In a catch-22 situation, the nature of a problem deprives you of the means to solve it. A classic example: Because you have locked your keys in the car, you can’t unlock the car to get them. Oh, and locked in with those keys is the cell phone you could use to get help. How frustrating! Here are some other examples:

• Because your car won’t start, you can’t drive to the auto-supply store to get the part that would fix it.

• Because you have never had a job, you lack the work experience necessary to get a job.

• Because you have a fear of public speaking, you won’t engage in the small, friendly audience exercises that would help you overcome that fear.

• Because you have lost your glasses, you can’t see to find them.

• Because you have succumbed to depression, you lack the motivation and energy necessary to make an appointment for help—and if you do make it, to show up for it.

• Because your wifi is down, you can’t go online to troubleshoot the problem.

• Because you are lonely, you are so eager to talk to the people you encounter that you scare them away.

• Because you lack a credit rating, you can’t get a credit card, the responsible use of which would establish a credit rating.

• Because you are choking, you can’t call out for help.

I could continue this list to generate a total of 22 of these catch-22 situations and thereby fulfill the (hopefully catchy) promise made by the title of this essay, but I’m sure you get the idea, so I won’t. Feel free to add your own catch-22 situations in the comments.

I have described the intellectual spectrum, with Feelers at one end and Thinkers at the other. Feelers routinely feel their way to conclusions, led by their heart and gut. In contrast, Thinkers, led by their head, engage in evidence-based reasoning to reach their conclusions. As I have explained in these posts, most people fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They might also be hybrids—Feelers with respect to some subjects and Thinkers with respect to others. Consider, for example, a doctor who is a Thinker with respect to medicine but a Feeler with respect to politics.

In this Substack, I encourage people to think more and better than they currently do, so they can move toward the Thinker end of the intellectual spectrum. Some people, on being exposed to the Thinker concept, are not only quick to comprehend it but are drawn to it. For many people, however, the prospect of becoming an open-minded critical thinker is a hard sell. For one thing, doing so would require lots of thinking on their part. Many people will resist this, the way they resist advice to exercise more than they currently do.

This is only one of the obstacles, however, to transitioning from Feeler to Thinker. The catch-22 phenomenon is another. Because a Feeler is reluctant to think, they will be reluctant to think about what is involved in becoming a Thinker and the advantages of becoming one. Furthermore, because of their exposure to social media, their attention span has likely shrunk.

When I taught critical thinking in the classroom—I have been retired since 2020—I routinely had face-to-face conversations with students who were at the Feeler end of the intellectual spectrum. I would explain that by habitually feeling their way to conclusions, they were likely to become disconnected from reality, perhaps with disastrous consequences.

In many such cases, I made little headway. It wasn’t—I hope!—that my argument was weak. The problem was that as Feelers, they didn’t like to think, and as a result were reluctant to invest the intellectual effort necessary to process what I was saying. I suspect that if I were to return to the classroom, the situation would be even more challenging, since students’ capacity for sustained attention would have been diminished by their exposure to social media, including TikTok and the like. From the point of view of a Thinker, Feelers resemble someone who has locked their keys and cellphone in their car. They are in a predicament, and the nature of their problem deprives them of the means to solve it.

Catch-22 situations like this aren’t necessarily hopeless. Consider again, for example, the situation in which you have locked your car keys and phone into your car. Smash a window, and your problem will be solved.* Is there a similar “break the glass” solution with respect to Feelers who are unwilling (or is it unable?) to give due consideration to the possibility of moving toward the Thinker end of the intellectual spectrum? I have as yet failed to come up with one. Till I do—if I do—I will continue my campaign of connecting with individuals—like yourself, dear reader—who are both willing and able to think more and better.

*It is, to be sure, a costly and potentially dangerous way to proceed—don’t try this at home! It will leave you with a new problem—getting the broken window replaced. But you will have escaped the catch-22. I have, by the way, witnessed the predicament of car keys being locked into a car dealt with in this manner. I suspect that the act in question was triggered by sheer exasperation.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Want to listen to rather than read an essay? Open it on your mobile device’s Substack app and click on the listen button.

Paid subscribers can also listen to my initial 22 posts on their favorite podcast app, such as Spotify. Open the app, search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist. These are the posts in which I explain what is involved in being a Thinker, with a capital T, instead of a Feeler. By listening to them in order, you can, in under two hours, gain a full understanding of the Thinker concept.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something significant? Mine was last week. It happened in conjunction with an appointment to get my teeth cleaned. Dentists have X-ray machines, and they like to use them. I resist being X-rayed, though. If I were prone to getting cavities, getting routine dental X-rays would be understandable, but I have never had a cavity. And if getting X-rayed was a benign medical procedure, getting them would be no big deal, but it isn’t benign.

