Thinking - Abhishek Chakraborty

Working Hypothesis: How to Avoid Fooling Yourself

Facts don’t change our minds. The mind is stubborn, and no matter how strong the facts are, we undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. Ironically, the same brain that empowers rational thinking also skews our judgments.

Thought Experiments

Thought Experiments help us engage in deliberate reasoning by exploring various circumstances, and predict their implications without conducting any real life experiments. Mastering thought experiments can help us stretch our minds by confronting difficult questions.

Optionality: When More is Merrier

When you have options, you don’t have to care about the average outcome—only the favourable outcomes. Because your wins far outweigh your losses. You get a larger payoff when you are right, which also makes it unnecessary to be right too often.

Invisible Rules

Our thoughts and decisions have a set of taken-for-granted assumptions behind them. These are the Invisible Rules that guide us. Unless we uncover them, it’s almost impossible to understand what’s driving our decisions, and what are the flaws, if any, in our logic and thinking.

Make Your Failures Insignificant

Most of us aren’t willing to fail. We may understand intellectually that we’ll fail once in a while if we are trying something new, but most of us aren’t ready to take that punch to the gut. The paradox of success is that everybody wants to be successful, but nobody wants to fail to get there.

Chasing Uncertainty

The future is uncertain. No matter what we think or believe, we have no control over it. Uncertainty will be a factor in everything we undertake. It makes no sense to try to guess it. The best we can do is to learn to control what we can, i.e., our thinking, our decision process, and our reactions.

Find Gems Hidden in Plain Sight

We tend to give experts infallible statuses. We take their ideas at face value without ever challenging them. On the other hand, we dismiss ideas from non-experts without enough consideration. This is wrong!

What it Takes to be a Contrarian

When you take a position the market disagrees with, or when you build upon an idea that everyone says is ridiculous, it pays off tremendously. Being a contrarian has its benefits. The question is, how do you become one?