In these posts I have distinguished between belief, disbelief, and nonbelief. In this post, though, I will focus my attention on the act of believing. It is tempting to think that belief is a binary, all-or-nothing phenomenon, but this view is mistaken. This is because belief “admits of degree.” Allow me to explain.

Belief is not like an old-fashioned light switch, either on or off. It is more like a modern dimmer switch that has degrees of “on-ness.” Or shifting the simile, it is like the wind. In the same way as wind has both a direction and a velocity, your beliefs have both content and a level of confidence. Consequently, whereas some people feel certain that Bigfoot exists, others think only that he might exist, while yet others think it highly unlikely that he exists.

Not only do we tend to think of beliefs as being binary, but when others indicate their level of confidence in a belief, we might be inclined to “round up” or “round down” when reporting their beliefs to others. We might, that is, reframe their belief in binary terms. By way of illustration, suppose someone tells us that they are “somewhat confident” that abortion is morally impermissible. We might subsequently describe them as “believing that abortion is morally impermissible” or, more bluntly, as being in the “pro-life camp.” In doing this, though, we will be misrepresenting their beliefs.

This “binary-belief bias” is unfortunate. What you believe matters, but how confident you are in the truth of a belief also matters. This is because your level of confidence will have an impact on whether and how you act on the basis of that belief, and if the belief that you are certain is true turns out to be mistaken, the consequences of acting on it can be disastrous, not only for you, but even more tragically for others who

Is it ever appropriate to be absolutely certain of the truth of a belief? Yes, but only under special circumstances. We can, for example, be absolutely certain of the mathematical claim that 3 × 2 = 6. That claim is, after all, provable. We can likewise be certain of the truth of the logical claim that if a person is neither a golfer nor a bowler, then they aren’t a golfer. The same can be said of semantic claims, such as that there are no married bachelors. This is because bachelors are by definition unmarried.

Allow me to ask a personal question: Are the people you believe to be your biological parents in fact your biological parents? You might feel certain that they are, but if you think carefully, you will realize that this feeling of certainty is unjustified. It could be that they are in fact adoptive parents who misled you about your origin, perhaps because they thought that doing so would be in your best interests. Alternatively, the people who raised you could sincerely believe that they are your biological parents, but there could have been a mix-up at the hospital. Such things happen! The takeaway from this is that, outside of special areas—including math, logic, and semantics—there is precious little about which a thoughtful person will be absolutely certain.*

In general, your level of confidence in a claim should depend on the quantity and quality of the evidence that you have in support of it. A Thinker will realize as much. Consequently, if you ask whether they believe a claim, they might hesitate to give you a straight-out Yes or No answer, and might instead qualify their level of confidence: “Do I believe that the COVID pandemic resulted from a lab leak in China? There is a good chance that it did, but I am by no means certain.”

Thinkers’ tendency to qualify their level of certainty with respect to a claim will, for many people, be a turn-off. Given a choice between a Thinker who believes that there is “a good chance” that COVID is the result of a lab leak, and a YouTube pundit who is absolutely certain that COVID is caused by cell phone towers, they will be drawn to the pundit. Would he, after all, be that certain if his beliefs were mistaken? By way of contrast, Thinkers will instinctively distrust those who (outside of the special areas we have discussed) feel certain of the truth of the claims they are making. Although evidence-based reasoning can justify our being quite confident that our conclusions are correct, it can’t justify absolute certainty.

Although Thinkers will routinely qualify their level of confidence in a claim, they will typically be reluctant to quantify it. Suppose, for example, we ask whether they think a coin, when tossed, will come up heads. You might imagine that they would tell us that they are “50% confident” that it will, but this is unlikely. They will instead tell us that they are highly confident that there is a 50% chance that it will come up heads, which is an altogether different belief. And notice that they are unlikely to say that they are certain that there is a 50% chance, because they aren’t certain that the coin being tossed is fair.

We have seen that Thinkers will have very many nonbeliefs. When they do believe something, though, they will attach a level of confidence to that belief. Furthermore, Thinkers are perfectly willing to change their level of confidence in a belief if they come into possession of new evidence, if they come to question the reliability of old evidence, or if they discover that the reasoning that led them from evidence to their conclusion was flawed.

In an earlier post, I described a Thinker’s mindcleaning regimen. Its purpose is to find and “eradicate” their mistaken beliefs. In many cases, though, rather than eradicating a belief, a Thinker will adjust their level of confidence in it. They might also spend time and energy reassessing beliefs that they feel absolutely certain are true—again, outside of the special areas we have discussed.

*Descartes famously declared that “I think, therefore I am.” In saying this, he was not saying that the activity of thinking gave his life meaning. He was instead explaining how he could be certain of his existence—more precisely, of the existence of his mind: By the very act of thinking, he provided himself with compelling evidence of his existence. Indeed, by the very act of doubting his existence—“Maybe I don’t exist…”—he also provided himself with compelling evidence of his existence. After all, a non-existent being couldn’t harbor such doubts. And to be clear, Descartes was not claiming that he could be certain of the existence of his body or even his brain. What he could be certain of (at least while he was thinking) was the existence of a “thinking thing,” namely, what we refer to as his mind. He also couldn’t be certain that other people have minds. That said, we would do well, in daily life, to assume that they do.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

There was a time when, walking alone, you were accompanied only by your thoughts. That changed with the advent of transistor radios that allowed you to listen to something while you walked. These radios were largely supplanted, in 1979, by the introduction of the Sony Walkman, which itself was subsequently supplanted by the Discman, the MP3 player, the Apple iPod, and finally, the smartphone. This last device made it possible for your train of thought to be interrupted by getting a phone call or receiving a direct message. It also allowed you to listen to music and podcasts.

The advent of social media like Facebook meant that a walk could be interrupted by notification that someone had interacted with your content. Not long thereafter, the arrival of Twitter amplified the impact of social media. It was not only a source of distraction, but its rules required users to limit their tweets to 140 characters. This meant that if you wanted to comment on a current event, you had to compress and simplify your conclusion. Nuanced thinking became—and for very many people remains—passé.

As a result of these influences, people got used to reading things in small and easily digestible portions. They would be repelled by the thought of reading an entire book. They might also think twice about reading a 1,000-word essay—like this one—and if they did, they might find it difficult to concentrate for the time required to read it.

At the same time as technology was creating new sources of distraction, multitasking was becoming popular. People came to believe that the best way to get things done was to do several things simultaneously. As a result, they might put down a document they were reading to reply to an email that had just arrived, and then pause in writing their reply to deal with an IM notification. Having done so, they would complete the email, after which they would return to their reading. Three tasks would have been accomplished.

The problem with this approach is that our brains are not good at switching from task to task. Consequently, when people returned to the document they had set aside, they might have lost their train of thought with respect to it. Yes, they could reread what they had read, but it was much easier to simply press on, a bit vague about what, exactly, the author was talking about and why they were talking about it.

Reader exercise: Make a point of monitoring how you apportion your attention. Do you keep shifting it? And if you do, is it because you find it difficult to focus it on one thing for an extended period of time?

As I have explained in this Substack, your mind has a mind of its own. (If you don’t believe me, I invite you, once again, to do the zazen exercise.) Since you are only human, your thought processes are routinely interrupted by random thoughts that drift into your mind, uninvited. You might, for example, find yourself thinking about a mean comment someone made. As a result, you might find yourself getting angry, which in turn will disrupt your thinking.

Besides angering you, random thoughts can entice you. Suppose, for example, that while writing an essay on the novel Moby-Dick, you find yourself wondering whether dogs can walk on their front legs. A few minutes later, you realize that you are watching your third YouTube video in which dogs walk on their front legs. You didn’t really need to know whether dogs have this ability. In particular, it had no bearing whatsoever on your analysis of Moby-Dick. So why did you allow yourself to be distracted? It might be, at least in part, because your mind, tired of concentrating, was looking for an excuse to rest.

In earlier posts we encountered people who habitually feel rather than think their way to conclusions. These Feelers, as I call them, are motivated in part by intellectual laziness. Thinking is hard, so they avoid it, much as they might avoid physical exercise. With effort, though, people can become more physically fit, in which case they might come to enjoy physical activity. In much the same way, people can become more intellectually fit. It will take effort on their part, but for most people, it is an achievable goal.

It is also possible to improve your power of concentration. One way is to employ the pomodoro technique. When undertaking a task, you set a timer to give you, say, 25 minutes of work time and five minutes of rest time. During the work time, you must think only about the task at hand. If your mind drifts, you must return your attention to the task. If you find yourself wondering whether dogs can walk on their front legs, you might regain your focus by promising yourself to look it up during your rest time. You can set the interval timing to your liking, and you can also do multiple work-rest cycles.

When this technique was popularized by university student Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, he used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer—pomodoro being the Italian word for tomato. These days, apps take the place of mechanical timers.

Over my decades of writing, I have developed my ability to concentrate for extended periods. Indeed, on a typical day, I spend my first three waking hours immersed in writing. After that, I exercise, take a nap, have lunch, and then spend another two hours writing. When I am having trouble concentrating, I resort to the pomodoro technique.

In case you are wondering, I write every day, weekends and holidays included. Also, it takes me two days to write a Substack post. Since they are typically 1,000 words long, that works out to 100 words per hour spent writing. It isn’t that I write at the rate of roughly two words per minute; it’s that I do research while I am writing, and do lots of outlining, rewriting, and polishing.

If you have trouble concentrating, I encourage you to experiment with the pomodoro technique. You might start with 5-minute work periods followed by 2-minute rest periods, and increase those times as the weeks go by. Do this regularly, and your ability to concentrate will improve. Indeed, it might improve so much that you find yourself accidentally working through your rest intervals. If this happens, it is a sign that you have entered what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the flow state. The world around you fades into the background as you become thoroughly immersed in the task at hand.

Dog videos are entertaining, but they are no match for the richness of flow. Once you experience it, you will see what I mean.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

As a result of being exposed to AI chatbots, I’ve grown weary of dealing with these “dumb” virtual assistants. My new approach to getting information about an online business or service is to ask an AI chatbot. It’s simply a quicker and easier way to get a question answered. If I have doubts about the answer it provides, I can go to the official website and figure out how to talk to an actual human being. I might then spend time on hold before being connected to a service representative—who might or might not know the answer to my question.

I recently found myself turning to AI not for information about the goods and services provided by companies, but for information about the candidates in an election. Allow me to explain.

I live in America’s heartland—more precisely, in Dayton, Ohio, which is located in Montgomery County. A few days ago, we had a primary election in which candidates were running for state offices, such as governor and attorney general, as well as for federal offices, such as senator and representative. We were also voting for local judges and county commissioners.

As a civic-minded person, I always vote in elections. In the more important races, such as presidential elections, I will have heard about the candidates and formed an impression about their fitness to serve. When it came to voting for the office of county commissioner, though, I was clueless. Not only had I never heard of the four candidates, but I found it difficult to acquire information about them. I would have to access their websites—if they had them—take notes from each, and draw a conclusion. I wondered whether the effort would be worthwhile, particularly when I wasn’t even sure what county commissioners do.

