Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America
By: Scott Adams
Portfolio (November 7, 2019)
256 pages

Loserthink is a gem of a book. Adams lists example after example of thinking that is not quite right. Some are logical fallacies, some are fuzzy thinking, and some are nothing but ignorance or emotion. Read this book and practice thinking about things more clearly. Every high school student should read Loserthink. (Maybe pair this book with How To Think, By: Alan Jacobs?)

Do not miss these two other books by Adams:

• Win Bigly
• How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

Two of my favorite quotes:

My nomination for the most loserthinkish advice in history is: “Stay in your lane.” That is the sort of advice that is better served to an enemy, not a friend. If everyone followed that advice, you wouldn’t have civilization. The world as we know it was engineered, designed, and built by people who left their lane and tried something outside their temporary skill stack. They figured it out as they went. I’ll agree that one size doesn’t fit all, and some people probably should stick to what they do best. But I wouldn’t want society to decide that staying in one lane is some sort of obvious wisdom. In my experience, the smartest plan for life is to leave your lane as often as you can (without inviting major risk) to pick up skills that will complement your talent stack. The more skills you have, the more valuable you will be, although you won’t necessarily know in advance where it will take you.

Hallucinations generally involve adding imaginary things to the environment. For example, if you think you see ghosts, UFOs, or Bigfoot, you are imagining then added to the existing scenery. What you rarely or never see is a hallucination that subtracts something from the existing reality. For example, you never hear of people hallucinating that the furniture in their homes is missing when it is actually still there right in front of their eyes. 

Buy this book.

Mere Christianity
By: C.S. Lewis
HarperOne; Revised & Enlarged edition (April 21, 2015)
227 pages

What can I say about a classic text, like Mere Christianity, that has not already been said? I think this is actually my second (or third?) time reading this book. The first time was when I was an undergrad. And I think I read it again in graduate school. Lewis takes on the questions of: What exactly do Christians believe? And what basis do they have for that belief? If you care about religion and/or ethics, definitely look this one up.

Two of my favorite quotes:

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers—people who understood morality better than their neighbours did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.

When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

Buy this book.