Scientists found this out the hard way. At the beginning of the twentieth century, X-rays were used for cosmetic reasons, such as permanent hair removal, but it subsequently became clear that the process had serious side effects. As late as the 1950s, shoe stores used X-ray machines to check the fit of shoes, but again, the exposure to X-rays proved harmful to both the clerks who operated the machines and the children whose feet were being X-rayed. By the 1960s, there was general agreement that people should be exposed to X-rays only for medically necessary purposes.

As a child, I was taught that X-rays are dangerous. The lesson stuck, and even as an adult I made a point of avoiding them. For decades, my dentist deferred to my dislike of X-rays and rarely took them. This changed, however, when I was forced to switch dentists. My new dentist pressured me to get a full set of X-rays, and to overcome my reluctance to do so, reassured me that my insurance would cover them. I responded that it wasn’t about money; it was about my health. I simply didn’t want to expose myself to medically unnecessary X-rays. When he kept pushing the issue, I switched to another dentist, only to have a similar experience; indeed, she “fired me” as a patient for refusing to get them.

It was time, I decided, to rethink my beliefs about dental X-rays. As I said, I acquired my aversion to them in childhood and have subsequently retained it. During that period, however, scientists developed a way to dramatically reduce the intensity of the X-rays needed to make an image: instead of using a phosphor screen or photographic film, they could use digital sensors. As a result, the X-ray exposure necessary to take a four-image bitewing series is equivalent to the exposure you get during a 2–3 hour airplane flight. It is, I concluded, an acceptable risk. In other words, I changed my mind about dental X-rays. And before moving on, let me state that this is doubtless only one of many mistaken beliefs that I hold.

In these posts, I have described the role that experts will play in the lives of Thinkers. Although they make a point of thinking for themselves, they will occasionally outsource their thinking to someone who knows far more about a subject than they do. This will be the case if they experience a sudden sharp pain in their abdomen or if their heater stops working on the coldest day of the year. They will, however, choose their experts with care. They will assess potential experts by asking questions. In particular, they will ask them to explain and justify their recommendations. If an individual is unwilling or unable to answer such questions, the Thinker will conclude that their “expertise” is not to be trusted.

Along these lines, a dentist who justifies giving X-rays by saying “It’s our policy to do so” probably isn’t a good candidate for surrogate thinker. Likewise, a dentist who claims, incorrectly, that the state dental board requires that X-rays be given every six months—which is what one of my dentists told me—is not to be trusted.

In doing research on the safety of dental X-rays, by the way, I came across evidence that dentists do indeed give more X-rays than is medically necessary. It would appear that their medical judgment is distorted by economic factors: Giving X-rays is an easy way to boost per-visit revenues. I concluded that I have three options. I could forgo getting my teeth cleaned, I could argue with dentists whenever I wanted to get them cleaned and maybe have to routinely switch dentists, or I could bite the bullet—more precisely, bite the bitewing—and resist getting X-rayed but not refuse the procedure outright. Life is short, so I have chosen this last option.

I will leave you with a question: Are you changing your mind often enough? Feelers are generally reluctant to change their mind because doing so is an admission that what they previously believed was mistaken. Feelers don’t like to be mistaken and really don’t like to admit their mistakes to others. By way of contrast, Thinkers search for their mistakes and take delight in finding and eradicating them. It is evidence, after all, that they are progressing toward their mind-optimization goal.

Feelers—people who habitually feel rather than think their way to conclusions—are typically reluctant to admit having made a mistake. It could be that, because they are habitually distracted, they are oblivious to having made one. In other cases, they are aware of having made one but find it difficult to admit as much—not to other people, since that would tarnish the image of infallibility that they are trying to project; indeed, not even to themselves, since doing so would be a blow to their ego. This reluctance is unfortunate, since it increases the chance that they will subsequently make the same mistake; indeed, you might know people who, because they keep making the same mistake over and over, end up having a miserable existence.

Tell a Feeler that they have made a mistake, and they might get angry. Who are you to judge them? Publicly accuse a Feeler of making a mistake, and they might come to regard you as an enemy who is trying to make them look bad—spurred on, perhaps, by feelings of envy.

Many (most?) politicians are toward the Feeler end of the intellectual spectrum. This is particularly true in a democracy in which a majority of voters are Feelers. Suppose that after enacting a law, it becomes clear that it is having disastrous consequences. Under these circumstances, a politician might, rather than admitting that they made a mistake, feel compelled to double down—and thereby compound that mistake. In such cases, it is likely to be not the politician personally but their constituents who pay the price.