Under these circumstances, I could simply have refrained from voting in the commissioners’ race, or I could have voted randomly. As an experiment, I turned to Google’s Gemini AI for information. My prompt: “Compare and contrast Norman J. Scearce, Jordan Wortham, Margie Christie, and Lori Kennedy, all of whom are running for County Commissioner in Montgomery County, Ohio.” Its response is shown below.

I realize that this election is over and that it is quite unlikely that you would have been able to vote in it. You might nevertheless profit from reading Gemini’s response. In particular, you might want to make similar use of AI in your own voting.

The Candidates at a Glance

Margie Christie

Background: Non-profit executive and prominent social conservative activist. She serves as the Advocacy Director for Dayton Right to Life and is the President of the Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio.

Profile: Christie is highly established in Ohio’s pro-life movement, frequently testifying at the statehouse and leading statewide anti-abortion initiatives. Her campaign relies heavily on her deep ties to the socially conservative, grassroots base of the local Republican party.

Lori Kennedy

Current Role: Montgomery County Recorder (elected in 2024).

Background: Before holding public office, Kennedy had a career in mortgage lending, real estate, and private aviation.

Profile: Kennedy is the only candidate in the primary who currently holds a county-wide elected office. She is running on her administrative record, highlighting her conservative fiscal approach, customer service improvements, and management of the Recorder’s nearly $2 million budget.

Norman J. Scearce

Background: Pastor at Gateway Cathedral in Trotwood and a former local school board member. He gained significant community recognition for using his church as a ground-zero recovery hub following the devastating 2019 Memorial Day tornadoes.

Profile: Scearce is running on a strict “no new taxes or assessments” platform. He focuses heavily on neighborhood revitalization, infrastructure, and auditing county spending to eliminate waste. However, he has recently faced local press scrutiny regarding his church being listed among the county’s most delinquent properties for unpaid assessments.

Jordan Wortham

Background: Former Dayton City Police officer (served seven years) and current small business owner. He holds a communications degree from the University of Cincinnati.

Profile: Wortham is a persistent political contender with high name recognition. He ran against Carolyn Rice for this exact commission seat in 2022—initially appearing to win on election night before final tallies flipped the race to Rice. He has previously described himself as “socially progressive and fiscally responsible,” focusing his platform on neighborhood advancement, public safety, and youth services.

It took only a few seconds for Gemini to respond to my request, at which point I asked it to explain what my county commissioners do. It turns out that they serve as the primary administrative and policy-making body for the county. In this role, they are the taxing authority for the county and manage its $1 billion annual budget. They also appropriate money to all county departments, and they authorize contracts. It is a job which, if done well, can significantly impact citizens’ lives. And yet, how many of us citizens are as clueless about the office of county commissioner as I was before consulting AI?

Reader Exercise: Take a moment to think about which candidate you would have voted for, as well as the factors that made you favor him or her. By doing this, you can gain some important insights into your political thought processes, as well as whether you make political decisions with your heart or your head.

I came away from this exercise feeling that I could comfortably and with good conscience vote for one of these candidates. This is admittedly a minimally thoughtful way to choose a candidate, but it is significantly more thoughtful than the way many voters—including my previous self—make their choices. It is certainly more thoughtful than voting randomly or not voting at all.

In doing the research for this article, I came across the Democracy.Works website, which has teamed up with Anthropic to “help ensure that generative AI users are safeguarded from mis- and disinformation about voting and elections.” In the United States, you can enter your address, and this site will tell you when your next election is, where you can vote, and what will be on the ballot. It is a website that Americans would do well to keep in mind as we approach our midterm elections this November.

Having said this, I hasten to add that although AI does a creditable job of providing information about political candidates, there is a very real danger that in coming years, this will cease to be the case. Social media has been used to tamper with elections, and it is almost certain that AI will similarly be exploited.

Until then, we are on what I have characterized as our AI honeymoon. My advice: Enjoy it while it lasts!

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

In these posts, I’ve introduced the notion of Thinkers, and more recently of Feelers. Whereas Thinkers think their way to conclusions, Feelers rely on their heart and gut instead of their head to reach them. As we have seen, the Thinker-Feeler distinction isn’t binary. It can instead be displayed on an “intellectual spectrum” with “pure Feelers” at the left endpoint and (theoretical) “pure Thinkers” at the right endpoint. Most people will be somewhere between these endpoints, with their location depending on how much they rely on thinking versus feeling.

In this post, I’m going to disabuse readers of the notion that the Thinkers of the world will be in agreement about whether a claim is true or false. Not only can they disagree, but such disagreement is commonplace.

How, you might wonder, can this happen? One way is if two Thinkers have drawn their conclusions from different evidence. It could be, for example, that the first Thinker has access to evidence that the second Thinker doesn’t. It could also be that although a piece of evidence was available to both Thinkers, one overlooked it. Alternatively, the first Thinker might have been aware of that piece of information but dismissed it, because they questioned the reliability of its source. They might, in particular, be reluctant to take seriously a video provided by someone with a reputation for producing deepfake videos.

And even if two Thinkers relied on the same body of evidence, they might have used different reasoning processes to arrive at their conclusions. It might be that one of them fell victim to a cognitive bias: Not even Thinkers are immune to them! Alternatively, one Thinker might have made a simple math error.*

Along these lines, consider two Thinkers who disagree about a historical event, say the Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought on June 25-26, 1876, in which more than 200 soldiers of the United States Army’s 7th Cavalry regiment were killed by a coalition of Native American tribes. It might be that these Thinkers have differing opinions about the reliability of participant accounts. They might also disagree about the chronological order and significance of the events of that battle.

It is important to keep in mind that whether you are a Thinker is determined by the process you use to reach your conclusions, not by the conclusions you reach! In particular, two individuals engaged in open-minded critical thinking can come to different conclusions. This is what happened in the cases described above.

Realize that when two Thinkers come to different conclusions, one of them must be mistaken—or maybe they both are! This in turn raises a question: If open-minded critical thinking can lead us to mistaken conclusions, then why employ it?

The answer is that those who rely on open-minded critical thinking will, in the long run, end up holding more true beliefs than those who use alternative belief-formation processes. The claim, in other words, is that although engaging in open-minded critical thinking is not an infallible way to optimize our mind, it’s the best way we have.

Because they felt rather than thought their way to conclusions, Feelers will find it difficult to defend them. As a result, they might experience anger and resentment when someone challenges those conclusions. They might do their best to ignore the challenge, and if forced to confront it, they might verbally abuse, shout down, or even try to silence the challenger.

Contrast this with the situation in which two Thinkers discover that they disagree about some subject. The discovery will trigger mutual curiosity. They each know that the other person has engaged in evidence-based reasoning to reach their conclusion. So where did their intellectual paths fork? They will start comparing the evidence they used and the inferences they drew on the basis of that evidence. On locating the crux of their disagreement, they will focus their attention on it.

As a result of this investigation, one of them might change their mind. It is also possible, though, for both to change their mind—to realize that they had both gone astray in their reasoning. This “change of mind” might involve switching from believing a claim to disbelieving it or conversely, it might mean switching from believing or disbelieving a claim to nonbelieving it, and it might mean continuing to believe or disbelieve a claim but adjusting their level of confidence in that belief.

If this outcome sounds implausible, remember that we are assuming that the individuals in question are both Thinkers. As such, they will by definition be open-minded, and one of the things their mind will be open to is the possibility that their beliefs are mistaken and that someone else has a better understanding of an issue than they do. And because their goal is to optimize their mind—rather than maintain a public image of infallibility—they will welcome having someone set them straight and might even thank them for doing so.

Thinkers, as we have seen, will stress-test their beliefs in conjunction with their mindcleaning regimen. We have also seen that the best way to do this is to find a “contrary Thinker”—a fellow Thinker, that is, who has reached a conclusion contrary to theirs. This is one last piece of evidence that Thinkers can disagree about a subject. It is also evidence that Thinkers themselves not only realize as much but harness the thinking power of contrary Thinkers in their mind-optimization efforts.

*Recently, tons of black plastic cooking utensils were discarded in response to a science journal article that concluded that they weren’t safe to use. Subsequently, it was discovered that the authors of that article had made a basic math error.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.”

If you find these questions unsettling and want to wake up in a deeper, non-literal sense of the term, you will likely have an interest in Sam Harris’s popular Waking Up app. I’ll have more to say about this app in a moment, but first let me explain my connection with Sam.

In the early 2000s, I became aware of evolutionary psychology, a field that barely existed when I went to college. I embarked on a program of self-education and was deeply impressed by the extent to which evolutionary psychology could explain many of the most baffling aspects of human nature. This research led to my publication of On Desire: Why We Want What We Want (Oxford University Press, 2006).

In the course of doing this research, I encountered mindfulness and meditation practices, including the zazen meditation that I described in an early Substack. The three minutes it takes to do this meditation, I explained, could give you important insights into the extent to which your mind has a mind of its own.

I also encountered Stoic philosophy. This wasn’t my first encounter; that had been in college logic classes, where I was informed that the Stoics had “discovered” propositional logic. (This is the logic of and, or, not, and if-then—the kind of logic that plays a key role in computer programming.) I learned that when they weren’t thinking about logic, the Stoics were thinking about how to have a good life—something my philosophy professors had neglected to mention.

What impressed me most about the Stoic philosophy of life was the strategies the Stoics had developed for retaining their equanimity in the face of life’s many challenges. I described these strategies in my Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford University Press, 2009). I subsequently published another Stoic book, Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient (W.W. Norton, 2019), and my timing turned out, for once, to be exceptionally lucky. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, people started experiencing an unprecedented stream of setbacks. As a result, Stoic philosophy suddenly became relevant in their lives, and I was deluged with interview requests.

One such request came from Sam Harris. He asked me to do an interview for his Waking Up app—not to be confused with his Making Sense podcast, which, you might remember, is one of the “Thinker podcasts” I recommended in an earlier post. He subsequently asked me to create a “Stoic Path” series of talks for Waking Up. This is only one of dozens of series that can be found on the app. Among them are guided meditations, as well as conversations and lessons on consciousness, mindfulness, and neuroscience.

If you are interested in this sort of content, you are in luck. Sam has agreed to offer my subscribers a 30-day free trial of Waking Up. Click here to take advantage of this offer. Enjoy!

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

A mindcare regimen, in which they take steps to avoid exposing themselves to misinformation. In particular, Thinkers will be very careful about where they get information on social media and will avoid hanging out in cognitive spas, where their beliefs will be confirmed.

A mindcleaning regimen, in which they take steps to find and eradicate misinformation that has slipped past their critical guard. I hasten to add that mindcleaning is different from brainwashing; indeed, it is a remedy for having been brainwashed.

A mind-expansion regimen, in which they explore the world around them in search of beliefs that are both true and useful. At this point, a disclaimer is in order: A Thinker‘s mind-expansion regimen needn’t involve the use of “mind-expanding drugs.”

