By all accounts, LBJ was not someone you’d like to marry into your family. There’s a wonderful series of books on Lyndon Johnson, the 36th President of the United States. Most of practical reality lies outside the realm of mathematical certainty. The first step towards thinking in 3D is realizing that you carry many of your cherished positions too strongly. If any of these ruffle your feathers, then good. Support for soldiers may carry some conditions.
College has its pluses and minuses it works for some and not for others. Some socialist institutions actually work well in a capitalist economy, but pure socialism hasn’t tended to work at all. Capitalism is enormously productive but has many limitations. But make sure to use the right mental model for the right situation. We can re-frame our slogans above: War is awful but history shows it to be occasionally necessary, and a very complex phenomenon. Doing heroin even once is probably a bad idea. This isn’t to say that some things shouldn’t be stamped on hard, and fast. That is the way of the world, and why almost everything connected to practical reality must be quantified, at least roughly. Nearly all things are OK in some dose but not OK in another dose. Well, maybe, but not necessarily and not usually. It starts with this, and then the whole thing goes to hell. The dose/poison idea is the opposite of the slippery slope argument favored by the ideologue. But most don’t realize that quantitative thinking isn’t really about math it’s about the idea that The dose makes the poison. This is why quantitative and scale-based thinking is so important. It takes a substantial deprogramming to realize that life is all grey, that all reality lies on a continuum. This fundamental truth is easy to grasp in theory and hard to use in practice, every day. There are very few black and white answers and no solutions without second-order consequences. It requires less energy.īut the fact is, the reality is all grey area. As discussed in the Eager to be Wrong piece, it’s a lot easier to land somewhere simple and stay there. The slogan isn’t just a shorthand: It replaces thinking for many people, because it’s hard to generate real understanding. These slogans become substitutes for actual understanding, and it’s not as benign as it seems. We must support our troops. College is useless. But a major symptom of this style of learning, combined with our natural proclivity to land on easily digestible answers, is that we start thinking in rigid categories: War is good. The shortcomings of this system are well documented so we won’t rehash them. We are forced to take tests with definite answers - A, B, C, or D? How well we do at these determines, to an extent, our position in life. Their views are not fixed yet.Īs we get older, we start to get rigid. It’s agitating in the moment, but it’s just a symptom of the child’s view of the world: Something to be explored. If you’re a parent, you’ve probably had this experience. Yes, but he has fur, and doesn’t sweat. Why does he have fur? To keep him warm. Why don’t I have fur then? OK that’s enough. Thinking in GreyĬhildren love torturing their parents and teachers with the relentless Why? The chain of whys can be endless - Why does the doggy pant? He’s hot. It goes by many names, but a fair one might be Grey Thinking.
No truly great thinker is siloed in a small territory.īut a common experience tends to occur as you rid yourself of ideology and narrowness, as you venture deeper and deeper into unfamiliar territory and it’s worth thinking about it ahead of time. There is, of course, no one thing, and if Farnam Street is a testament to any idea, it’s that you must pull from many disciplines to achieve overall wisdom. One of the most common questions we receive, unsurprisingly, is along the lines of What one piece of advice would you recommend to become a better thinker?