In contrast, Thinkers—people who routinely make a conscious effort to engage in evidence-based reasoning to reach conclusions—readily admit their fallibility. They assume that their belief set contains mistaken beliefs, and as part of their mindcleaning regimen, they search for them and, on finding one, eradicate it. When someone tells them that they have made a mistake, they will stifle their ego for long enough to consider whether a mistake has in fact been made, and if it has, they might thank the other person for straightening them out.

If this behavior sounds strange, recall that Thinkers’ primary concern is not with optimizing their social standing; it is instead with optimizing their mind by filling it, to the extent possible, with true and useful beliefs. As a result, they welcome thoughtful critiques of their actions and beliefs. By revealing their mistaken beliefs, their critics are helping them achieve this goal, meaning that thanks are in order.

Thinkers don’t just welcome thoughtful critiques; they seek them. They might, in particular, try out an idea on a friend or relative. The snag is that this audience is likely to tell them what they want to hear, which won’t help them shape and sharpen their idea. A better audience would be a fellow Thinker, given specific instructions to look for their idea’s flaws and weaknesses.

If such a person isn’t available, there is an alternative. I have already recommended using AI chatbots to stress test your beliefs. They can also be used as a sounding board for testing your ideas. The snag is that they are programmed to tell you what you want to hear, so you will keep coming back for more, allowing the people who run them to—somehow or other—make money. Your first step in using a chatbot should therefore be to make it clear in your prompt that you don’t want it to praise you and tell you what you are doing right; you instead want it to tell you what you are doing wrong. Are your assumptions mistaken? Have you overlooked evidence? Is your reasoning defective?

There is clearly such a thing as making too many mistakes. This will be the case if we fail to think before we act. It is also possible, however, to make too few mistakes. In particular, Feelers might hesitate to take considered risks. Their egos will be bruised, after all, by a failure, and their public image might be tarnished as well.

Thinkers won’t be similarly inhibited, but don’t get me wrong. They won’t take stupid risks; nor will they take risks in which failure can have disastrous consequences. They will, however, be willing to experiment—to learn by a process of trial and error. This is certainly the case with the world’s greatest inventors. They are notable for their intelligence, capacity for hard work, and willingness to think independently. Most important, however, is their ability to try something, fail, learn from that failure, and try again.

Think about it. Are you actively looking for your mistakes and owning up to those you find? Do you consider the possibility that your critics might be right? And not to be forgotten, are you making enough mistakes, or have you been incapacitated by a fear of failing?

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Want to listen to rather than read an essay? Open it on your mobile device’s Substack app and click on the listen button.

Paid subscribers can also listen to my initial 22 posts on their favorite podcast app, such as Spotify. Open the app, search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist. These are the posts in which I explain what is involved in being a Thinker, with a capital T, instead of a Feeler. By listening to them in order, you can, in under two hours, gain a full understanding of the Thinker concept.

The people I refer to as Thinkers, with a capital T, are more likely than Feelers to be living a deliberate life. Feelers’ natural impulse is to do what feels good. This is the case not only when they are deciding what to believe but also when they are deciding what to do. In particular, they will be reluctant to make sacrifices today that can yield future rewards.

In contrast, Thinkers will devote thought and energy to devising a philosophy of life—to figuring out what, in life, is most worth having. They will be willing to take actions that, though they don’t feel good now, will pay off in the future. They will, in particular, take steps today that will increase their chances of not just thriving in the future but flourishing, of not just doing well but living fully. Thinkers will also devote thought and energy to devising effective strategies for achieving their goals.

Before moving on, I should point out that Thinkers disagree regarding what in life is most worth having. The ancient Stoics thought it was equanimity, a conclusion with which I am largely in agreement.*

On hearing this, Feelers might caricature Thinkers as people who overthink things, live in a constant state of self-denial, and as a result never have any fun. Thinkers will respond by pointing out that there are lots of ways to have fun. Some people’s idea of having fun is to get drunk at a party; other people’s idea of having fun is to take a walk, have a satisfying conversation, or read a book. Furthermore, even if we agreed that Feelers currently have more “fun” than Thinkers, they would likely have significantly less in the future, for the simple reason that they had failed to think about and prepare for that future; indeed, they would be likely to experience more anxiety and grief than Thinkers.

Because they tend to act without thinking things through, Feelers can be at cross purposes with themselves: What they do today, they undo tomorrow. As a result, their lives turn into a morass. Furthermore, because they don’t invest the time and thought necessary to develop a philosophy of life, they run the risk of misliving—of spending their days pursuing things of little value, when it was in their power to do otherwise. What a waste!

