Sweet Bites
February 23, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
This week we explored how important it is to continually ask questions to improve our reasoning abilities (links below).
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📚 This Week’s Newsletters
🦉 Wisdom
“For years, I struggled in school. I wasn’t that good at sitting quietly, tucked into a little desk, following a bell schedule and filling out worksheets. That binary way of learning—either you know the answer or you don’t—didn’t fit my brain and didn’t appeal to me. I’ve always felt like ideas come from all corners of my brain, and I felt that way even as a kid.”
Brian Grazer
Source: A Curious Mind
📖 Story
In his book, How to Think, Alan Jacobs recalls a story of the economist John Maynard Keynes on his thought process.
Keynes had taken a stance on a policy issue and then later on decided to flip on that stance. When called out for changing his position, he retorted:
“When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?"
How far would we be in life if we didn’t mind adjusting our beliefs and opinions as new information came to light? We unfortunately hold ourselves back from this as we have invested time, emotion, and peer-capital on certain ideas. This entrenchment therefore makes it hard for us to want to give up our beliefs and change our thinking.
But a good football coach would never be content to just run plays they had preplanned if the game required a change in approach. The coach would reassess, ask questions of his staff and players, and change plans to better outmaneuver their opponent.
We can, and should, do the same with our thinking. As new facts come to light, those facts can and should influence our thought process and the beliefs we hold.
Update our logic, update our reasoning, update our chances of success.
🛠️ Tactic
Sean Evans is the host of the youtube series “Hot Ones” where he interviews celebrities as they eat hot wings, each wing becoming hotter and hotter.