Sweet Bites
February 16, 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 the concept of dichotomous thinking and how it can assist or hinder our reasoning abilities (links below).
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📚 This Week’s Newsletters
🧠 Wisdom
“This is what thinking is: not the decision itself but what goes into the decision, the consideration, the assessment. It's testing your own responses and weighing the available evidence; it's grasping, as best you can and with all available and relevant senses, what is, and it's also speculating, as carefully and responsibly as you can, about what might be. And it's knowing when not to go it alone, and whom you should ask for help.”
Alan Jacobs
Source: How to Think
✏️ This Week’s Most Popular Note
📰 Article
This article, What is incoherence?, by Alex Worsnip grabbed by attention this week as it related to similar topics as the week’s theme on dichotomous or dual-thinking.
Worsnip describes the incoherence we face everyday and how we’re constantly fighting our own logic and beliefs to make decisions. These inconsistencies lie across our “beliefs, preferences, intentions, or mixtures of more than one of these types.”
Why is this all so important? Because according to Worsnip:
“The incoherent person is irrational in a deeper way than the unreasonable person.”
As he continues on:
“If we’re employing a substantive notion of rationality, it’s hard to contest that human beings are very often irrational. We often have beliefs that are not well supported by evidence – the climate-change deniers, flat-Earthers and fairy-believers…. And we often do things that there’s very strong reason not to do, as when we engage in behaviours very harmful to our health, lash out at others intemperately, or fall victim to scams and hucksters.”
Check out the article on Aeon if you have time.
🛠️ Tactic
“It is not things themselves that trouble people, but their opinions about things.”
-Epictetus
Here are five steps to overcoming dichotomous thinking: