Dear readers, today I’ve got a very special post for you! I’ve convinced Ben Seeley to co-write today’s blog post with me. Ben is a screenwriter, and has twice won the World Othello Championships (the board game - nothing to do with Shakespeare’s play!). He’s also very interested in using the human mind to its full potential (wink wink ^^. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s the new tagline of my blog). In this post we discuss critical thinking, and what happens when we overdo it!
Vlad: Hi Ben, thanks for agreeing to co-write this post with me.
Ben: My pleasure! I’ve been admiring your blog from afar, and now I can’t help but seize the opportunity to jump in, head first.
Vlad: So, what got you interested in the human mind?
Ben: Well, we’ve all got one, so what is it good for? How can we have as much fun with it as possible? If we don’t understand it, we can’t use it wisely!
One basic trick I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of is to notice when an unusual urge arises. For example, if I suddenly want to eat Mexican food, even though I normally have no attraction for it, I go for it (and I’m usually glad that I did, enjoying it much more than I normally do). If the urge doesn’t come from strong conditioning, there is probably a very good reason for it.
Vlad: Hey, I like that trick!
Ben: Now, Mexican food is a very mundane example, but I’m a firm believer that we can’t be creative and intelligent on the macro level, if we have no practice on the micro level. Following our inexplicable, spontaneous urges is just as valid for things like- talking to an unfamiliar person, learning a foreign language, playing a musical instrument, or even changing careers (if you do what you safely can, and the urge persists as you keep pulling on the thread of interest, you will be surprised how much your life can change for the better). It’s precisely because you can’t explain the urge, that it has the potential to rock your world!
Vlad: Yeah, I agree. I found that stuff doesn’t need to be rational to be useful. I enjoy acting on irrational desires. Like, I read somewhere online that Toastmasters public speaking classes are great. So I figured “Hey, I’ll give them a shot!”. I found my local Toastmasters club, went there for one meeting as a guest, and I loved it, so I signed up to be a member. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself!
Or, some time ago, I heard about the artificial language Esperanto (it’s designed to be clean and simple. Apparently it’s six times easier to learn than English). So I figured I’d learn it. I learned a bit from on-line courses, and this summer I’m going to a summer camp for Esperanto learners. It’s not something you can find a logical reason for. It just felt right, so I went for it! Maybe it will be the next “Toastmasters” for me 
Ben: That’s wonderful, and a great example of what I’m talking about! A critical person would probably mock you for learning a made-up language that has few speakers. Hell, learning Esperanto is pretty inexplicable even to me. But, if you don’t have any conscious idea of why you are attracted to it, you will probably find out by doing it. Maybe learning Esperanto will make it easier for you to learn other languages. Or, as happens with a lot of hobbies, you will meet people you like a lot, which rocks!
Ben: I think modern life makes optimism more rewarding. And we need to adapt our minds to the new world, rather than let our brains stay stuck in old-world approaches.
Today, getting separated from the herd doesn’t make you prey to wild animals or another tribe, like it once did. With our modern medical care, breaking a bone on an adventure, or getting sick, is not nearly as life-threatening as it once was. You also aren’t going to get stoned to death if you offend other people, just by living your life how you want to live it. It isn’t even a real problem to get shunned- with 7 billion people out there, there’s always lots more potential friends, just WAITING to find another rare, interesting person who is willing to be himself or herself.
In the past, even if being pessimistic, angry, or cautious, was the less rewarding strategy 99% of the time, but it saved your life 1% of the time, it was probably worth keeping. But today, optimism is the better way to go - no matter how stupid a person may be, almost everyone in modern society lives past 50, and hardly anyone ever has trouble finding shelter and food. But, most people don’t recognize the new reality, and adjust their instincts to the better life available to them.
Vlad: Yeah, I’ve written about optimism before. Interestingly, most pessimists I know call themselves “realistic”. But I read somewhere that 90% of all negative expectations we have never come true. (And my experiences with the pessimists confirm this.) Who’s being realistic now, huh?
Ben: Haha, right. The optimist is thinking “Realistic? You’re blocking the better reality”. I suppose the pessimist’s rejoinder is “better safe than sorry”, “live to fight another day”, and all that jazz.
Vlad: Sure, you need a bit of caution, like not walking on narrow slippery ledges above 200 meter drops, but most pessimists just overkill it. Ever died of talking to a stranger in a public place?
Ben: Sometimes old instincts get triggered for completely inappropriate reasons. For example, some people have a strong fight-or-flight escape urge when confronted by social situations. A sense of overwhelm which used to represent a lion attack, is now triggered by something quite harmless.
This shows up a lot in the realm of “new ideas”. A new haircut, a new scientific idea, a new software program- these are not like going into unknown wilderness, or trying to eat an unknown plant. There’s very little survival risk; at worst a little time and energy are “wasted”. But with our long lifespans, we have plenty of time and energy to spare !
Vlad: Yeah. It’s interesting that when you propose something new or unusual, lots of people start to attack you as if you wanted to use their energy or time. I read this excellent article by Bill Beaty, who’s a scientist. He’s had first-hand experience of the establishment attacking new ideas before even examining the evidence, simply because they didn’t fit in with the current ideas. That’s critical thinking gone haywire.
Here, let me paste an interesting quote from that article:
In the Encyclopedia of Ignorance, R. A. Lyttleton proposes that one’s belief in a particular hypothesis is like a bead which slides along a wire. One end of the wire represents 100% disbelief, and the other end shows 0% disbelief (or 100% acceptance.) Nothing prevents the bead from falling off the ends of the wire. Since all theories are tentative, proper scientists should strive to keep their “beads” somewhere between 0% and 100%. However, many otherwise intelligent people have been convinced to move their beads regarding contemporary science theories to the position of 100% belief, whereupon their “beads” fall off the wire and their beliefs can can no longer be altered. At the same time, they move their “fringe science” beads to 100% disbelief, whereupon the beads fall off the other end of the wire and are nearly impossible to restore. Then, whenever a piece of “fringe” science gives signs of being proved valid, those fallen-bead skeptics must launch remorseless emotional attacks against it. Or, when a piece of solid mainstream science starts to look shaky, they must leap to blind defense of the dogma. This is entirely sensible, because their alternative is to court insanity.
Vlad: You can read the rest of the article. It’s really interesting. And I think it applies to everyday life as well as science. Most people realize it’s a bad idea to let your bead fall off the end that says “100% belief”. We call these people gullible. But we, as a society, haven’t fully realized that 100% disbelief is just as dangerous. (By the way there’s a great article called My favorite liar. It’s about a teacher who had an awesome way of teaching his students critical thinking.)
Ben: Very true. Reflexively critical people have an egotistic, rankist urge. They want to adopt a posture which makes it appear they have superior judgment. They’re no different than dogs, always trying to assert dominance by mounting any new dog.
Interestingly, so-called “ignorant” people are usually more willing to entertain the possibility of wacky things being true. Life teaches them humility more frequently than it teaches the intelligentsia.
Vlad: Speaking of pathologically critical people being egoistic, I think it’s similar with pessimists. They make themselves feel worse 95% of the time. But the one time out of twenty, they get to say “I told you so!” and feel good. It’s almost like gambling. You get to feel good once in a while, so you keep doing it, even though overall you lose.
Ben: Wow, that’s an amazing point! I never considered that pessimism could be a form of addiction. But “the feeling of being right” absolutely has the potential to be addictive. So much so, that people would be tempted to assume they were right too soon, just to cut straight to the rush of “Yeah, I’m right, suck that!”.
Pessimists also get the idea of “risk” all wrong, because caution is NOT safer than adventurousness. I learned this as a passenger in my friend Eric’s car. I have never, ever seen him get passed on the freeway. One day we were on a long road trip, and I asked him how many accidents he had been in, and how many speeding tickets he had gotten. He replied “none, and none”. I was shocked! I realized then that since he was always pushing the edge, he was more alert, which made him less vulnerable to accidents and cops. I always felt safe as a passenger when he was driving, and boy was it so much more fun.
So do what wakes you up and makes you feel alive, and don’t worry so much about what seems like extra risk. And besides, the conscious mind is not responsible for safety reflexes- our unconscious, autonomous nervous system is responsible for basic physical safety. Evolution does not trust our conscious mind, the slowest one, to do this job. So, relax your conscious worries, and let your reptilian brain worry about the gory stuff.
Vlad: You just totally reminded me of one quote:
“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”
- John F. Kennedy
I used to be a shy don’t-stir-any-waves don’t-get-noticed kind of guy. But I found it’s much better to take action. It leads to a better life than just coasting along within your comfort zones. Yes, I often get rejected. Yes, I often look dumb in front of other people. I realized that’s no big deal. Getting what I want in life is more important than looking “cool”.
Ben: People probably admire you for it, anyway. It makes you much more interesting.
Vlad: Okay, back to critical thinking. I always make it a point to keep some doubt about what people say, even if they’re world class experts. (I never let my bead slide off the 100% belief side of the wire.) Yes, I trust them. I trust them a lot. But even if they’re right a hundred times, they could still be wrong the next time. I watch for that.
Ben: Have there been any times that has paid off big, when you kept the tiniest bit of doubt or hope about something?
Vlad: Off the top of my head, this happened in my high school economics class. The teacher taught us something I thought was wrong. I tried correcting him, but he wouldn’t listen, so I just wrote down in my notebook what he said, and I noted down what I thought was really right. Then, when an exam came up, I was the only one who got the right answer. Everybody else just copied what the teacher said. (The teacher meanwhile forgot he taught us the wrong answer.) Sort of reminds you of My Favorite Liar. (except my teacher wasn’t doing it on purpose)
Ben: When I was in high school, I was an avid runner. And when I would read accounts of famous runners in history, the authors would always chalk up their performance to “talent”, especially the great times they had when they first started competing. But, I really didn’t see how genetic talent could explain why they were so fast right off the bat, when most healthy athletes did not have those times after several years of hard training.