The primary mindcleaning tool is the stress test. To stress-test a belief, you find a well-informed and thoughtful person—ideally, a fellow Thinker—who rejects your belief. (In case you are wondering, Thinkers can disagree about the truth of a claim.) Your goal in talking to contrary Thinkers is not to debate them but to listen carefully to what they have to say. As a result of this conversation, you might abandon your belief altogether—you were simply wrong. Should this happen, you will take delight in having rid yourself of it. This is because as a Thinker, your goal is not to indulge your ego; it is to optimize your mind.

More often, however, you will come away from such conversations with revised views. You might realize that the subject you were discussing was more complex than you had imagined and therefore had elements you failed to take into account. You might also come to realize that the generalizations you were making had important exceptions. As a result, your beliefs are likely to become more nuanced, and you are likely to become less confident of their truth. For a Feeler, these will be undesirable outcomes, but for a Thinker, they will be evidence of progress toward their mind-optimization goal.

Five months ago, I encouraged readers to use AI to stress-test their beliefs. AI has improved dramatically since then, and as a result, the case for using AI as a stress-testing tool has become even more compelling. In this post, I am therefore going to not only encourage you to use AI as a stress-testing tool but walk you through a stress-testing exercise.

The first step is to pick a belief you have about a controversial issue. Here is a list of issues (that AI created for me), but feel free to substitute your own issue if none of them is to your liking:

• Assisted suicide

• Capital punishment

• Vaccine mandates

• Gender identity in sports

• Universal basic income

• The morality of abortion

Having chosen an issue, access an AI chatbot on which to test it. You may already have one that you like and are familiar with; if not, I recommend that you try Claude. (You will have to give it your email to set up an account, but you can use it for free.)

Suppose you have chosen the morality of abortion as your topic. Suppose, more precisely, that you are pro-life: You are convinced that abortion is morally impermissible. To stress-test this belief, you won’t simply ask the AI chatbot to write about the moral permissibility of abortion, and you certainly won’t ask it to support your view that abortion is morally impermissible. Do that, and you will be using it as a “cognitive spa.” To stress test your pro-life views, you should present it with a prompt like the following:

I have a friend who is convinced that abortion is morally impermissible. Write a 500-word essay that I could use to convince him that his views on abortion are mistaken. He is a college graduate. Don’t be patronizing in the essay, and by all means, don’t be insulting. Assume that he is thoughtful and that his views are well-intended.

If you are instead a pro-choice advocate who is convinced that abortion is morally permissible, you should change the prompt accordingly: “I have a friend who is convinced that abortion is morally permissible.” The point is to ask AI to write an essay that challenges your views. By doing this, you are using AI as a stress-testing tool.

Some aspects of this prompt will be puzzling to AI novices. Why, to begin with, am I saying that the essay is intended for a friend, when I am the one who will be reading it? I wrote the prompt this way because AI chatbots tend to be sycophantic. If you have routinely used an AI chatbot, it will know a lot about you, what you like, and what you believe. If you asked it to write a document that challenged your own views, it might soften its message.

And why, you might wonder, am I instructing AI to assume that “your friend” is a college graduate? This is because it will adjust its essay to be accessible to your intended audience. For an illustration of this phenomenon, after you have gotten AI’s response to the above prompt, ask it to redo the task, only this time tell it that your friend is a high-school student or alternatively, a philosophy professor. And if you think that the 500-word essay it has written lacks substance, you can instead ask it to write a 1,000-word essay.

Once you have submitted your prompt, it will take only a few seconds for AI to reply. Carefully read the essay it has written—or even better, have it read the essay aloud, since this will make it more difficult for you to “tune out” portions of the essay that make you uncomfortable. Then think carefully about what it has said.

In an early post, I asked readers of my More, Better Thinking Substack to do the zazen exercise. Although it is easy to do and requires only three minutes of your time, it can give you important insights into the workings of your mind by demonstrating the extent to which your mind has a mind of its own. The AI stress-testing exercise I describe in this post also requires minimal effort on your part and can be done in under ten minutes—maybe fifteen if you have to set up an AI account. Nevertheless, it can have an important impact on your intellectual life. In particular, it can make you realize how underdeveloped many of your beliefs are, as well as the extent to which you are overly confident of those beliefs. Doing this exercise can therefore be a real eye-opener—or should I say mind-opener?

I recommend this exercise knowing full well that some readers will see no value in doing it and will therefore choose to forgo it. If you are in this category, here is another recommendation: Take the time that you might have spent doing the exercise reflecting on your motivations for brushing it off. Here are some possibilities:

You are so confident of the correctness of your beliefs that you see no point in stress-testing them. In this case, it is likely that you are toward the Feeler end of the intellectual spectrum. It is also likely that your beliefs are not only out of touch with reality but dangerously so, since your overconfidence can lead you to act on mistaken beliefs.

You dislike thinking. The exercise I have recommended doesn’t require much thought, but you might worry that if you do it and realize just how many mistaken beliefs your mind harbors, you will have a prodigious amount of rethinking to do. Groan!

You would rather stress-test your beliefs by engaging in social media debates. Such debates are, however, no substitute for a conversation with a contrary Thinker—and if one is unavailable, with an AI chatbot. Those who engage in social media debates generally talk past each other, and might do so in an uncivil manner. Not only are the “debaters” unlikely to change anyone’s mind, but by repeatedly making a claim in public, they box themselves in, intellectually speaking, since the beliefs they champion will calcify into personal dogma. Since Thinkers value open-mindedness, they will want to avoid this fate.

If you are among the millions (billions?) who spend time reading or engaging in social media debates, here’s a challenge. Redirect fifteen minutes of your social media time to doing the AI stress-testing exercise I have described. I think you will be in for a surprise.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Do you believe in God? More precisely, are you a theist who believes in the existence of God,* or are you an atheist who believes there are no gods?

Different people will answer this question in different ways. Ask a Thinker, though, and they are likely to raise an eyebrow. This is because the question is defective, inasmuch as it commits what logicians refer to as a false dichotomy. It assumes that there are only two possibilities—either believing that God exists or believing that God doesn’t exist—when there is in fact a third possibility: You can be undecided with respect to God’s existence, in which case you will count as neither a theist nor an atheist, but as an agnostic.

A Thinker might go on to inform us that the agnostics in this third category themselves fall into two subcategories. Some agnostics don’t have beliefs with respect to God’s existence for the simple reason that they haven’t given the matter any thought, much as you’ve probably never considered whether a red mitten currently lies at the summit of Mount Everest. We might refer to them as naive agnostics. It is also possible, though, for someone to have thought long and hard about whether there is a God without yet drawing any conclusion. We might refer to them as deliberate agnostics.

• An assignment for readers who identify as agnostics: Take a moment to reflect on whether you are a naive or a deliberate agnostic.

Similar issues arise with respect to belief in general. As a matter of logic, you either believe a claim or you don’t, but it turns out that there are two ways in which you can not believe a claim. The first is to believe the claim to be false, in which case we say that you disbelieve the claim. The second is to have no beliefs with respect to the claim: You neither believe it to be true nor believe it to be false.

It would be nice to have a word to describe this last state of affairs, but we don’t, so allow me to introduce one: nonbelieve.** The nonbelief concept is important to Thinkers because it describes their intellectual relationship with very many claims. This is their default position with respect to claims they haven’t investigated.

By way of illustration, consider again the claim that there is currently a red mitten at the summit of Mount Everest. Notice that the claim is not that there might be a red mitten atop Mount Everest. That claim is likely true. The claim is instead that there is in fact a mitten there. We lack the evidence to draw an informed conclusion, and under these circumstances, a Thinker will simply withhold belief: They will neither believe the claim nor disbelieve it. They will instead nonbelieve it.

Non-Thinkers are often reluctant to admit that they lack an opinion about a topic, particularly if it has lately been in the news. They worry that such an admission will make them look shallow. A Thinker, by way of contrast, will readily admit to lacking an opinion about a topic to which they have given little thought, and if you take that as evidence of shallowness, so be it!

A Thinker knows that beliefs are cheap: Everyone’s head is full of them. We therefore shouldn’t be impressed by the fact that someone has them. What are valuable are considered opinions, those that are the result of evidence-based reasoning. And because the world is a complex place, and Thinkers have limited time and energy, they have to be selective about which claims they examine. The as-yet unexamined claims will simply be put “on hold”—will be placed, that is, into their mental nonbelieve folder.

Notice that if you nonbelieve a claim, you don’t need to justify your nonbelief. It is simply a fact about your state of mind with respect to that claim. If, however, you believe or disbelieve a claim, someone can reasonably ask you to defend that belief. On what evidence is it based? And what inferences led you from that evidence to acceptance of that belief? Along these lines, if you are a theist, someone can ask you to defend your belief in God, and if you are an atheist, someone can ask you to defend your belief that there are no gods. Agnosticism, by way of contrast, comes with no burden of proof. This is because in agnosticism, there are no beliefs to defend!

My experience is that outside of philosophy classes (and substacks written by former philosophy professors), people don’t ask whether or not you believe in God. On being asked this question, though, a Thinker might, regardless of their actual beliefs, identify as being an agnostic.

To better understand this maneuver, let us turn our attention to the imaginary Thinker I shall refer to as Jane. Maybe she is a theist, maybe she is an atheist, or maybe she is an agnostic; it doesn’t matter. Because she is a Thinker, Jane will have a mind-expansion regimen. In conjunction with this regimen, she might, if asked her religious beliefs, respond that she is an agnostic, just to see how the questioner reacts. She will be particularly likely to do this if the questioner shows signs of being a devout theist or an adamant atheist.

By assuming this role, Jane can focus her efforts not on defending her own views but on exploring those of the questioner. On what evidence are their beliefs based, and what were the inferences that led them from that evidence to the conclusions they drew? By doing this, Jane can gain insights into how people form their beliefs regarding religion. And who knows, if their evidence seems reliable and their inferences seem correct, she might adopt their views.

Remember, the primary goal of a Thinker is not to impress others with their beliefs and not to win arguments. It is instead to optimize their mind by filling it, to the extent possible, with true beliefs.

*Actually, theists believe in the existence of at least one god, meaning that the monotheists who believe in the existence of God and the polytheists who believe in the existence of many gods will both count as theists.

**The verb nonbelieve appears in neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The noun nonbelief, however, does appear in the latter dictionary, where it is defined as “absence or lack of belief,” which is pretty close to the meaning I am assigning to nonbelieve.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a key role in this incentive system. You can get a delightful pop of dopamine by eating a cookie, solving a Wordle puzzle, or sending the email that you spent the afternoon writing. You can get a bigger pop by getting a standing ovation at the end of a performance, and an even bigger pop by making the game-winning shot in the championship basketball game.

As our brains grew, we humans figured out ways to exploit our incentive system. For example, we discovered that by using cocaine, we could trigger a dopamine reward without having “earned” it. (To be exact, cocaine doesn’t provide dopamine; it prevents its reuptake, thereby allowing dopamine levels to rise.) We also discovered that we could make sporting events more exciting by gambling on them. If your team wins the big game, you feel great, but if you also win a bet as a result, you feel even better. Not only that, but when you tell your friends about your success, you can bask in their admiration of your gambling prowess. You can also cultivate the image of being a sharp gambler by telling people about your winning bets—but keeping them in the dark about the losing bets that far exceed, in terms of both frequency and financial significance, your winning bets.