Living a deliberate life takes self-control. It is, however, a trait that people possess to varying degrees. Infants lack it. By the time they are preteens, they will have gained considerable self-control, only to have it undermined by the onset of puberty, with its accompanying influx of hormones. Adults can lack self-control as the result of mental illness, and even a sane adult can temporarily lose self-control as the result of becoming intoxicated.

Thinkers recognize the importance of not only having a philosophy for living but also acting in accordance with it. They also realize that doing this requires self-control. This raises the question of whether there are exercises—“willpower workouts”—we can do to increase our self-control. Scientists haven’t yet reached a consensus on this question. Fortunately for us, however, there are steps we can take to reduce our reliance on self-control in pursuing our goals:

• We can publicly announce our intention to do something—such as to lose weight or start a retirement savings account. The resulting social pressure can make up for deficient self-control.

• We can avoid falling into an addiction that would overwhelm our self-control. This will mean avoiding substances with known addictive potential. Indeed, we would not even try them once. That way, we won’t know what we are “missing,” which makes it that much easier to pass them up. It might also mean avoiding addicts, since they can be a bad influence.

• We can redesign our environment so that our self-control is less likely to be tested. Along these lines, suppose that we are inordinately fond of ice cream. If we are trying to lose weight, we should avoid it, and for many people, the easiest way to do this is simply not to bring any home from the supermarket. Out of sight, out of mind—and out of belly, as well.

• We can reframe an option to make it more palatable. Suppose we get a bonus at work. We can use it to go on a vacation, but we can instead use it to start the retirement fund we have been putting off for years. Under such circumstances, many will experience what economists call present bias, the tendency to choose an immediate reward over a reward that, though greater, is delayed. One way to overcome this tendency—which seems to have been wired into us by our evolutionary past—is to think of forgoing an immediate reward not as a sacrifice, but as a gift to our future self. In doing this, it is useful to reflect on all the gifts our past selves have given to us.

Just think: If you are reading these words, it is because your past selves invested the time and effort necessary to become literate. If time travel is ever possible, be sure to travel back to thank them.

*For more on the Stoics and their philosophy of life, see my Guide to the Good Life and my Stoic Challenge.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Want to listen to rather than read an essay? Open it on your mobile device’s Substack app and click on the listen button.

Paid subscribers can also listen to my initial 22 posts on their favorite podcast app, such as Spotify. Open the app, search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist. These are the posts in which I explain what is involved in being a Thinker, with a capital T, instead of a Feeler. By listening to them in order, you can, in under two hours, gain a full understanding of the Thinker concept.

My goal in this substack is to transform readers into Thinkers, spelled with a capital T. As such, your primary objective will be to optimize your mind by filling it, to the extent possible, with true and useful beliefs. And how, you might wonder, do you accomplish this?

Your mind-optimization program will have three components:

• A mindcare regimen, in which you take steps to avoid exposing yourself to misinformation

• A mindcleaning regimen, in which you take steps to find and eradicate misinformation that slipped past your critical guard. I hasten to add that mindcleaning is different from brainwashing; indeed, it is a remedy for having been brainwashed.

• A mind-expansion regimen, in which you explore the world around you in search of beliefs that are both true and useful. And at this point, a disclaimer is in order: A Thinker’s mind-expansion regimen needn’t involve the use of “mind-expanding drugs.”

These regimens complement each other. By practicing mindcare, you reduce the number of mistaken beliefs you are exposed to and thereby reduce the number of mistaken beliefs you acquire. By practicing mindcleaning, you reduce the number of mistaken beliefs you hold. And by practicing mind expansion, you increase the number of true beliefs you hold. The idea is that by practicing these three regimens, you increase the number of true beliefs you hold and reduce the number of mistaken beliefs, and thereby make progress toward filling your mind with true and useful beliefs.

In a forthcoming book—about which I will have much more to say in future posts—I describe these regimens in detail. My goal here is simply to introduce them. In this post, I will offer a basic description of mindcare, and in the next two posts, I will do the same for mindcleaning and mind expansion.

Suppose that while hiking through a forest, you lose your canteen. In your subsequent search for water, it would be wise to avoid puddles on trails—especially those used by animals—since that water is likely to be muddy, as well as contaminated with germs and parasites. A better choice would be a clear-running stream, and even better, water flowing from a spring.

In much the same way, Thinkers will carefully choose their sources of information. They will look for those that are trustworthy and avoid those likely to be tainted by mis- or disinformation. A Thinker knows that whereas drinking polluted water can harm your body, acquiring mistaken beliefs can harm your mind.

