dumb

You’re delusional – but stay that way

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We have no clue. I’m always surprised when someone remembers me, I’m regularly misjudging how meetings went, I haven’t the faintest idea about myself or what in the world I do. But apparently neither does anyone else – or at least, not apart from a very specific few – and apparently it’s also a good thing. It is good and even essential to be completely deluded:

At one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life and your place in it. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you and your own competence. Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. Positive illusions evaporate there, and the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root. About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism*. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. You have a strange superpower — the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad and weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads; sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning.

You are Now Less Dumb – David McRaney (UK edition, US edition)

The quote is from McRaney’s book but I read it in a Brainpickings.org article about this topic which also pulls in advice from Helen Keller and comments from Hunter S Thompson/

Neither of whom are remotely as good a writer as what I am, like. Hmm. Not sure this is working.

I’ve changed my mind, he said lying

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If there is one good thing about me, it is I am saintly about admitting when I’m wrong and truly Godly about changing my mind when you persuade me. Admittedly, I do it because you cannot believe how it throws people. Yes, I can look like a fool, but whoa, their faces. Love it.

However, I am unusual. Brainpickings.org looks at the issues of changing one’s mind and in particular how one book talks about it:

David McRaney explores [this] in You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself [UK edition, US edition] — a fascinating and pleasantly uncomfortable-making look at why “self-delusion is as much a part of the human condition as fingers and toes,” and the follow-up to McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, one of the best psychology books of 2011. McRaney writes of this cognitive bug:

“Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.”

But what makes this especially worrisome is that in the process of exerting effort on dealing with the cognitive dissonance produced by conflicting evidence, we actually end up building new memories and new neural connections that further strengthen our original convictions.

I fancy the book now but Brainpickings writer Maria Popova writes an interesting piece about this.