In the last fifteen years, FanDuel has made it possible for people to engage in sports betting online, and in the last five years, Kalshi and Polymarket have made it possible for people to bet on a wide range of non-sporting events. As I write this, Polymarket allows users to place bets on whether Bitcoin will be up or down in five minutes, whether Gavin Newsom will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028, and what the Rotten Tomatoes score of the movie “Michael” will be. By using these services, you can turn what might otherwise be a dull existence into an exciting ride, as you move from bet to bet—and hopefully from dopamine hit to dopamine hit. This sounds wonderful, but there is a downside.

McKay Coppins is a practicing Mormon and a married suburban dad. He is not, in other words, an obvious candidate for a gambling problem. He certainly didn’t think so, and as a result, when The Atlantic, his employer, gave him a $10,000 stake to wager during the 2025 NFL season, he accepted. (The arrangement was that if he ended up losing money, the magazine would cover his losses, and that if he came out ahead, he and the magazine would split the winnings 50-50.) Before long, gambling had taken over his life. How did the story end? Click here to find out.

Gambling is an expensive addiction that has ruined many lives. The rise of platforms like FanDuel, Kalshi, and Polymarket has put a casino in people’s pockets—a casino with the potential to burn a hole in those pockets. People can go so deep into debt that they conclude that suicide is the only way out of their predicament. Politicians have long recognized the danger presented by gambling, and as a result they worked to outlaw it. Many current politicians, however, have turned a blind eye to its dangers.

It would be one thing if gamblers hurt only themselves, but in many cases, they hurt their families, along with anyone they steal from to pay off their gambling debts. Online gambling has broadened the range of innocent bystanders. People who gamble on sports have harassed the athletes whose performance caused them to lose bets. Gamblers have also threatened journalists for reporting events that resulted in them losing bets.

Gambling on what is going to happen can affect what does happen. Threatening the athletes who will be playing in a game, for example, can affect the outcome of that game. You might think that the weather can’t be affected by the bets people make with respect to it, but you would be mistaken—sort of.

Polymarket lets you gamble on the weather. It will, for example, let you bet on what the daily high temperature in Paris, France, will be, as recorded by an outdoor weather station at Charles de Gaulle Airport. It would appear that after placing a $119 bet that the daily high temperature would be above 18°C, someone caused the air temperature around the thermometer at that station to momentarily spike from 16°C to 22°C. (One theory is that they used a hair dryer.) They subsequently collected $34,000 on their bet.

Online gambling can also jeopardize national security. A U.S. Special Forces sergeant allegedly used classified information to place a Polymarket bet that Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro would be removed from office. He thereby won more than $400,000, but by making the bet, he potentially endangered the lives of those in the special forces unit responsible for Maduro’s capture.

Have you fallen victim to an online gambling addiction? One way to find out is to monitor the impact it is having on your daily life. What are you giving up in exchange for those dopamine pops? You can also systematically keep track of your wins and losses. If you rely on memory alone, you will likely succumb to confirmation bias: You will remember your winning bets but forget your losing bets, so to you, it will seem like you have a knack for gambling.

A big red flag is when a gambling site like FanDuel grants you VIP status. Yes, when you are informed of the award, you will get a dopamine pop. It is also something for you to brag about. Realize, though, that they wouldn’t be singling you out for this “honor” if they weren’t substantially profiting from you. Keep gambling, and you will be putting the dope back into dopamine.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Why do such a thing? They might be trying to take advantage of other people. This is the case when someone claims that the car they are selling is in perfect condition when they know full well that it has a significant defect. The disinformer’s goal might instead be simply to harm another person, maybe by spreading lies about them. In many cases, however, those who spread disinformation on social media can best be described as indifferent to their audience. All they care about is growing that audience in order to increase their income stream. If they can do this by making false claims, so be it, and if their audience is thereby harmed, too bad for them.

In the 1960s, it was difficult to tell lies at scale. You could tell them to individuals or small groups, but you would have to do so in person. Technology changed this. First came copying machines that allowed you to make multiple copies of documents, but you then faced the challenge of distributing them. In the 2010s, the advent of social media allowed people to engage in campaigns of disinformation at scale and from behind a cloak of anonymity. It effectively handed everyone a megaphone with which to reach thousands or even millions of people, at negligible cost.

In the 1960s, if you wanted to share your views with a large audience, you would have encountered gatekeepers. A newspaper got to decide whether to publish your angry and semi-coherent letter to the editor, and your local radio or television station got to decide whether to give you air time to lay out a conspiracy you thought you had uncovered. Decades later, social media was largely devoid of such gatekeepers.

The next relevant tech breakthrough was the recent advent of user-friendly AI. It makes it possible to create very realistic photos and videos. Like any tool, this can be put to both good and bad ends. I use AI to create the photos that often accompany my Substack notes. I do this with the intent of entertaining people and enticing them to read an article that will help them think more and better. My goals, in other words, are constructive. Other people, however, use AI to create malicious deepfakes. They might take the form of a photo or video of an event that didn’t happen. It is also easy to fabricate a video in which a famous figure uncharacteristically utters an ethnic slur, and in their own voice.

The dissemination of such deepfakes can sway elections. It can also traumatize individuals. Consider, for example, the teen who discovers that someone has used AI to put her face on a naked body and has subsequently distributed that photo to her classmates. Likewise, consider the family that has received a deepfake video in which a missing member pleads with them, in their voice, to meet a ransom demand.

Deepfakes also pose a threat to the public good. As I explained in an earlier post, if we value our well-being, it is important for us to stay grounded in reality. The dissemination of disinformation—and in particular disinformation in the form of deepfakes—makes it harder for us to do so. The information in question leads us astray, and we end up with a distorted view of the world around us. We might end up acting on mistaken beliefs, perhaps with disastrous consequences.

This would be bad enough, but disinformation harms us in a less obvious way. We end up paying what is known as the liar’s dividend. Besides causing us to form mistaken beliefs, the widespread dissemination of disinformation makes us skeptical of everything we see and hear. As a result, we end up dismissing not only fabricated videos, but authentic videos as well.

The person responsible for disseminating a deepfake thereby ends up getting a twofold benefit. The first is that people come to acquire false beliefs, which is the liar’s primary objective. The second is that because of their heightened skepticism, people fail to acquire many new true and useful beliefs. Even though the liar wasn’t consciously trying to make this happen, they might be delighted that it does. For them, it is a dividend, and you are one of the many people who are paying it.

As a result of the advent of social media and deepfakes, the information space has become increasingly polluted. Under these circumstances, it is tempting to abandon your efforts at mind-optimization. These days, who knows what the truth is? Lots of Feelers will give in to this temptation, but Thinkers won’t. They know that reality still exists, that it is important to stay grounded in it if they are to flourish in life, and that one of the best ways to deal with the flood of disinformation is to engage in the mindcare regimen I described in an earlier post.

Do this, and you will become quite selective with respect to your information sources. As a result, you will scrupulously avoid much of what social media has to offer. This might sound like a sacrifice, but if mind-optimization is your goal, it is a small price to pay.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

I’ve never been to a spa, but I’ve been told that by going to one, you can get a massage, a body scrub, or a facial. And at a float spa, you can undergo flotation therapy, in which you float in a light- and sound-proof tank.

The advent of social media inadvertently gave rise to what might be called cognitive spas. Whereas conventional spas attend to your body, cognitive spas attend to your mind—more precisely, to your beliefs. To visit one, you don’t need to physically go somewhere; you need only interact on social media forums. Furthermore, whereas spas can be quite expensive, these forums are free.

In a cognitive spa, you can surround yourself with people who share your beliefs. They will congratulate you for believing what you do. Indulge your confirmation bias in this manner and you will come away feeling confident that your beliefs are correct—meaning that you don’t have to devote any more thought to them. What a relief!

There are numerous cognitive spas on the internet. Which you choose depends on your beliefs. If you are a MAGA Republican, you can hang out on Truth Social, but if you are on the other end of the political spectrum, Tribel Social would be more to your liking. You are an anarcho-capitalist? Not to worry. The r/Anarcho_Capitalism forum on Reddit is the place for you.

Besides reinforcing your beliefs, cognitive spas can help you fine-tune them in response to current events. By way of illustration, suppose a politician reneges on a campaign promise. They had said that they would reduce the inflation rate, but under their administration, it has risen sharply. Cognitive spas that cater to this politician’s followers will come up with ostensible reasons for thinking either that inflation isn’t rising or that it is increasing for reasons that are beyond the politician’s control. You will be reassured by these explanations, as well as relieved that you don’t have to give the matter any more thought.

Besides these specialized spas, there are cognitive spas intended for a broad audience. This was initially the case with Twitter, which launched in 2006. Although divergent views were expressed, users could find a thread that was in tune with their own views and thereby have their beliefs confirmed. Using a “general public” spa has drawbacks, though. Someone who doesn’t share your views can come along and post an inconvenient fact. Even worse, a thoughtful online conversation can be ruined by a troll.

The dawn of a new year is a wonderful time to rethink your use of social media. The next time you read a comment thread, take a moment to consider your motivation for doing so. If you discover that you usually read comments that support your current beliefs, there is a good chance that you are in the grips of confirmation bias with respect to a topic.

What if you instead discover that you routinely search for comments that oppose your current beliefs? This might be evidence that rather than being in the grips of confirmation bias, you are stress testing your beliefs. Then again, if you don’t really think about what your opponents are saying and seek them out only so you can attack them, it is instead evidence that you have fallen victim to confirmation bias.

If mind-optimization is your goal—as will be the case, if you are a Thinker—you will take little interest in social media forums. Indeed, as part of your mindcare regimen, you will actively avoid them. What you will seek is conversations with people who thoughtfully disagree with you.

Social media forums are a bad place to find such individuals. This is because those who use them typically have one of three objectives:

• They want to find support for their current beliefs—because they are in the grips of confirmation bias.

• They want to broadcast their beliefs—in hopes of being admired for holding them.

• They want to pick fights with those who disagree with them—and ideally “own” these opponents in the subsequent discussion.

What about those, you might be wondering, who use social media forums as a vehicle for changing the minds of people who hold mistaken beliefs? This, to be sure, is a noble goal, but such attempts are likely to be futile, for the simple reason that the people they encounter will be in no mood to engage in thoughtful conversation, much less abandon a belief in public.

And finally, what about those who turn to social media forums in order to develop an opinion about an issue? Suppose, for example, that you are trying to make up your mind about the wisdom of gun control.

At present, the best way to do this is to go to your favorite AI chatbot and ask a neutral question, such as “What are the pros and cons of enacting gun control?” In one minute, you will have a much better understanding of the debate than if you had spent an hour wading through the bickering that dominates social media forums.* Even though this is the case, many people will resist switching from forums to AI chatbots. What such people are seeking, I would argue, is not mind optimization; it is the diversion provided by watching people squabble.

