My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
If judgement is mostly limited by mindset rather than knowledge, then it is important to find ways to improve your mindset. There are slower but more persistent ways of improving your mindset, and there are quicker but temporary “boosts” that you can utilize. I think The Ritual speaks to one of these “boosts”.
But reciting meta-mnemonics and staring and blank walls is only one way that you might give yourself such a boost. I think it is worthwhile and important to think about others.
Yesterday I took a 50 mile bike ride and noticed myself feeling like I’m in a much better state to change my mind about something important. I felt like it gave me a boost. Perhaps long distance cardio really does provide such a boost, especially when done in nature.
This is such a good post. From The Scout Mindset (emphasis mine):
If judgement is mostly limited by mindset rather than knowledge, then it is important to find ways to improve your mindset. There are slower but more persistent ways of improving your mindset, and there are quicker but temporary “boosts” that you can utilize. I think The Ritual speaks to one of these “boosts”.
But reciting meta-mnemonics and staring and blank walls is only one way that you might give yourself such a boost. I think it is worthwhile and important to think about others.
Yesterday I took a 50 mile bike ride and noticed myself feeling like I’m in a much better state to change my mind about something important. I felt like it gave me a boost. Perhaps long distance cardio really does provide such a boost, especially when done in nature.