How Philosophers Think
Metadata
Highlights
- The point is, you can read all the Wikipedia summaries you want, but they wonât give you a holistic understanding of an idea. That only happens once you have a layered, three-dimensional perspective, which writing helps you achieve.
- we learn that you understand an idea not when youâve memorized it, but when you know why its specific form was chosen over all the alternatives. Only once youâve traveled the roads that were earnestly explored but ultimately rejected can you grasp an idea firmly and see it clearly, with all the context that supports it.
-
Since ideas are invisible, people under-estimate the extent to which they can go in and out of fashion. But ideas are like clothing. They change with the times and reveal how much the actions of others influence our decision making.
- We laugh at the things people in the 70s used to wear, but if ideas were visible, weâd do the same for our thinking.
- The faster you jump to conclusions, the more fashionable your thinking is likely to be. People who donât have the tools to reason independently make up their minds by adopting the opinions of prestigious people. When they do, they favor socially rewarded positions over objective accounts of reality.
- Humanity has succeeded not because of the intelligence of atomic individuals, but because weâve learned to outsource knowledge to the tribe.
- All this suggests that social learning is humanityâs primary advantage over primates, and in Henrichâs words: âThe secret of our success.â
- Given that, our culture needs people who can reason independently and stand like sturdy steel beams in the winds of social change.
-
if thereâs anything Iâve learned about marketing, itâs that repetition is indistinguishable from truth. The more people are exposed to an idea, the more likely they are to believe it. The more fashionable it is, the more exposure itâll receive. But the popularity of an idea doesnât make it correct.
-
Jumping to conclusions limits your ability to discover the truth. Philosophers know that every idea comes packaged in an implicit frame.
-
When you restrict yourself to one side of the intellectual spectrum, you limit your capacity to find truth.
-
You canât really be honest with people who will think youâre a bad person if you disagree with them. Fear of callous retaliation, however subtle, limits your capacity for truthful conversation.
-
Only when others are charitable and give you the benefit of the doubt, can you wholly reason towards truth and explore interesting ideas that may be flawed.
-
âWhat can this person teach meâ is a much more productive question than âHow is this person wrong?â
- Meanwhile, when I talk to actual scholars about their beliefs, they start with the premises of my question instead of the conclusions of their answer. Theyâre upfront about tradeoffs too. Ultimately, they say something like: âWell, itâs complicated.â
-
Specifically, our minds evolved to make sense of the world not in ways that are true, but in ways that help us survive. But once all that information enters our minds, we ignore critical information and believe self-serving falsehoods.
- Summarizing his work, Trivers once said: âWe deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.â
- Sorry, but history predicts that many of your foundational beliefs are actually wrong.
-
Social media has turned us all into public relations professionals who pursue likeability instead of truth.
- The pressure to have an opinion on every important topic has incentivized lazy thinking, the consequences of which we feel every day.