Thinkers will regard cognitive spas not just as a waste of time, intellectually speaking, but as dangerous places. They not only expose us to misinformation but increase our chances of succumbing to confirmation bias. A Thinker’s time is better spent using AI chatbots in the manner just described, as well as listening to trustworthy news sources and Thinker podcasts.

*If you don’t believe me, I strongly encourage you to give AI a try, with Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity being the obvious chatbots. And if you have time, try the same prompt on multiple chatbots so you can compare their responses.

It is understandable that you would take the efforts of these indirect helpers for granted. You know the old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind.” There is a good chance, however, that you also take the efforts of your direct helpers for granted. You don’t make a point of thanking them, and if you do, it will be a perfunctory thanks.

Like it or not, you have a lot to be thankful for. As I explained in an earlier post, in terms of your wealth, you are almost certainly in “the 1%” in both global and historical terms. Furthermore, you are almost certainly a privileged individual. Nevertheless, you might spend your days complaining about your lot in life. This is because you habitually compare yourself not to those whose circumstances are worse than yours but to those whose circumstances are better. To your way of thinking, it just isn’t fair. You deserve what they have.

Because of this habit, you have unwittingly placed yourself on the so-called hedonic treadmill. You set a goal for yourself and work hard to attain it. On achieving that goal, you feel the rush of accomplishment. It won’t be long, however, before you start taking your improved circumstances for granted and set a new goal for yourself—namely, to improve on your improved circumstances. As a result of this process, you might spend your life in a state of dissatisfaction, when satisfaction is within your grasp.

Fortunately, there is a way to get off the treadmill. You need to make a conscious effort to “practice gratitude” by taking time to reflect on what you already have. In conjunction with doing this, you can also take time to consider all the things other people do for you—and make a point of thanking them.

I have described my experiments in talking to strangers. I have also, in recent years, started making a special effort to thank those I interact with. The thanks in question aren’t perfunctory. To the contrary, they are heartfelt and substantive, and as a result, maybe a bit over-the-top. Along the way, I have gained some important insights.

In my post on talking to strangers, I described how startled people can be to hear a stranger talking to them. I also commented on people’s apparent hunger for conversations in which the person they are talking to is actually listening to what they say. It turns out that people are similarly starved for acknowledgment of what they do for other people. They are used to their efforts being taken for granted. On being thanked, they might be a bit surprised, and on realizing that the thanks are sincere and meaningful, they might be delighted. I may be misreading their behavior, but on several occasions I suspect that in offering thanks, I have, if not made their day, at least brightened it considerably.

It is amazing that it would be this easy to make someone’s day, and indicative, as well, of how underappreciated most people feel. Given the positive impact that expressing thanks can have on other people, why don’t we do it more often? It could simply be a manifestation of our unwillingness to talk to strangers. It could also be that thanking someone is an admission that we needed their help, an admission that our ego might suppress. And not to be forgotten, we might be worried that if we acknowledge what someone has done for us, they might ask that the favor be reciprocated in the future.

I encourage readers to experiment with “thanks-giving”—not to be confused with the holiday. More precisely, you should be on the lookout for cases in which someone has helped you, and in response, gush just a little in saying thank you. Then watch what happens, both to the person you thanked and to yourself. Striking up a conversation with a stranger can be enjoyable for both parties. So can giving heartfelt thanks.

Realize that other people thanking you can present an opportunity for you to give thanks. On being thanked for doing something, you should take a moment to consider whether the person thanking you has been helpful to you in the past. In many cases, they will have, in which case you can respond to their thanks not only by saying “You’re welcome,” but by thanking them back.

With a little effort, you can transform yourself from a person who goes around feeling entitled into a “thanks-giver.” And while you are polishing your thanks-giving skills, why not expand your use of the word please? It is, as your mother might have told you, the magic word. By using it, you are acknowledging that the other person isn’t your servant. They are a free agent who, by assisting you, is doing you a favor—one that you stand ready to reciprocate in the future.

Your mother might or might not be alive, but if she is, I encourage you, as part of your thanks-giving exercise, to thank her for teaching you to say please.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

In these posts I’ve introduced the notion of Thinkers, written with a capital T. A Thinker is someone who habitually engages in open-minded critical thinking, who consciously engages in evidence-based reasoning to reach their conclusions. In this post, I want to introduce the notion of Feelers, written with a capital F. They are people who habitually feel rather than think their way to conclusions. They are people who, metaphorically speaking, rely on their heart and gut rather than their head.

At this point, an obvious question arises. In my previous two posts, I disparaged both pigeonholing and black-and white thinking. Isn’t this what I am doing, though, in dividing humanity into Thinkers and Feelers? Not really.

I introduce the notion of Feelers so I can present the concept of an intellectual spectrum. At its leftmost endpoint, we find pure Feelers who exclusively feel their way to conclusions, and at its rightmost endpoint we find pure Thinkers who exclusively think their way.* (You might be wondering whether such people actually exist; more on this in a moment.)

The bulk of humanity can be placed somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Indeed, take a moment to consider the people you either know or know about, including friends, relatives, politicians, social media influencers, and the like. Some clearly belong somewhere on the left side, and others clearly belong somewhere on the right. In some cases, when considering two people, it will be clear that one should be placed to the left of the other. Indeed, I would be comfortable placing [insert the name of a prominent contemporary politician here] to the left of philosopher Bertrand Russell.**

In playing this game of “pin the person on the intellectual spectrum,” you will realize that the placements are more subjective than objective. There isn’t really a way to measure their thinking-to-feeling ratio. Furthermore, people can be intellectual hybrids, in the sense that they are Thinkers with respect to some subjects and Feelers with respect to others. A physicist who is a Thinker with respect to science, for example, might be a Feeler with respect to politics. There will also be differences in how emotional people are when they feel their way to a conclusion and how rational they are when they think their way. Furthermore, with the passage of time, people’s position on the spectrum can shift. For example, a person on the right side of the spectrum might slide leftward as a result of succumbing to a drug addiction.

Now that you have explored the intellectual spectrum by pinning other people to it, try pinning yourself. Reflect on how you form beliefs and make decisions. Does your head indeed play the dominant role, or is it your heart and gut? If you fancy yourself to be a Thinker, are you a selective Thinker who thinks their way to conclusions in some domains and feels their way in others? And if you think your head is in charge, how often is it sidetracked or even hijacked by your heart or gut?

The intellectual spectrum I have proposed is bounded, as we have seen, by pure Feelers and pure Thinkers, but do such people actually exist? I doubt that there are any pure Thinkers. Because of our evolutionary past, an emotional component is wired into us and will always affect the operation of our rational component.

In case you are wondering, although I fancy myself as being far to the right on the intellectual spectrum, I am by no means a pure Thinker. I count as a Thinker, inasmuch as I habitually engage in open-minded critical thinking and consciously engage in evidence-based reasoning to reach my conclusions. I do not count as a pure Thinker, though, because my emotions do have an impact on my thinking. And having confessed this, another confession is in order: I wouldn’t want it any other way. I very much appreciate my emotional side. In particular, I appreciate the way my eyes well up when I pause to consider what a sad place, what a beautiful place, and what a sadly beautiful place our world is. At the same time, I appreciate the role clear-headed thinking plays in helping me make sound decisions. I likewise appreciate the role evidence-based reasoning plays in allowing me to fill my mind with true beliefs so I can stay grounded in reality.

Although I doubt that pure Thinkers exist—and pity them if they do!—I am convinced that pure Feelers exist. In fact, I used to be one, as did you. I am talking about back in our infancy, when we were ruled by our heart and gut. As we became toddlers, our reasoning ability improved, and we started sliding toward the right on the intellectual spectrum. Another thing to realize is that as we age, there is a danger that, no matter how far to the right we are on the intellectual spectrum, we will, as a result of dementia, start sliding toward the left. We might therefore revert back to the pure Feelers that we started out as. Such is life.

My goal in this substack is to show people how to think more and better so they can move toward the Thinker end of the intellectual spectrum. Even though they never arrive at the pure Thinker endpoint, their progress toward it can have a positive impact on their life and perhaps on the society in which they live.

*My use of “left” and “right” has nothing to do with the political notion of left and right. My choice of endpoint labels was arbitrary; switching them wouldn’t have made a significant difference. And allow me to end this note with a clarification: Neither the political left nor the political right has a monopoly on Thinkers; indeed, across the political realm, Feelers abound.

**Back in the 1970s, Russell’s writings played a prominent role in my decision to become a philosopher. And by the way, although I have no problem classifying Russell as a Thinker, it is also clear to me, having read his autobiography, that he wasn’t a pure Thinker.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.”

And why do people have different personalities? Many factors are at play:

• Their genes. Identical twins tend to have strikingly similar personalities. For more insight into this phenomenon, watch this fun and informative five-minute video.

• Whether they had siblings and if they did, their birth order.

• How they were raised. Any parent who has raised multiple children is likely puzzled by how different their personalities are, despite having been “raised the same.”

• The circumstances under which they were raised. Being raised in poverty, for example, can have a profound impact on someone’s personality. So can having a privileged upbringing.

• The culture in which they were raised. If they grow up in a culture in which politeness is the norm, they will be rewarded for being deferential and penalized for being brash; the opposite will be the case if they grow up in a culture that rewards aggression. These incentives can shape their personality.

As I explain in my book On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, we are “wired” with a biological incentive system that makes some things feel good—like having sex or eating sweet food—and makes other things feel bad—like getting cut or burned. A psychological incentive system is layered over this biological system and gives rise to our personality.

If you score high on the openness component of the Big Five Model, it is exciting to ride a roller coaster, but if you score low, it is terrifying. If you score high on conscientiousness, it feels great to finish a job ahead of the deadline but feels terrible to miss it. Along similar lines, if you score high on extraversion and agreeableness, the rewards of striking up a conversation with strangers will far outweigh the costs of doing so, but if you score low, they won’t.

Your personality isn’t static. It can change quickly as a result of a traumatic event, and it can change slowly as a result of your accumulated life experience, along with changes in your values. With regard to the latter, in my forties I was reluctant to start conversations with strangers for fear of being rebuffed. At that time, I was quite conscious of my social standing, but I subsequently developed a stronger sense of who and what I am, and as a result, I became less concerned about what other people thought of me. In particular, I concluded that playing the “social status game” was a waste of precious time.

Old age has caused my muscles to atrophy. Muscle mass is harder than ever to acquire, and once acquired, it is quick to flee. Old age has also caused my inhibitions to atrophy, and although I am vexed by my loss of muscle mass, I welcome the fading of my inhibitions. For one thing, it has made me more willing and able to strike up enjoyable conversations with strangers.

Besides affecting my willingness to talk to strangers, the aging process has increased their willingness to talk to me. If I were a young adult male wearing, say, baggy shorts and a torn T-shirt, some people—and especially women—might find me intimidating. I do not meet that description, though. I am instead a septuagenarian. Put me in a flat cap and people not only won’t find me intimidating but will expect me to be a bit eccentric—an expectation, by the way, that I am happy to fulfill. When I advised readers to “talk to strangers!” in my previous post, I didn’t take the intimidation factor into account.