So, I researched the backgrounds these “superathletes” had when they were young. It turned out, every superathlete had done a tremendous amount of exercise, usually in some other sport, starting when they were very young. Roger Bannister, the first man to run the mile in under 4 minutes, did no real training until he joined the Cambridge track team at 19. And right away, he was running the mile in under 4:20. But, in his autobiography, he mentioned that as a youth he would ride an old, heavy bicycle around the beautiful countryside, “up to 70 miles in a day”. That’s a lot! It also explained his ridiculously long, bounding stride.
Vlad: Oh, I just remembered! I’m very very careful when I hear “everybody knows that” truths. Everybody knows that to be a top pianist you need to practice ten hours a day. (Nope. One hour is more than enough. See Fundamentals of Piano Exercise.) Everybody knows you can’t gain 34 lbs. of muscle in 4 weeks without taking steroids. (Nope. Read Tim Ferris’ account of how he did it. Plus, he only went to the gym for a total of 4 hours!) Everybody knows it’s impossible to get by with just two hours of sleep every day. (Nope. Check out my post about Uberman’s Sleep Schedule.)
It’s one thing believing experts. But believing some ethereal “everybody”, that’s just silly
Ben: Just a couple more examples (I could list dozens)- Alan Webb, American record holder in the mile, didn’t start running until his freshman year in high school. But he had been a competitive swimmer before that, and by his sophomore track season he ran the mile in under 4:07, setting the national record for sophomores. Lance Armstrong, winner of 7 Tour de France cycling titles, was a triathlete from a young age. If someone looked at his initial cycling times in his late teens, with no idea he had been running, cycling, and swimming thousands of miles before the switch, they would have assumed he was pure talent. Not true. There is such a thing as talent, but most things are really some form of effort, when it comes right down to it.
I put this insight to good use. I hadn’t done much exercising as a kid, but I immediately started bicycling, weightlifting, calisthenics, swimming, swimming with flippers, trampolining, tai chi, even running on the road with a wood pallet strapped behind me (thank God we lived in the country!). Whatever parts of my body had been less-used after running, I used on cross-training. In one year I went from being the slowest runner on my team to the fastest runner my age, for our region.
Vlad: There’s one more related thing we talked about that would probably interest our readers. You said that a lot of criticism comes from stress.
Ben: Stress is a feeling of lacking resources, of inherently being at risk. This makes us cautious and critical of anything outside our very narrow comfort zone. Unfortunately, it’s easy to feel stressed out, even if we have a great deal of resources. I’ve personally known at least three millionaires who were so stressed out (from work, poor health, loneliness, paranoia), that they were unwilling to use the resource which they had in abundance (money), to invest in the area which was stressing them out (necessary medical care, a vacation or some other relaxant, fulfilling promises to others).
The physical mechanisms of stress, the hormone cortisol, the higher heart rate, the brain state of stress (which narrows a person’s focus, preventing them from seeing the big picture), all impede good judgment. The Programmer’s Stone has a lot of information about this phenomena. It mostly deals with the context of programming, but really it applies to any kind of thinking that isn’t habitual, easy stuff.
Vlad: Yeah, I can see why depressed or low-energy people would act critical. They’re defending their already limited energy reserves. So, if someone feels like being critical a lot of the time, the first thing I would recommend is checking their diet and doing some exercise. It’s amazing how much your diet affects your energy levels. And the great thing about exercise is that it leaves you with more energy, not less. (If you’re not used to exercising, even a brisk walk does wonders).
Ben: Even using a relaxation technique (like what you detailed in your relaxation article), can do wonders. Feeling good makes it easier to think well, and thus do well. Just to relax improves judgment.
Vlad: Alright, we’re running over time, it’s time to wrap up. Do you have any last words you’d like to say to the readers?
Ben: My experience, my feeling, is that good critical thinking usually opens better doors than it shuts. The critical consensus of the athletic community, that talent is the best explanation for superathletes, is wrong. And it shuts doors in people’s faces, giving them no useful information. My critical thinking about this consensus, my doubt, was different- it opened doors, leading me to discover cross-training, which was very effective for me.
If critical thinking is causing you to be skeptical about every single opportunity, it’s almost certainly wrong. Good critical thinking may shut a lot of doors along the way, but in the end it will help you find the door which is worth opening. Life should steadily become bigger and better, not smaller.
Vlad: Ah, yes. As Bill Beaty said: be skeptical of excess skepticism.
Ben: Well said.
Vlad: Thanks for the conversation. I got a lot from you, and I’m sure the readers got a lot, too. Bye, and good luck with your screenwriting!
Ben: Adios, amigo :).
Vlad: plop
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