anything forward-looking is subject to being swayed by your desire to have a pleasant life.
I feel this way about many things in my relationship
The same thing happens in investing, when people eagerly listen to forecasters whose track record is indistinguishable from guessing. Same in politics. The more uncertain the endeavor, and the higher the stakes of the outcome, the more you are persuaded by the most pleasing answer. And if you tell people what they want to hear you can be wrong indefinitely without penalty.
11. It’s hard to empathize with other people’s beliefs if they’ve experienced parts of the world you have not. 202212291713
The gap between how you feel as an outsider vs. how you feel when you’re experiencing something firsthand can be a mile wide.
There are theories that big wars tend to happen 20-40 years apart because that’s the amount of time it takes to cycle through a new generation of voters, politicians, and generals who aren’t scarred by the last war. Other political trends — social rights, economic theories, budget priorities — follow a similar path.
You can’t empathize with something if you haven’t experienced it; maybe this is true of wars as well
It’s not that people forget. It’s that empathy and open-mindedness cannot recreate what genuine fear and uncertainty feel like.
My guess is that more than half of all disagreements — personal, domestic, international, financial — would disappear if you could see the world through the lens of your opponent, and had experienced what they have in life.
12. An innocent denial of your own flaws, caused by the ability to justify your mistakes in your own head in a way you can’t do for others.
“It is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
I would add my own theory: It’s easier to blame other people’s mistakes on stupidity and greed than our own.
You see someone doing something crazy and think, “Why in the world would you do that?” Then you sit down with them, hear about their life, and after a while you realize, “Ah, I kind of get it now.”
Everyone is a product of their own life experiences, few of which are visible or known to other people.
What makes sense to me might not make sense to you because you don’t know what kind of experiences have shaped me and vice versa.
13. An underappreciation for how small things compound into extraordinary things. 202212291926
The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers.
Sometimes one side is selfish, or stupid, or blind, or uninformed.
But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that would make you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?”
The real magic of evolution is that it’s been selecting traits for 3.8 billion years.
The time, not the little changes, is what moves the needle. Take minuscule changes and compound them by 3.8 billion years and you get results that are indistinguishable from magic.
14. The gap between knowing what to do and actually getting people to do it can be enormous.
It wasn’t the stress or responsibility. It was so basic. “Getting my patients to do what I ask of them,” she said.
I didn’t understand at first, but it made sense when she explained.
“You have an appointment with a patient and you say, ‘I need you to get this lab done, see this specialist, pick up this medicine.’ And they come back a month later and they haven’t done any of it.” They either couldn’t afford it, or it was too intimidating, or they didn’t have time.
So many things in life work like that. Investing, relationships, health, careers. In each, what we should do isn’t that hard — it’s actually doing it that requires moving mountains.
In many cases this is caused by the appeal of hacks — shortcuts and tricks to get what you want without paying the price. The patient doesn’t want to eat better and exercise; they want a pill to fix everything. The investor doesn’t want to wait a decade for their money to compound; they want a stock that will double next week.
Issac Asimov said, “Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom,” which sums up a lot of things quite well.
15. We’re bad at imagining how change will feel because there’s no context in dreams.
Good and bad changes are hard to imagine, because you don’t know the full context behind them.
Future fortunes are imagined in a vacuum, but reality is always lived with the good and bad taken together, competing for attention.
16. We are blind to how fragile the world is due to a poor understanding of rare events.
This is what the antifragile book is about
If next year there’s a 1% chance of a new disastrous pandemic, a 1% chance of a crippling depression, a 1% chance of a catastrophic flood, a 1% chance of political collapse, and on and on, then the odds that something bad will happen next year — or any year — are … uncomfortably high.
Littlewood’s Law tells us to expect a miracle every month. The flip side is to expect a disaster roughly as often.
17. The inability to accept hassle, nonsense, and inefficiency frustrates people who can’t accept how the world works.
Is this me? #self-reflection
If you recognize that BS is ubiquitous, then the question is not “How can I avoid all of it?” but, “What is the optimal amount to put up with so I can still function in a messy and imperfect world?”
The thing people miss is that there are bad things that become bigger problems when you try to eliminate them. I think the most successful people recognize when a certain amount of acceptance beats purity.
A unique skill, an underrated skill, is identifying the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you should put up with to get ahead while getting along.
Franklin Roosevelt — the most powerful man in the world whose paralysis meant the aides often had to carry him to the bathroom — once said, “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you want orange juice, you learn to say ‘that’s all right,’ and drink it.”
Every industry and career is different, but there’s universal value in that mentality, accepting hassle when reality demands it.