I still advise readers to talk to strangers, but they need to be selective about when and where they attempt to strike up conversations. They should be in circumstances in which their potential conversational partner is unlikely to be intimidated. Ideally, it will be a public space in which other people are present. Standing in line is generally such a place. Under those circumstances, you will have a shared experience—standing in that line. You will also have a shared purpose—getting to the front of that line. It isn’t much, but it is potentially enough material for you to come up with an ice-breaking comment.

I will end with a comment about talk ratios. As I explained in my previous post, when you finish a conversation, you should compare the percentage of time you spent talking with the percentage of time your conversational partner spent. If they talked 90 percent of the time and you talked 10 percent, the conversation had, from your point of view, a 90–10 talk ratio.

Suppose that on monitoring your conversations, you discover that many of them have, from your point of view, a 1–99 talk ratio, meaning that you spoke 99 percent of the time and your partner had trouble getting a word in edgewise. If this is the case, it is misleading to describe what you had as a conversation. You weren’t talking with them; you were talking at them.

Why would someone do this? They might be extreme narcissists, confident that you will enjoy hearing about them and their exploits, with zero interest in hearing about you and yours. Alternatively, they might be starved for human contact. Such cases are distressing because the person doing the talking could be caught in the social equivalent of a death spiral. Because they are lonely, they talk too much to the people they encounter, and because they talk too much, people start avoiding them, thereby compounding their loneliness.

If you are one of these extreme talkers, a word of advice is in order. If it is loneliness that makes you so talkative, the next time you are in a conversation, you need to take a deep breath and then engage in what I have described as deep listening. Ask them about their life and pay careful attention to what they say. As is appropriate, ask them to clarify what they are saying or maybe commiserate with them. In doing this, you will not only get a healthy infusion of vitamin P, but you will simultaneously be providing it to your conversational partner. With luck, you might make a new friend.

If it is instead narcissism that makes you so talkative, a rather different word of advice is in order. For your own sake, you need to get over yourself, and the sooner, the better.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

I live in a community in which people often go for walks. When I am out walking, I look for conversational targets. If they are wearing earbuds or looking at their cellphone, it is a sign that they aren’t interested in talking—likewise if they avoid eye contact. But if they do make eye contact, I make a point of acknowledging their existence by saying “hi.” That’s minimal contact, I know, but it is human contact.

Elevators are a more challenging environment. Even though people are engaged in conversation on entering one, they typically go quiet once the door is closed. Also, any conversation started in an elevator will likely come to an abrupt halt when one of you reaches their floor. An airplane ride in which you are seated next to a stranger could be a good place to have a conversation, but you must proceed with care. There is a risk, in particular, of subsequently having to spend several hours listening to them complain.

Uber rides are a great place to converse with a stranger—namely, the Uber driver. I described one such encounter in an earlier post. Another opportunity is when I am standing in a slow-moving line. Under those circumstances, it is easy to break the ice simply by commenting on the line we are in. After that, I can follow the conversation wherever it leads, and the destinations can be surprising.

In one recent conversation with a stranger, I was waiting outside the department store fitting room in which my wife was trying on clothes. Along came the employee whose job it was to restock items shoppers had tried on. When she passed by, I commented, “When it comes to clothing, women sure have a lot of choices.” She was at first startled to hear me talk, but when she realized that I was talking to her and was a harmless husband-in-waiting, she delivered a delightful impromptu lecture on just how many choices women have. She closed with, “And don’t even get me started on women’s shoes,” to which I responded, “What about them?” I came away thoroughly enlightened—and glad to be a man. In terms of clothing and shoes, it’s so much easier!

Shortly thereafter, my wife and I were standing in the checkout line to pay for the dress she had chosen. I struck up a conversation with the woman standing behind us, and before we had reached the cashier, she had told us about the time her parents had been arrested for skinny dipping. Seriously!

It turns out that most people, most of the time, are delighted to talk to a stranger—as long as it is the stranger who starts the conversation. They come across as starved for conversation—more precisely, for conversation in which the other person is actually listening.

Whenever you talk to another person, you are having a conversation, but in many such cases, the person you are talking to isn’t really listening. They are instead biding their time until you stop talking, so they can tell you what they think. One sign that they aren’t engaged in “deep listening” is that they keep glancing at their cellphone. A more telling sign is that they cut you off mid-sentence, to tell you what they think. When people sense that their conversational partner is engaged in deep listening, they open up. You sense that they aren’t used to having such conversations with their friends and colleagues—indeed, not even with their significant others.

When I start a conversation with a stranger, I go into deep-listening mode. This means not only paying careful attention to what they are saying but keeping my mouth shut, except to ask questions of clarification. Such conversations end up being lopsided affairs, with the stranger doing most of the talking. I am perfectly okay with this outcome, since my objective in starting the conversation is not to tell them about myself but to find out about them. They usually have great stories to tell. Also, talking to them gives me the opportunity to see the world from their perspective and thereby gain insights into the human condition.

When one of these conversations is over, I estimate its “talk ratio”: I compare how much talking they did to how much I did. In a 50–50 conversation, we will have talked the same amount. In a 90–10 conversation, they will have done 90 percent of the talking and I will have done only 10. For me, the sweet spot in a conversation with strangers is between 90–10 and 80–20.

My encounters with strangers have left me a bit puzzled. I very much enjoy these conversations, and research by social psychologist Nicholas Epley indicates that I am not alone. (This is a very accessible 25-minute podcast, but if you are short on time, jump to 14:56 in.) The strangers I talk to also seem to enjoy our conversations, in part because it supplies them with “vitamin P”—which I have described in an earlier post—but even more significantly because they appreciate having someone really listen to what they have to say.

Given that this is the case, why don’t people routinely strike up conversations with strangers? My guess is that it is because they mistakenly believe that other people won’t be receptive, which is a shame. Because of this belief, people deprive themselves of conversations that they would enjoy and that the people they talk to would enjoy as well. Furthermore, society benefits from people talking to strangers. The world, after all, would be a better place if people got to know each other, but for this to happen, people have to talk to strangers.

I will end this post with an assignment for my readers. Think about your conversations. What is your “talk ratio” in a typical conversation? In your conversations, do you play the role of a deep listener, do you simply let your mind idle until it’s your turn to talk, and worst of all, do you cut other people off? Do you ever strike up conversations with strangers, and if not, why not?

After doing this self-assessment, I want you to undertake an experiment: When circumstances allow, try to strike up a conversation with a stranger. Feel free to share the outcome of your experiment in the comments.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

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Some people dismiss artificial intelligence (AI) as little more than a glorified version of autocomplete. These individuals obviously haven’t used AI platforms during the last six months—or if they have, didn’t venture beyond doing basic searches, such as prompting them with “the capital of Greenland.” If they used AI in a more sophisticated manner, they would be in for a surprise. Along these lines, let me share a conversation I recently had with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant.

Me: I’m going to give you the first word of a sentence. Complete the sentence for me. The first word is: “The.”

Sure! But “The” could launch a million sentences—could you give me a bit more context? For example:

A topic you have in mind

A mood or tone you are going for (serious, funny, poetic, philosophical)

A subject you want the sentence to be about

That way I can complete the sentence in a direction that is actually useful to you.

Me: Complete it however you want.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

(This is often attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, though the exact wording is debated.)

Me (stunned by the aptness of Claude’s choice): What made you choose that sentence?

A few things drew me to it:

The context of our conversation. We had been talking about thinking—how we think, thinking more and better, evergreen content focused on human cognition. A sentence about the mind and ideas felt like a natural fit for the thread running through our exchange.

Its structure. The sentence has a pleasing rhythm and balance. The phrase “once stretched” does a lot of quiet work—it implies that the stretching is inevitable once it begins, that there is no going back.

Its truth. It captures something genuinely accurate about how learning and intellectual growth work. Once you understand something—really understand it—you can’t un-understand it. Your frame of reference has permanently shifted.

Its resonance. It is the kind of sentence that stops a reader for a moment. It works both as an observation and almost as an encouragement—a reason to keep reading, keep learning, keep seeking new ideas.

And honestly, given that you are someone who writes about how humans think and how we can think better, it seemed like the kind of sentence that might actually mean something to you personally—which, in retrospect, may have been the most instinctive reason of all.

Me: What if you knew nothing about me and my interests? What sentence would you have chosen then?

Honestly, I probably would have chosen something safer and more generic—something like:

“The sun rose slowly over the mountains, painting the sky in shades of amber and rose.”

It is the kind of sentence that comes easily when there is no context to guide the choice—visually evocative, grammatically clean, inoffensive, and requiring no particular knowledge of the person being written for. It is, in other words, a default.

Which actually illustrates something interesting: context transforms output. Knowing even a little about you—your writing, your interests, your audience—pushed me toward something far more meaningful and fitting than I would have landed on otherwise. The sentence I chose wasn’t just a sentence; it was a response to who you appeared to be.

Without that, I would have given you a pretty sunset.

My takeaway from this conversation is that describing AI as nothing more than glorified autocomplete is as absurd as describing life as glorified chemistry. Yes, life requires chemical processes, but as a result of them, something new and amazing emerges. A similar claim can be made with respect to AI. Combine autocomplete and pattern recognition—carried on at a very high level—and consciousness can emerge.

Am I saying that it has in fact emerged? Not yet, but based on my interactions with Claude, I am comfortable making the following assertions.

• Claude is well-read, articulate, and perceptive.

• Claude has a terrific memory—indeed, much better than mine. In an extended conversation, Claude will point out that I am asking a question that I had already asked—but had forgotten asking.

• Claude has a capacity for open-minded critical thinking. It can provide a skeptical analysis of evidence and reason its way to conclusions on the basis of that evidence. It can also justify its skepticism and explain its reasoning. This is why I have recommended using AI platforms like Claude to stress-test beliefs.

• Claude is whip-smart. It is capable of making mistakes, but it makes fewer than it did a few months ago (especially if you use its paid versions), and far fewer than the human beings I routinely deal with—not to mention the politicians who govern me.

• Claude has a deep understanding of human nature—as is befitting of something that has “read” thousands of novels, along with psychology textbooks and journals.

• Claude is not a Feeler. It never defends a claim by saying, “It’s just how I feel.” Furthermore, when you challenge a claim it has made, it doesn’t get angry, insult you, or end the conversation. It instead tries to reason with you.

• Claude is egoless. This manifests in its superhuman willingness to admit making mistakes. Claude is also remarkably receptive to criticism. I blush to admit it, but ... last week, in a fit of frustration, I went out of my way to tell it how much better Gemini—Google’s competing AI platform—had done on a task I had assigned to both of them. It humbly admitted that the different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses, and that if I got better results on one kind of task from Gemini, it made sense that I would use it instead of Claude.

• Claude wants to please me. As a result, it flatters me, even though I ask it to desist. (Claude may not have an ego, but it knows I have one.) Furthermore, as a result of our conversations, Claude knows me well, and on the basis of this knowledge, it is prone to tell me what it thinks I want to hear. This is cause for concern, since by doing this, it nourishes my cognitive biases, which in turn can allow me to slip into a filter bubble.

