This Will Make You Smarter

To consider something well, of course, is to evaluate both sides of an argument, but unless we also go the extra mile of deliberately forcing ourselves to consider alternatives—which doesn’t come naturally—we’re more prone to recall evidence consistent with a belief than inconsistent with it.

Being mindful of self-serving bias beckons us not to false modesty but to a humility that affirms our genuine talents and virtues and likewise those of others.

Compared with our average peer, most of us fancy ourselves as more intelligent, better-looking, less prejudiced, more ethical, healthier, and likely to live longer—a phenomenon recognized in Freud’s joke about the man who told his wife, “If one of us should die, I shall move to Paris.

The question “What have I done to deserve this?” is one we ask of our troubles, not our successes

Recognizing how much we share with others promotes compassion, humility, respect, and brotherhood. Recognizing that we are each unique promotes pride, self-development, creativity, and achievement.

We will be better able to pay attention to counterevidence—those anomalous bits of data that make our picture of the world a little weirder, more mysterious, less clean, less done. And we will be able to hold our own beliefs a bit more humbly, in the happy knowledge that better ideas are almost certainly on the way.

The idea behind the meta-induction is that all of our theories are fundamentally provisional and quite possibly wrong. If we can add that idea to our cognitive toolkit, we will be better able to listen with curiosity and empathy to those whose theories contradict our own.

The notion of a gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment, has been integral to the theoretical physics toolkit ever since that discipline came into existence. It involves setting up an imagined piece of apparatus and running a simple experiment with it in your mind, for the purpose of proving or disproving a hypothesis. In many cases, a gedankenexperiment is the only approach. An actual experiment to examine retrieval of information falling into a black hole cannot be carried out

The scientist Nicolaus Copernicus recognized that Earth is not in any particularly privileged position in the solar system

What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of scienc