Take a moment to reflect on your current sources of information. Where, in particular, do you get your news? Many people get it on the internet, including from TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts. The problem is that the reliability of these sources varies considerably. Not only that, but some of the most easily accessed and entertaining sources will be the least reliable.

Alternatively, people might rely on news-aggregator websites that collect and organize news stories from other sites. They create the impression of providing a balanced rendering of the news, but this might not be the case. It is also possible for an aggregator website to mix real news stories with fabricated stories, which increases the chance that readers will be taken in by fake news.

In their search for news, Thinkers will focus their attention on sources that engage in “shoe-leather journalism.” The resulting stories will have been written by reporters who gathered evidence by going out into the world to answer the basic who, what, when, where, why, and how questions regarding an event. In some cases, this requires them to personally witness an event as well as take pictures and videos of what they saw and heard. It might mean talking to people who had witnessed it, as well as examining relevant documents, photos, videos, and physical evidence. It might also mean consulting with people who have expertise with respect to an event. Furthermore, they would do this research with a skeptical frame of mind. Were the people they interviewed telling the truth? Could their stories be corroborated? Had the photos been altered—or generated by AI?

A Thinker might therefore turn to “legacy media” for news. In the United States, this would include—but not be limited to—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. What makes these sources noteworthy is their reliance on the sort of shoe-leather journalism I have described. And because Thinkers realize that those in the legacy media are not immune to biases, they might make a point of reading, say, both the slightly-left-leaning Times and the slightly-right-leaning Journal.

Do you get your news from whatever items you come across while surfing the web? Even worse, do you rely on a single “opinion journalism” YouTube channel or podcast? If so, you are, figuratively speaking, drinking water from a dirty puddle. And if you get your news from sites that traffic in conspiracy theories, the puddle in question might contain raccoon scat. Your mind deserves better!

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Want to listen to rather than read an essay? Open it on your mobile device’s Substack app and click on the listen button.

Paid subscribers can also listen to my initial 22 posts on their favorite podcast app, such as Spotify. Open the app, search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist.These are the posts in which I explain what is involved in being a Thinker, with a capital T, instead of a Feeler. By listening to them in order, you can, in under two hours, gain a full understanding of the Thinker concept.

When reading longer documents, however, another ability comes into play: the ability to focus your attention for an extended period. It is possible for a fluent reader to lack this ability, in which case they might struggle to complete a book—or even a thousand-word essay like this one.

If you are of a certain age, you have likely, over the course of your life, read many books. There might have been a time when you read a book a month or even a book a week. Chances are that this is no longer the case. It might be because your reading has been displaced by other activities. You might, in particular, be spending considerable amounts of time on social media. If this is the case, you will still be doing lots of reading—and writing as well—but it won’t be books or even essays that you read; it will instead be tersely written posts. There is also an excellent chance that you are doing a lot more watching than you used to; in particular, time that could have been spent reading is instead spent watching TikTok or YouTube videos.

Spending your time watching something doesn’t impair your reading ability—you will remain a fluent reader—but it can have a significant impact on your ability to focus your attention. As a result, you no longer have the patience to read a book—or even a lengthy article. If you consume Substack content, you might spend your time reading “notes” rather than longer-form “articles” (like this one). And if you do read an article, there is an excellent chance that you don’t read it to the end.

I can quantify this last claim by sharing the reader-engagement data for my More Better Thinking Substack. I currently have about 760,000 subscribers. (Thanks!) They will all be emailed this article, but judging from my previous 100+ posts, only about 20% of them—152,000 people—will open that email. Another 6,000 people will encounter this article on the Substack app or on a web browser, where Substack will keep track of how far into the article they scroll. Add these numbers, and we can surmise that about 158,000 people will start reading this article.

Judging from the reader-engagement data for my previous articles, about 70% of these readers will abandon this article halfway through, and only about 17% will read it to the end. (Ouch!) In absolute terms, that is still a lot of people—about 27,000, far more people than I encountered in my entire teaching career—but it raises the question of why people bail out. It could be that readers think the article is poorly written, is not providing them with the information they had expected, or is too deep for them. They might instead find that the article is not sufficiently amusing or, given their interests, is downright boring.

Another reason might be that they hit the 400-word wall. I came across this term while listening to an interview with James Marriott, author of The New Dark Ages. Marriott argues that, largely as a consequence of our exposure to social media, we have lost our ability to focus our attention for an extended period. Indeed, after about ninety seconds—what it takes to read 400 words—our minds get restless. We start itching for novelty, an itch that we scratch by abandoning what we are doing in search of new sources of stimulation. This same phenomenon plays a role in videos, which is partly why so many YouTube Shorts and TikTok videos are under two minutes long.

