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

likely to change career paths than those who studied in Scotland. It isn’t a culture effect—it’s a timing effect. In England and Wales, students had to start specializing in high school, which limited their options for exploring alternatives throughout college. In Scotland, students weren’t allowed to specialize until their third year of college, which gave them more opportunities to rethink their plans and develop new interests. They ended up being more likely to major in subjects that weren’t covered in high school—and more likely to find a match.

* I originally recommended career checkups for students to avoid tunnel vision, but I’ve learned that they can also be useful for students at the opposite end of the rethinking spectrum: overthinkers. They often report back that when they’re dissatisfied at work, knowing a reminder will pop up twice a year helps them resist the temptation to think about quitting every day.

* I think the absurdity was best captured by humorist Richard Brautigan: “Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.” He wrote that line in the penultimate chapter of a book, and delightfully went on to end the book with the word—but deliberately misspelled it “mayonaise” to deprive the reader of closure. Human need, unfulfilled.

* Had thought earlier about showing my edits throughout the book, but didn’t want to inflict that on you. Slogging through half-baked ideas and falsified hypotheses wouldn’t be the best use of your time. Even if you’re a huge fan of Hamilton, you probably wouldn’t love the first draft—it’s much more exciting to engage with the product of rethinking than the process.

* Too whimsical. Early readers want more gravitas here—several have reported that they’re handling dissent differently now. When they confront information that challenges their opinions, instead of rejecting it or begrudgingly engaging with it, they’re taking it as an opportunity to learn something new: “Maybe I should rethink that!”

* Challenge network says updating a “fun fact” from the book is too trivial.

* A big unanswered question here is when rethinking should end—where should we draw the line? I think the answer is different for every person in every situation, but my sense is that most of us are operating too far to the left of the curve. The most relevant data I’ve seen were in chapter 3 on superforecasters: they updated their predictions an average of four times per question instead of twice per question. This suggests that it doesn’t take much rethinking to benefit from it, and the downsides are minimal. Rethinking doesn’t always have to change our minds. Like students rethinking their answers on tests, even if we decide not to pivot on a belief or a decision, we still come away knowing we’ve reflected more thoughtfully.

* For my part, I had assumed the phrase “blowing smoke up your arse” came from people gifting cigars to someone they wanted to impress, so you can imagine how intrigued I was when my wife told me its real origin: In the 1700s, it was common practice to revive drowning victims with tobacco enemas, literally blowing smoke up their behinds. Only later did they learn that it was toxic to the cardiac system.

* I started not with answers but with questions about rethinking. Then I went looking for the best evidence available from randomized, controlled experiments and systematic field studies. Where the evidence didn’t exist, I launched my own research projects. Only when I had reached a data-driven insight did I search for stories to illustrate and illuminate the studies. In an ideal world, every insight would come from a meta-analysis—a study of studies, where researchers cumulate the patterns across a whole body of evidence, adjusting for the quality of each data point. Where those aren’t available, I’ve highlighted studies that I find rigorous, representative, or thought provoking. Sometimes I’ll include details on the methods—not only so you can understand how the researchers formed their conclusions, but to offer a window into how scientists think. In many places, I’ll summarize the results without going into depth on the studies themselves, under the assumption that you’re reading to rethink like a scientist—not to become one. That said, if you felt a jolt of excitement at the mention of a meta-analysis, it might be time to (re)consider a career in social science.

* This looks like good news for countries like the United States, where self-assessments came fairly close to reality, but that doesn’t hold across domains. In a recent study, English-speaking teenagers around the world were asked to rate their knowledge in sixteen different areas of math. Three of the subjects listed were entirely fake—declarative fractions, proper numbers, and subjunctive scaling—which made it possible to track who would claim knowledge about fictional topics. On average, the worst offenders were North American, male, and wealthy.

* My favorite example comes from Nina Strohminger, who once lamented: “My dad called this morning to tell me about the Dunning-Kruger effect, not realizing that his daughter with a Ph.D. in psychology would certainly know the Dunning-Kruger effect, thereby giving a tidy demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.”

* There’s an ongoing debate about the role of statistical measurement issues in the Dunning-Kruger effect, but the controversy is mostly around how strong the effect is and when it occurs—not whether it’s real. Interestingly, even when people are motivated to