Why Some People Are Just Hopeless
Or, if you cannot be a scientist, at least be a sports fan
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
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Now, on to this week’s essay.
This is the second part of a two-part essay where we explore human thinking, based on the learnings from Tim Urban’s excellent book, What’s Our Problem?. This week we’ll especially try to understand why, despite being super stupid, some people are still super super confident. It’s about 1,500 words.
Q: Why are some people stubborn despite being stupid?
Last week we explored the gradual decline in the quality of our thinking as the Primitive Mind takes over the brain, visualised as a descent along the rungs of the Ladder of Thinking.
While the Rational Mind’s goal is to get to the truth, the Primitive Mind’s goal is confirmation of its existing beliefs. These two very different types of intellectual motivation exist simultaneously in our heads.
This means that our driving intellectual motivation — and, in turn, our thinking process — varies depending on where we are on the Ladder of Thinking at any given moment.
The Ladder’s four rungs correspond to the following four ways of forming beliefs.
When your Rational Mind is running the show, you’re up on the top rung, thinking like a Scientist.
The Scientist
When you’re thinking like a scientist, you start at Point A and follow wherever the evidence takes you.
The Scientist’s default position on any topic is “I don’t know.” To advance beyond Point A, you have to put in effort, starting with a hypothesis.
Think of your hypothesis like a rookie boxer.
When you’re thinking like a scientist, you’d never engage in a conversation that looks like this:
This boxer might have a lot of potential, but his skills haven’t been tested in the real world yet. A scientist, no matter who they are, never claims that an unproven hypothesis is the truth.
The more boxing matches the Scientist puts their hypothesis through, the more they’re able to explore the edges of their conclusions and tweak their ideas into crisper and more confident beliefs.
When you’re thinking like a Scientist, i.e, when you are self-aware, free of bias, unattached to any particular ideas, motivated entirely by truth and continually willing to revise your beliefs, your brain is a hyper-efficient learning machine.
But, all said and done, it’s super hard to think like a Scientist, and most of us, no matter how sensible we are, are bad at it most of the time.
Your Primitive Mind is dormant when you’re thinking like a scientist. But when your it wakes up and enters the scene, it’s very easy to drift down to the second rung of our Ladder — a place where your thinking is caught up in the tug-of-war.
The Sports Fan
When you’re think like a Sports Fan, you still start from Point A and follow wherever evidence takes you, but you have a certain bias towards a particular outcome. Unlike a scientist, your objectivity is compromised.
All sports fans want fair games, but they also have a strong desire for a specific outcome. They’re not just spectators, they’re emotionally invested.
In this mindset, the Scientist’s rigorous thinking process is corrupted by confirmation bias, which pushes you to seek evidence that confirms your existing beliefs and discourages you from changing your mind.
You gather information, but you may selectively choose sources that support your ideas.
When your hypothesis is challenged, you tend to dismiss it as a lucky shot, while exaggerating the impact of your own arguments.
The irony is that, despite having less extensive knowledge than a Scientist, Sports Fans often feel more confident in their beliefs.
Having said that, Sports Fans can be stubborn, but they are not without hope. If strong opposing evidence emerges, they can reluctantly change their minds. Deep down, Sports Fans still value the pursuit of truth, even amidst cognitive biases.
Now, if you continue to drift downwards, you reach a point on the ladder where your desire to be right and appear right outweighs your desire for truth.
This is when you enter Unconceivable Land.
Unconceivable Land is a place where people hold unwavering beliefs that cannot be changed by any amount of evidence. In this land, intellectual loyalty takes precedence over intellectual integrity.
The Lawyer
A Lawyer and a Sports Fan share similarities in their struggle between truth and confirmation, but their underlying values differ.
A Sports Fan wants to win, but ultimately cares more about truth. However, a Lawyer’s primary focus is on winning, without wavering in allegiance. You’d never expect a lawyer to say the following:
Thinking like a Lawyer means starting from Point B, where the client is assumed to be innocent; it doesn’t matter what Point A is.