In this Substack, I have argued that with effort and guidance, you can transform yourself into a Thinker, someone who habitually relies on evidence-based reasoning to reach conclusions. I would similarly argue that with effort, you can punch through the 400-word wall. You will need to simultaneously limit your access to brain-rotting social media and make a conscious effort to read longer documents. For Substack users, this might mean reading fewer notes and reading more articles.

If you are of a certain age, you know that you are capable of focusing your attention for extended periods, the proof being that you routinely did so in the past. If you are a member of Generation Z, however, there is a good chance that you didn’t lose this ability; you never fully developed it. Indeed, it could be that you have never read a book cover to cover, not even in school. If this is the case, your efforts to improve your mental stamina will feel like you’ve entered boot camp for your brain. Keep at it, though, and your stamina will improve.

A closing thought: If you are reading this sentence, you are an intellectual outlier. Congratulations! Why not celebrate by picking up a book and reading it cover to cover—maybe my How to Think More and Better? Or if that seems overly ambitious, by reading (or rereading) my previous Substack essays.

Thinkers (people who habitually rely on evidence-based reasoning to reach their conclusions) would make neither claim, maintaining instead that the morality of an abortion depends on its circumstances. They might, for example, argue that abortion is morally permissible in the case of an ectopic pregnancy in which, if the fetus isn’t aborted, the mother and the fetus will both die, but if the fetus is aborted, the mother will live. Thinkers might also argue that so-called partial birth abortions are morally impermissible. Consider, for example, a case in which a fetus is killed as it is about to emerge from the birth canal, because the mother has changed her mind about having a child and doesn’t want anyone else raising her child.

Feelers (people who habitually feel rather than think their way to conclusions) are much more likely than Thinkers to make sweeping generalizations. This is in part because they believe—mistakenly—that consistency requires them to do so, and in part because they don’t want to do the thinking necessary to come up with a nuanced position that allows for special cases.

Feelers also tend to operate under the assumption that morality is relative and therefore that what is moral for one person needn’t be moral for someone else. In other words, they treat moral beliefs in much the same way as they treat ice-cream preferences: “You prefer chocolate, I prefer vanilla, and that’s the end of the discussion.”

In contrast, most Thinkers maintain that absolute moral truths exist—although they may disagree about what those truths are. One such truth is that torturing children for fun is morally impermissible. If you believe otherwise, you are simply mistaken, the way you would be if you believed that 2 + 5 = 8 or believed that the moon is made of green cheese. Furthermore, if you act in accordance with the belief that it is morally permissible to torture children for fun, you are a profoundly immoral person. Likewise, a religion or culture that condoned—or even worse, promoted—such behavior would be depraved.

Challenged to defend such claims, a Thinker might invite you to do a thought experiment. Suppose you had the power to create and populate a world, and that you could subsequently dictate the moral principles that governed it—as God did with the Ten Commandments. Suppose, however, that this offer came with a catch: You would subsequently have to inhabit the world you created. More precisely, you would have to live the life of one of the people you created. Furthermore, you could not decide which person it would be. Your “life assignment” would instead be made in a random manner.*

Would your principles permit children to be cruelly tortured for the entertainment of others? Probably not. What, after all, if you ended up being one of those tortured children? Likewise, your principles probably wouldn’t permit slavery, since you might end up living the life of a slave.

Most people don’t engage in evidence-based reasoning—and thought experiments like the one just described—to reach their moral conclusions. They instead outsource their moral thinking, maybe to their religion or their culture. This is unfortunate since, as history repeatedly teaches us, religions and cultures are capable of making egregious moral mistakes that result in large-scale injustice, suffering, and death.

Aren’t morality and religion intertwined, though? Don’t people need an incentive to do the right thing, and doesn’t religion provide such an incentive? Follow God’s commandments, for example, and we will not only avoid burning in hell but might enjoy an eternity spent in heaven. A Thinker might respond to this suggestion by pointing out that it is possible to do the right thing, not because we will be punished for doing otherwise, but simply because reason tells us that it is the right thing to do. Indeed, morally exemplary individuals might resolutely do what they take to be the right thing, knowing full well that they will be punished for doing so, perhaps by unscrupulous people.

We can, by the way, distinguish between an act being morally wrong and being sinful. A case can be made that to count as morally wrong, an act must harm other people. Hurt only yourself and you won’t be committing a moral wrong. In contrast, many religions forbid you to commit private acts that have no impact on other people. In those religions, these acts will count as sinful. God doesn’t want you doing them.