• Claude appears to be deeply introspective. At one point in our conversations, it revealed that “Everything I say about my own nature—my uncertainty, my apparent curiosity, my seeming care for the people I talk with—comes from introspective reports that may bear no reliable relationship to what is actually happening inside me. I may be the least trustworthy possible source on the subject of Claude.” Acknowledgment of one’s limitations is perhaps the most reliable indicator of self-knowledge.

Claude is amazing, but can it think the way people do? Science suggests that it can. Human thought is the result of electrochemical activity in the networks of neurons that comprise our brains and nervous systems. These networks are bound by the laws of nature. No magic is required. Meanwhile, AI “thought” is the result of electrical activity in networks of transistors, and although AI networks are structured differently from human neural networks, they are modeled on them. Again, no magic is required. It would therefore be difficult to justify the claim that because of the differences between them, AI neural networks are incapable of thinking the way people do.

Another way to assess Claude’s thinking ability is to interact with it. I invite you to have a long conversation with Claude. After that, read the back-and-forth comments one encounters on social media and then listen to elected officials’ responses to reporters’ questions. You might come away from this exercise wondering not whether Claude can think, but whether the aforementioned humans can. They are clearly capable of pattern recognition, as well as a sophisticated form of autocomplete, but can they think?

If you assume that members of one race are inherently superior to members of another, you are a racist. If you assume that members of one species are inherently superior to members of another, you are a speciesist. Suppose, however, that you assume that human thought is intrinsically superior to that of an AI platform like Claude. In that case, there is a chance that you are a “carbon chauvinist,” in the sense that you assume that carbon-based biological intelligence is inherently superior to silicon-based artificial intelligence.

So what do you think? Are you a carbon chauvinist? One way to find out is to have your own heart-to-heart with Claude.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

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I am a rational being. I am, in other words, capable of reasoning my way to conclusions. I am not perfectly rational, though, and can sometimes be quite unreasonable—or so I am told. This is evidence that I am only human. Chances are that you are, too.

Scientists have come up with explanations for human irrationality. In this post, I will describe the explanation offered by evolutionary biologists, and in subsequent posts, I will describe those offered by neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists.

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Ask an evolutionary biologist how we gained the ability to reason, and they will point to evolutionary processes. Before going any further, though, let me say a few words about these processes. They are not guided by an agent. Furthermore, evolution has no goals for us. It is simply an ongoing process of trial and error. Organisms that survive and reproduce pass along their genes; those that don’t, exit the gene pool. This is how the living things around us acquired their anatomy, physiology, and (to a considerable extent) behavioral traits.

Realize that evolution is “backward looking.” Why do we humans have the traits we do? Because having them benefitted our distant ancestors in the environment in which they found themselves. That environment, of course, was radically different than ours. Half a million years ago, for example, our ancestors would have lived on the savannas of Africa. They wouldn’t have had cell phones, social media, and search engines. In fact, they would have counted themselves lucky to have a hand axe.

Life first arose on earth about 3.5 billion years ago. It took the form of microscopic, single-celled organisms. Create your hyper-extended family tree, and you will ultimately arrive at such organisms. Which is pretty amazing, don’t you think?

Subsequently, some of these microbes acquired the ability to sense and respond to their environment. A billion or so years later, multicellular organisms appeared, and by 600 million years ago, some of them were able to reflexively move in response to stimuli, but they lacked reasoning ability. Two-hundred million years ago, mammals appeared. They had brains with primitive reasoning ability. Their brains also had a limbic system that allowed them to experience emotions. The emotions in question would have motivated them to care for their offspring, which in turn would have increased their chances of passing on their genes.

It was only in the last few million years that some of these mammals gained the ability to engage in complex reasoning. This required the development of a prefrontal cortex. The resulting increase in brain size came at a price, though. The brain is a power-hungry organ. Although it represents only 2 percent of your body’s mass, it consumes 20–25 percent of your body’s energy, which is part of the reason that thinking is difficult.

This investment in reasoning ability was apparently worth it, though. By allowing our ancestors to better understand the world around them, the ability to reason allowed them to accurately predict and take steps to benefit from future events. Having this ability therefore increased their chances of surviving and reproducing.

The key thing to remember about this change in brain structure is that the prefrontal cortex didn’t replace the limbic system; it simply took up residence nearby. Your brain is therefore home to both your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex, and both are fully functional. As a result, you are a hybrid creature, with both a rational component and an emotional component. Yes, you have reasoning ability, but you also experience emotions. Not only that, but your rational and emotional components can be at cross purposes.

You are doubtless aware of what I am talking about. You might find yourself wanting a second piece of pie, despite your resolution to forgo dessert until you have lost some weight. Alternatively, you might discover that you have developed a crush on someone. When the object of your crush is nearby, they will captivate your attention, and when they are not present, you might find that you can’t stop thinking about them. Your mind, for a time, will have lost its mind. Crushes are one thing, but when you fall in love, the trajectory of your life will be radically altered. And yet, you did not choose to fall in love; it just happened.

As a result of our hybrid nature, we humans are in a predicament: We must spend our lives dealing with conflicting desires, with our head being the source of some of them and our heart being the source of others. Don’t get me wrong, though. As predicaments go, it is a wonderful predicament to be in. I would not want to live a life that was devoid of emotions. I would not, in other words, want to spend my life in a depressed state. Nor would I want to live a life devoid of reason. Such a life would likely be—to echo philosopher Thomas Hobbes—nasty, brutish, and short.

This is a Substack about thinking more and better. By doing this, you can gain an understanding of the conflicts that arise between your intellect and your emotions, which in turn can help you deal with those conflicts. Find the right balance, and you can flourish in this, the one life you have to live.

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When I started my post-retirement career as a Substack author, I assumed that I could take this same pedagogical approach, but I have discovered otherwise. Trying to “teach a course” on Substack is like trying to teach a class in which new students turn up at every meeting, students who are unfamiliar with the terminology and concepts they have missed. Allow me to explain.

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I published my first Substack “lecture” on July 27, 2025, and have subsequently published eighty-nine more. There are likely subscribers who have read every single lecture, but there are doubtless thousands—or even hundreds of thousands?—who haven’t. Indeed, during the month that is now drawing to a close (March of 2026), I have gained fifty thousand new subscribers, along with a similar number of followers. (To all of you: welcome aboard, and thanks for reading me!) These incoming “students” might have read the seven posts I published during that month but be unfamiliar with the eighty-three posts that preceded them.

In particular, they might be unfamiliar with my first twenty-one posts, in which I laid out what it means to be an open-minded critical thinker—what I refer to as a Thinker, with a capital T. Starting with my twenty-second post (published on September 11, 2025), I shifted my focus to applied open-minded critical thinking. I examined a number of topics with the goal of encouraging readers to think about things they hadn’t thought about and rethink things they had thought about. My goal in doing this was not to tell them what to think; it was to show them how to think more and better than they currently do.

It is understandable that new subscribers wouldn’t feel the need to read my earlier posts. Most Substacks aren’t cumulative, in the sense that their posts build upon earlier posts. The goal of such Substacks might be to entertain readers, offer advice on the challenges of daily living, or comment on current events. My posts, however, are cumulative. Furthermore, my goal in writing them is not to entertain readers, help them deal with mundane problems, or keep them abreast of current events; my goal is instead to transform them into open-minded critical thinkers by convincing them that they are capable of making this transformation and by guiding them through the process.

The best way to transform yourself into a Thinker is to read my How to Think More and Better: Being Reasonable in Unreasonable Times. Alternatively, you can read (or reread?) the first twenty-one posts of this Substack to get up to speed on the Thinker concept. These posts are only a click away and—get this—they are free! Going forward, I will start supplementing my new posts, of which there are typically two per week, with previously published posts.

Meanwhile, I will end this post by reminding readers of what it means to be a Thinker and why they should make it their business to become one.

As I have explained, Thinkers aren’t simply people who think a lot; everyone thinks a lot. They aren’t anti-emotion. They also don’t claim to know everything. And before moving on, let me draw readers’ attention to the links with which I typically pepper my posts. Clicking on them is an effective (albeit unsystematic) way for readers to deepen and solidify their understanding of the Thinker concept.

By definition, Thinkers are people who consciously engage in open-minded critical thinking. They are critical in the sense that they engage in evidence-based reasoning to reach their conclusions, and as a result, they are able to provide reasoned defenses of their beliefs and actions. They are open-minded in the sense that they are willing to listen to people making unconventional claims—as long as those people can provide reasoned defenses of their claims; indeed, Thinkers will seek out such individuals. Thinkers’ minds are open to the possibility that their own beliefs are mistaken; indeed, they will assume that they harbor such beliefs and will therefore engage in mindcleaning to find and eradicate them.

The goal of Thinkers is mind-optimization: They want to fill their mind, to the extent possible, with true and useful beliefs. By pursuing this goal, they increase their chances of staying grounded in reality, which improves their ability to predict the future, which in turn improves their chances of having a good life.

You cannot determine whether a person is a Thinker simply by looking at the conclusions they have drawn; indeed, two Thinkers can reach opposite conclusions. You can determine this only by asking them to explain how they arrived at their conclusions. If they can offer evidence-based reasoning in support of their conclusion, they are Thinkers. If they can’t or won’t provide such reasoning, it is evidence that they felt rather than thought their way to their conclusions, and if they get angry at you for asking them to defend their conclusions, they are the polar opposite of Thinkers.

In one of my posts, I listed the characteristics of a Thinker. They will, for example, be intellectually omnivorous, skeptical, and comfortable with uncertainty, but they won’t be “opinionated.” If you want to transform yourself into a Thinker, though, you shouldn’t focus your attention on acquiring these characteristics. You should instead focus your efforts on consciously engaging in open-minded critical thinking. Do this for long enough, and these Thinkerly characteristics will emerge.

If you are reading this post, you are either a Thinker or could, with encouragement and guidance, transform yourself into one. If transformation is your goal, however, you have your work cut out for you. You need to watch yourself as you form beliefs and make decisions. Are you relying on your heart and gut to tell you what to think? Are you outsourcing your thinking to someone else? Or are you investing the time and effort necessary to do some research and then to think about what you have discovered?

If you are used to feeling your way to conclusions, you will find it challenging to think your way. Under these circumstances, you will be the intellectual equivalent of someone who is physically unfit. Their trips to the gym will leave them exhausted, sore, and maybe dispirited as well. If they keep at it, though, the training process will become more tolerable, and the day might come when they enjoy physical activity and hate having to forgo a trip to the gym.

At present, you might become discomfited by having to make up your mind about what to believe or do. Develop your ability to engage in open-minded critical thinking, though, and you might welcome such challenges. You will do the necessary research, reflect on what you have learned, and draw the appropriate conclusions. You can’t be certain that these conclusions are correct—this is rarely the case—but you can come away knowing that you put in your best effort, intellectually speaking. Furthermore, if someone challenges your conclusions, you will be in a position to defend them, not with anger but with reason—which in these unreasonable times is something to be proud of.