The goal of a Lawyer is to construct an argument that supports this assumption, selectively gathering evidence along the way.
In a real courtroom, this approach is understandable, as each lawyer presents one side of the case. However, on our Ladder of thinking, the Lawyer’s mindset becomes like a corrupt courtroom where only one side is represented, predetermined to favour Point B.
For the Lawyer, preferred beliefs are treated like clients, immune to revision. The process becomes a reinforcement of existing viewpoints, making opposing arguments frustratingly ineffective.
The Lawyer’s mindset hinders genuine learning, and their determination to confirm existing beliefs leads to confidence in falsehoods. Their efforts only contribute to increased delusion.
Despite this, Lawyer thinking acknowledges the concept of knowledge-building, remaining just a small shift away from higher-rung thinking. The voice of the Rational Mind still holds some influence, offering the potential for change if embraced.
A lawyer would fight till the end to support their ideas. But if they are beaten, their personal identity isn’t threatened. However, there are beliefs that the Primitive Mind holds so tightly that feel inseparable from one’s identity. This represents the bottomest rung of thinking where changing one’s mind is perceived as a threat.
The Fanatic
Imagine you’ve just had your first baby. Every day when you look at your baby, you can’t believe how cute it is.
This is the relationship Fanatics have with their sacred ideas. Their ideas aren’t rugged experiments to be kicked around. They’re fragile, precious babies to be adored and protected.
Just like no parent has to research whether their baby is loveable, the Fanatic doesn’t have to go from A to B to know their viewpoints are correct — they just know they are. With 100% conviction.
If someone told you your actual baby was super cute, you wouldn’t assess their credibility, you’d be in automatic full agreement. And if someone told you your baby was one ugly piece of shit, you wouldn’t consider their opinion, you’d just think they were a terrible person.
We can visualise a Fanatic’s trust filter as a funnel, where they flip-flop from one extreme to the other based on whether they hear confirmation or dissent.
When Fanatics argue, things can quickly get heated. A challenge to their ideas feels like an insult. It feels personally invalidating. A punch landed on a Fanatic’s idea is a punch landed on their baby.
When the Primitive Mind is overactive in our heads, it turns us into crazy people. On top of making us think our ideas are our babies, it shows us a distorted view of ourselves.
While the Scientist’s clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Fanatic’s foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions.
When you’re thinking like a Fanatic, you end up in a totally alternative reality, feeling like you’re an omniscient being in total possession of the truth. In this reality, total ignorance and complete certainty are one and the same.
The four thinking rungs are all distinct, but they fall into two broad categories: high-rung thinking (Scientist and Sports Fan) and low-rung thinking (Attorney and Zealot).
High-rung thinking is productive thinking. The humility of the high-rung mindset makes your mind a sponge that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom.
On the other hand, the arrogance of low-rung thinking makes your mind a rubber ball that life experience bounces off of.
One begets learning, the other ignorance.
We all spend time on the low rungs, and when we’re thinking this way, we don’t realise we’re doing it. We believe our conviction has been hard-earned. We believe our viewpoints are original and based on knowledge.
Healthy discussions — where there is room for dialogue and dissent — can happen only on the higher rungs.
Thus, it becomes very important to know which rung you are on when you get into any kind of discourse. It’s equally important to know in which state of mind your counterparts are.
When people are on the lower rungs of the ladder, any effort to lift them up is futile.
Each of us is a work in progress. We’ll never rid our lives of low-rung thinking, but the more we evolve psychologically, the more time we spend thinking from the high rungs and the less time we spend down below. Improving this ratio is a good intellectual goal for all of us.
The thumb rule is this: If you cannot always be a Scientist, you can at least be a Sports Fan. It’s okay if you have some bias, just don’t be stupid about it.
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
PS: All typos are intentional and I take no responsibility whatsoever! 😬
Great article.