How to Think

If there is something this blog is about, it’s how to think. There’s an entire category, but it’s most of what I write about.

Thinking well isn’t about always being right, because you can’t be. It is about having models of the world that are:

Right often enough

When wrong, fail with the least harm possible and ideally with benefit.

Models are never true, they are always abstractions from the truth. Most of our models of the world are not reasoned, they are emotional and experiential. Science is a special form of experiential. The world turns out to be a very odd place indeed: It is not intuitive that there is action at a distance, that there is no transmitting medium (ether) in space, that gravity warps time and space, or that observation changes the results of quantum experiments.

There are two sets of knowledge, overlapping: knowledge of the external world and knowledge of humans and our society.

Society creates reality: The fastest way to get dead, from stone age hunter gatherers to today, is through your fellow humans beings, whether by violence or neglect. We are deeply attuned to the fact that ostracism equals death, and we will do almost anything to stay in with our group, whoever that group is. If that means believing patent nonsense, if that involves kowtowing to cruel leaders, if that involves becoming cruel and deranged ourselves, we will do it.

We will believe what we need to believe to stay with the group we identify with, to identify with the group that supports us, and be damned the consequences to anyone outside the group–or, indeed, anyone inside the groups. Norms will be maintained.

None of this is to deny change in norms over time, but only if those norms move towards greater kindness and greater truth, is changing of norms beneficial.

And only if successful regimes fail with least harm, and ideally beneficial side effects, are their claims to be better to be entirely believed.

The decision-making humans of our society almost all run a particular set of beliefs best called neoliberalism, a particularly harmful strain of capitalism. They believe in it, because they have benefited from it, and because everyone around them believes in it. If you don’t believe in it, you don’t get into power, with rare exceptions.

This set of beliefs has led to catastrophe after catastrophe, starting with the Russian transition from Communism, including the financial collapse and austerity, and certainly including ignoring the last chance to limit climate change to acceptable levels.

Because capitalism is fundamentally based on greed and selfishness, and because its metaphysics says that price is equal to value and should be used to guide behaviour, it is failing damagingly–despite however much it has otherwise accomplished.

It is not that these failures were not predicted by many, they were. But they were not accepted as failures and no action was taken to prevent them because to accept and act, in too many errors, was to make oneself unfit for power.

Not of the group. Unclean. Unclean.

Not serious.

World models have consequences. How people think has consequences. Our tribal nature and ability to identify with virtually anything has consequences.

Because our power over the natural world has increased so much, errors and characteristics which were adaptive during most of our evolution are now catastrophically dangerous. Extinction level dangerous. Not just for us, but for all too many other species with whom we share the globe, many of whom are more than capable of immense levels of suffering.

So how we think, matters. And figuring out how to think better, not just for a few, but for the many, matters.

And because feeling is most of thinking, this means figuring out how to feel better, more accurately, and more kindly, as well.

More on this soon. In the meantime, read this model of the role of reason and emotion.

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