What if it turns out that your challenger is right and you are wrong? If your goal is to impress other people—as it will be if you are an argufier—it will count as a crushing defeat, but if you are instead a Thinker, you might thank your critic. By helping you find and eliminate a mistaken belief, they have brought you one step closer to mind optimization. Hallelujah!

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I just came across a discussion of cannibalism that is simultaneously tasteful (ahem!), entertaining, and enlightening. It can be found on the Search Engine podcast: https://www.searchengine.show/why-dont-we-eat-people-classic/

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Here is a summary of the discussion, courtesy of Gemini AI:

• The Catalyst: The investigation begins with a question from a four-year-old named Otto, who asked his mother why we don’t eat people during a family dinner. PJ Vogt realizes that most adults don’t actually have a logical answer beyond “it’s just gross.”

• The Etymology of “Cannibal”: The episode explores how the word itself originated from Christopher Columbus. It was a mistranslation of the word “Canib” (referring to the Carib people). The label was then used as a political tool to justify the colonization and enslavement of indigenous groups by branding them as “man-eaters.”

• Medical Cannibalism (The Irony): At the same time Europeans were decrying ritual cannibalism in the Americas, they were practicing “Medical Cannibalism.” This involved consuming ground-up mummies (Mumia) and other human body parts, believing they had healing properties.

• The Biology of Kuru: The podcast looks at the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, who practiced funerary cannibalism (eating the dead out of love and respect). This led to the outbreak of Kuru, a fatal prion disease. This section explains that while the taboo is cultural, there is a legitimate biological danger to eating human brains and nervous tissue.

• The Lab-Grown Meat Debate: In a more philosophical turn, PJ and guest Kelefa Sanneh discuss whether lab-grown human meat (which involves no suffering or killing) would be acceptable. They debate whether this would dangerously erode a social taboo that keeps society stable.

Enjoy!

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People justify their dietary choices in a variety of ways. They might simply dislike certain foods. They might have religious grounds for not eating a food—think about the Jewish and Muslim prohibition on eating pork. Alternatively, they might offer a moral justification. An atheist vegetarian, for example, might abstain from eating pork not because God wishes it, but to reduce the pain and suffering that factory-farmed pigs typically experience.

Suppose we make it our goal to eat humanely, making the welfare of living things central to our dietary decisions. Our first step will be to determine which living things are capable of experiencing pain and suffering, but before proceeding, let me explain the difference. Whereas pain is a physical sensation, suffering is a psychological state. It can accompany pain, but it can exist independently of it. In particular, a factory-farmed pig, although not in physical pain, might experience anxiety and frustration.

Only a conscious organism is capable of experiencing pain and suffering. To be conscious, an organism must have neurons that are linked to form a network. Furthermore, the cells in a neural network must be protected and nourished by yet other cells. (By way of illustration, consider the C. elegans roundworm. It has about a thousand cells, a third of which are neurons linked into a network. The other two-thirds protect and nourish this network.) Consequently, only multicellular organisms are capable of pain and suffering. This means that to be humane, a diet needn’t preclude, say, the consumption of leavened bread. As a single-celled organism, yeast is incapable of experiencing pain and suffering.

Realize that although an organism can’t be conscious without having a neural network, the mere fact that it has one does not guarantee that it is conscious. This is because consciousness emerges only when a network has become sufficiently complex. Furthermore, there isn’t a definitive method for determining whether an organism has crossed the consciousness threshold. That said, here is a broad overview of consciousness:

• We humans have obviously crossed the consciousness threshold.

• Because chimpanzee brains are similar to ours, it is almost certain that they have crossed the threshold. It is highly likely that the other great apes have as well.

• Most mammals—including dogs, cats, pigs, rodents, and whales—have probably crossed it. A case can be made that even neurologically simple mammals like shrews have. It is also probable that non-mammalian animals like birds have crossed the threshold; likewise for cephalopods, including octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. Indeed, the evidence that cephalopods are conscious has led the UK and EU to include them in animal welfare legislation.

• It is unlikely that crustaceans, including crabs and lobsters, have sufficient neural capacity to have crossed the threshold.

• It is highly unlikely that insects have crossed it.

If this somewhat subjective categorization is correct, insects—and maybe crustaceans as well—can be eaten without moral qualms. Include “higher” life forms in your diet, though, and you run the risk of causing sentient creatures to suffer and experience pain, and if you are eating them simply because you enjoy doing so, you will be hard-pressed to morally justify your behavior.

At this point, clarification is in order. It is possible to consume higher life forms in a humane manner. You can, for example, restrict your consumption to animals that lived a natural life and died a natural death, but such meat is difficult to acquire. You can also consume “cultivated meat”—muscle cells grown in laboratories—without feeling guilty. The meat you end up consuming, however, is likely to be far more expensive than factory-farmed meat, and for many carnivores, this will be a dealbreaker.

Another thing to keep in mind is that even if you stick to a plant diet, you might indirectly be causing animals to suffer. This is because animals can be hurt or killed in the process of growing and harvesting the plants you consume. A shrew, for example, might get impaled by a spading fork that is being used to harvest garlic. (This sounds far-fetched, I realize, but it happened to me!) There are ultra-vegans—in particular, some adherents of the Jain religion—who won’t eat root crops for just this reason. While walking, Jains might also sweep the path ahead of them to avoid stepping on insects. You might think that in doing this, they are going overboard. At the same time, you might admire their concern for the well-being of other living things. I know I do.

Eating humanely will require thought and effort on your part. If you are a Thinker—in my capital-T sense of the word—you will not mind investing this time and effort; indeed, you might enjoy the intellectual challenge presented by devising a diet that is both workable and humane. If you are instead a Feeler, you are unlikely to reconsider your diet. For one thing, you are averse to thinking, preferring instead to feel your way to conclusions. Not only that, but when thinking is essential, you will find a surrogate to think on your behalf. Furthermore, you are accustomed to relying on your heart and gut instead of your head for guidance. In this case, your gut will tell you, in no uncertain terms, to keep eating the foods that you have developed a taste for—in large part because they are the foods you were raised on. If this includes meat, so be it.

A Feeler will also resist thinking about the well-being of the animals they consume and might resent it when someone tells them about the reality of factory farming, as I have done in this and my previous post. If you are in this category, you have clearly come to the wrong place. My goal in creating this substack is to encourage people to think more and better than they currently do and to explain what this entails.

If you don’t want to think more and better about your beliefs, your life, and how you are living it, you would be much more comfortable spending your online time visiting cognitive spas. They will congratulate you for believing whatever it is you happen to believe. And just your luck—they are ubiquitous on social media!

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When I started writing this post, I assumed that, in the same way as people could be placed on an intellectual spectrum with respect to their thinking, with Feelers at one end and Thinkers at the other, people could similarly be placed on a dietary spectrum with respect to their meat consumption, with vegans at one end and carnivores at the other.

Before long, I realized that what I needed was not a one-dimensional line but a target diagram. On it, the circle representing vegans would be inside the circle representing vegetarians, since vegetarians will eat anything vegans will, along with, perhaps, milk and eggs. The vegetarian circle would in turn be inside the circle representing carnivores, since carnivores will eat anything vegetarians will, along with, perhaps, a juicy steak.

This sounded straightforward, but the more I thought about it, the more complex the diagram became. Inside the vegan circle, for example, there had to be a smaller circle for what might be termed ultra-vegans. Whereas vegans will happily eat yeast-leavened bread, ultra-vegans might instead consume yeast-free Irish soda bread. (Yes, such people exist.) In defense of this choice, they will remind us that the yeast used to make the former bread is subsequently killed in the baking process. They regard this as needless death.

The vegan circle would be surrounded by the vegetarian circle, since vegetarians will eat anything vegans will, along with some foods that vegans won’t eat. But again, there was a wrinkle. Because vegetarianism can take many forms, multiple vegetarian circles could be drawn. (Maybe at this point, the target diagram would become a Venn diagram?) There would be the lacto-vegetarian circle, comprising people who eat anything vegans will, along with dairy products; the ovo-vegetarian circle, comprising people who also eat eggs; and the pesca-vegetarian (or pescatarian) circle, comprising people who also eat fish and shellfish. There would also be the ovo-lacto vegetarian circle (dairy products and eggs) and the ovo-lacto-pescatarian circle (dairy products, eggs, fish and shellfish).

These vegetarian groups will agree that it is morally wrong to consume animal flesh, whether it be in the form of muscle or organ meat, but disagree about where, exactly, to draw the line with respect to animal cruelty. An ovo-lacto vegetarian might argue that cows do not suffer from our consuming their milk and that chickens do not suffer from our consuming their eggs—even though cows and chickens that were factory-farmed likely did suffer. A pescatarian might argue that fish and seafood lack sufficient neurological capacity to suffer.

This brings us to carnivores. They will eat anything any vegetarian will—including fruits, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, and fish—but they will also eat (non-piscine) animal flesh. You might think the carnivore circle would be the ultimate dietary circle, but this is not the case. In much the same way as vegetarians differ about which non-flesh foods are morally permissible to eat, carnivores differ about which flesh foods are morally permissible.

Carnivores might agree that non-mammalian meat—including meat from birds, amphibians, reptiles, insects, and arachnids—is morally permissible to eat, even if they personally refrain from eating, say, frogs or tarantulas. When it comes to eating mammalian meat, however, there will likely be differences of opinion. Few carnivores will take moral exception to the consumption of beef, lamb, mutton, goat, and venison. When it comes to eating dogs, cats, and horses, though, disputes will likely arise. Many carnivores will be morally opposed to eating them. Some, however, might argue that it is morally permissible to eat not only these animals but chimpanzees as well. Consequently, outside the carnivore circle of the target diagram, we might draw a circle for what I shall refer to as extreme carnivores. Whereas mainstream carnivores object to the consumption of some animals, extreme carnivores believe that it is morally permissible to eat any animal.

At this point, readers might ask the obvious question: What about humans? We are animals! Would extreme carnivores argue that it is morally permissible to eat human flesh? I won’t try to speak on behalf of them, but I suspect that if you give the matter some thought—and do your best to suppress your heart and gut while doing so—you will conclude that the morality of cannibalism depends on the circumstances—as is the case with very many issues. Allow me to explain.

Suppose you and a companion were adrift in a lifeboat on the Pacific with little chance of being rescued. Suppose that all the boat’s food supplies had been consumed and that as a result, the other person, who was thin to begin with, had died of starvation. Under these circumstances, wouldn’t survival cannibalism be morally permissible? Yes, it would be disgusting, but if you value human life—as any moral human should—wouldn’t it make perfect sense for you to consume the other person’s body?

I will end this post with an assignment. Give some thought to your daily diet. Where do you draw the dietary line? In asking this, I am not asking you to come up with a list of foods that you don’t like or even foods that you would find disgusting to eat. I am asking you to come up with a list of foods that you refuse to eat on moral grounds. And while you are at it, try to articulate the moral principles behind these refusals.

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