Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant (sad books to read txt) 📕

whose ego was bruised after a fiery exchange about aeronautics. Wilbur stressed that it wasn’t personal: he saw arguments as opportunities to test and refine their thinking. “I see that you are back at your old trick of giving up before you are half beaten in an argument. I feel pretty certain of my own ground but was anticipating the pleasure of a good scrap before the matter was settled. Discussion brings out new ways of looking at things.”

When they argued about the propeller, the Wright brothers were making a common mistake. Each was preaching about why he was right and why the other was wrong. When we argue about why, we run the risk of becoming emotionally attached to our positions and dismissive of the other side’s. We’re more likely to have a good fight if we argue about how.

When social scientists asked people why they favor particular policies on taxes, health care, or nuclear sanctions, they often doubled down on their convictions. Asking people to explain how those policies would work in practice—or how they’d explain them to an expert—activated a rethinking cycle. They noticed gaps in their knowledge, doubted their conclusions, and became less extreme; they were now more curious about alternative options.

Psychologists find that many of us are vulnerable to an illusion of explanatory depth. Take everyday objects like a bicycle, a piano, or earbuds: how well do you understand them? People tend to be overconfident in their knowledge: they believe they know much more than they actually do about how these objects work. We can help them see the limits of their understanding by asking them to unpack the mechanisms. How do the gears on a bike work? How does a piano key make music? How do earbuds transmit sound from your phone to your ears? People are surprised by how much they struggle to answer those questions and quickly realize how little they actually know. That’s what happened to the Wright brothers after their yelling match.

The next morning, the Wright brothers approached the propeller problem differently. Orville showed up at the shop first and told their mechanic that he had been wrong: they should design the propeller Wilbur’s way. Then Wilbur arrived and started arguing against his own idea, suggesting that Orville might be right.

As they shifted into scientist mode, they focused less on why different solutions would succeed or fail, and more on how those solutions might work. Finally they identified problems with both of their approaches, and realized they were both wrong. “We worked out a theory of our own on the subject, and soon discovered,” Orville wrote, “that all the propellers built heretofore are all wrong.” He exclaimed that their new design was “all right (till we have a chance to test them down at Kitty Hawk and find out differently).”

Even after building a better solution, they were still open to rethinking it. At Kitty Hawk, they found that it was indeed the right one. The Wright brothers had figured out that their airplane didn’t need a propeller. It needed two propellers, spinning in opposite directions, to function like a rotating wing.

That’s the beauty of task conflict. In a great argument, our adversary is not a foil, but a propeller. With twin propellers spinning in divergent directions, our thinking doesn’t get stuck on the ground; it takes flight.

PART II

Interpersonal Rethinking Opening Other People’s Minds

CHAPTER 5 Dances with Foes How to Win Debates and Influence People

Exhausting someone in argument is not the same as convincing him.

—Tim Kreider

At thirty-one, Harish Natarajan has won three dozen international debate tournaments. He’s been told it’s a world record. But his opponent today presents a unique challenge.

Debra Jo Prectet is a prodigy hailing from Haifa, Israel. She’s just eight years old, and although she made her first foray into public debating only last summer, she’s been preparing for this moment for years. Debra has absorbed countless articles to accumulate knowledge, closely studied speechwriting to hone her clarity, and even practiced her delivery to incorporate humor. Now she’s ready to challenge the champion himself. Her parents are hoping she’ll make history.

Harish was a wunderkind too. By the time he was eight, he was outmaneuvering his own parents in dinner-table debates about the Indian caste system. He went on to become the European debate champion and a grand finalist in the world debate championship, and coached the Filipino national school debate team at the world championship. I was introduced to Harish by an unusually bright former student who used to compete against him, and remembers having lost “many (likely all)” of their debates.

Harish and Debra are facing off in San Francisco in February 2019 in front of a large crowd. They’ve been kept in the dark about the debate topic. When they walk onstage, the moderator announces the subject: should preschools be subsidized by the government?

After just fifteen minutes of preparation, Debra will present her strongest arguments in favor of subsidies, and Harish will marshal his best case against them. Their goal is to win the audience over to their side on preschool subsidies, but their impact on me will be much broader: they’ll end up changing my view of what it takes to win a debate.

Debra kicks off with a joke, drawing laughter from the crowd by telling Harish that although he may hold the world record in debate wins, he’s never debated someone like her. Then she goes on to summarize an impressive number of studies—citing her sources—about the academic, social, and professional benefits of preschool programs. For good measure, she quotes a former prime minister’s argument about preschool being a smart investment.

Harish acknowledges the facts that Debra presented, but then makes his case that subsidizing preschools is not the appropriate remedy for the damage caused by poverty. He suggests that the issue should be evaluated on two grounds: whether preschool is currently underprovided and underconsumed, and