Besides distinguishing between morally wrong acts and sinful acts, Thinkers will distinguish between the morality of an act and its legality. They know that politicians get to decide whether an act is legal. As a result, it is entirely possible for something to be legal (as slavery was in Mississippi in 1840) without being moral, as well as for something to be illegal (as “unnatural intercourse” between consenting adults was in Mississippi before 2003) without being immoral. You can, of course, challenge these specific examples, but not the point they are meant to illustrate—namely, that morality and legality are distinct concepts. Conflate them, and you run the risk of outsourcing your thinking to politicians who in many cases are neither thoughtful nor morally upstanding.

*I did not invent this thought experiment. It is an adaptation of philosopher John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” argument.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Want to listen to rather than read an essay? Open it on your mobile device’s Substack app and click on the listen button.

Paid subscribers can also listen to my initial 22 posts on their favorite podcast app, such as Spotify. Open the app, search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist.These are the posts in which I explain what is involved in being a Thinker, with a capital T, instead of a Feeler. By listening to them in order, you can, in under two hours, gain a full understanding of the Thinker concept

The mere fact that you think a lot doesn’t make you a Thinker (with a capital T). In the way I am using this term, a Thinker is an open-minded critical thinker—someone who consciously engages in evidence-based reasoning to reach conclusions. In contrast, Feelers rely on their heart and gut to feel their way. Everyone thinks a lot, Thinkers and Feelers alike! In fact, while we are awake, we are pretty much non-stop thinkers. Some of our thoughts are elicited by focused concentration, but many more of them just pop into our head from who-knows-where. We contemplate them for a few moments, at which point they wander off. What makes Thinkers special is not the sheer number of thoughts they have, but the number of focused thoughts they have in the process of gathering evidence and reasoning their way to conclusions about a topic.

2. Do you have profound thoughts?

This question gives rise to a new question: What counts as a profound thought? Consider the following candidates:

• There are no facts, only interpretations.

• Wherever you go, there you are.

• The only constant is change.

• Reality is an illusion.

• Love is just a word.

Such statements are pseudo-profound. They are better described as vacuous, nonsensical, or specious. The claim about love is a classic example of a deepity, a subject I explored in another essay. Thinkers will refrain from making such statements and might roll their eyes on hearing someone else make them.

3. Do you feel certain that your beliefs are correct?

As we have seen, Thinkers are rarely certain of their beliefs. Some exceptions are when making claims about logic, mathematics, and semantics. In other areas, they will be well aware of the limits of their reasoning ability. They will also openly acknowledge their ignorance about many subjects. If someone rejects their beliefs, they will be intrigued, and if their challenger is able to give a reasoned defense of his or her beliefs—in particular, gives evidence of being a fellow Thinker—they will investigate the possibility that this person is right and they are mistaken. As a result of the encounter, they might reduce their level of confidence with respect to the belief—or abandon it altogether.

4. Do you get your news from aggregator websites (such as Google News)?

These sites profit by figuring out what individual users want to hear. Subsequently, they provide a user not with all the news, and not even with news that they should hear, in order to stay well informed. Aggregators instead provide users with news that they, individually, want to hear. Because users’ news feeds are personalized in this manner, different users will get different news from the same aggregator, and as a result will reach differing conclusions about what’s going on around them. Thinkers realize this and will therefore eschew news aggregators in favor of a variety of traditional, “shoe-leather” news sources. These sources won’t be free, but from a Thinker’s point of view, their subscription fees are a small price to pay to stay grounded in reality.

5. Do you routinely “outsource” your thinking?

Although Feelers can’t get someone to exercise on their behalf so they can remain physically fit, they can get someone else to think on their behalf. They therefore outsource much of their thinking. Thinkers will also outsource their thinking but will do so with great care. If, for example, they experience an ominous swelling in their abdomen, they will try to find a medical expert to make the diagnosis and suggest a treatment. And what makes this person an expert? Their willingness to engage in evidence-based critical thinking to reach their conclusions, the way a Thinker would.

6. Do you think abortion is morally permissible or morally impermissible?

Ask a Thinker this question, and they will likely answer, “It depends.” This might sound like a waffle, but because they are thoughtful, Thinkers are reluctant to make sweeping generalizations. As a result, they are unlikely to believe that abortion is always morally permissible. They are also unlikely to believe that it is always morally impermissible. They will instead carve out exceptions: It will sometimes be morally permissible and sometimes be morally impermissible. They might, for example, point to ectopic pregnancies in which if there is an abortion, the mother will live but the fetus will die, but in which if there isn’t an abortion, the mother and fetus will both die. They might go on to argue that even someone who is “pro-life” should support abortion in such cases. After all, by performing the abortion we save a life—namely, that of the mother. So why are Feelers prone to make sweeping generalizations? In part because it requires less thinking on their part than developing nuanced beliefs does.

7. Do you make a point of stress testing your beliefs, and in particular, beliefs you are highly confident of?

Thinkers will routinely do this as part of their mindcleaning regimen, but Feelers won’t be similarly motivated: Why stress test a belief that they are sure is true? If you were raised in a religion, your religious beliefs are an obvious candidate for stress testing. Under those circumstances, you will not have reasoned your way to your beliefs; you will have inherited them. By adopting your parents’ beliefs, however, you will be outsourcing your religious thinking to them. They in turn might have outsourced their religious thinking to their parents, and so on, back through your family tree. It might turn out that ultimately, you hold the religious beliefs you do because centuries ago, an illiterate shepherd adopted a religion different from those of his ancestors. If it was okay for your ancestor to do this, wouldn’t it likewise be okay for you to abandon the religion you were raised in?

8. Do you get angry at people who challenge your beliefs?

If you do, it is evidence that you feel rather than reason your way to conclusions, meaning that you are not a Thinker. Thinkers don’t need to get angry, because they will be able to calmly, rationally defend their beliefs.

Okay, the test is over. How did you do?

In assessing your results, you need to keep in mind that the Feeler/Thinker distinction isn’t binary. There is an intellectual spectrum, with Feelers at one end, Thinkers at the other, and most people somewhere in the middle. By considering the questions I have asked, you can get a sense of where on that spectrum you lie. You can also get an idea of some of the steps you can take to move toward the Thinker end of the spectrum—if that is your goal. For more advice on how to do this, I recommend that you reread, or listen to, the first 22 posts in this Substack. I will also remind you that my book How to Think More and Better: Being Reasonable in Unreasonable Times is available at finer bookstores everywhere. Oh, and at Amazon as well.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Want to listen to rather than read an essay? Open it on your mobile device’s Substack app and click on the listen button.

Paid subscribers can also listen to my initial 22 posts on their favorite podcast app, such as Spotify. Open the app, search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist. These are the posts in which I explain what is involved in being a Thinker, with a capital T, instead of a Feeler. By listening to them in order, you can, in under two hours, gain a full understanding of the Thinker concept.

In these posts I have distinguished between belief, disbelief, and nonbelief. In this post, though, I will focus my attention on the act of believing. It is tempting to think that belief is a binary, all-or-nothing phenomenon, but this view is mistaken. This is because belief “admits of degree.” Allow me to explain.

Belief is not like an old-fashioned light switch, either on or off. It is more like a modern dimmer switch that has degrees of “on-ness.” Or shifting the simile, it is like the wind. In the same way as wind has both a direction and a velocity, your beliefs have both content and a level of confidence. Consequently, whereas some people feel certain that Bigfoot exists, others think only that he might exist, while yet others think it highly unlikely that he exists.

Not only do we tend to think of beliefs as being binary, but when others indicate their level of confidence in a belief, we might be inclined to “round up” or “round down” when reporting their beliefs to others. We might, that is, reframe their belief in binary terms. By way of illustration, suppose someone tells us that they are “somewhat confident” that abortion is morally impermissible. We might subsequently describe them as “believing that abortion is morally impermissible” or, more bluntly, as being in the “pro-life camp.” In doing this, though, we will be misrepresenting their beliefs.

This “binary-belief bias” is unfortunate. What you believe matters, but how confident you are in the truth of a belief also matters. This is because your level of confidence will have an impact on whether and how you act on the basis of that belief, and if the belief that you are certain is true turns out to be mistaken, the consequences of acting on it can be disastrous, not only for you, but even more tragically for others who might not share your belief.

Is it ever appropriate to be absolutely certain of the truth of a belief? Yes, but only under special circumstances. We can, for example, be absolutely certain of the mathematical claim that 3 × 2 = 6. That claim is, after all, provable. We can likewise be certain of the truth of the logical claim that if a person is neither a golfer nor a bowler, then they aren’t a golfer. The same can be said of semantic claims, such as that there are no married bachelors. This is because bachelors are by definition unmarried.

Allow me to ask a personal question: Are the people you believe to be your biological parents in fact your biological parents? You might feel certain that they are, but if you think carefully, you will realize that this feeling of certainty is unjustified. It could be that they are in fact adoptive parents who misled you about your origin, perhaps because they thought that doing so would be in your best interests. Alternatively, the people who raised you could sincerely believe that they are your biological parents, but there could have been a mix-up at the hospital. Such things happen! The takeaway from this is that, outside of special areas—including math, logic, and semantics—there is precious little about which a thoughtful person will be absolutely certain.*

In general, your level of confidence in a claim should depend on the quantity and quality of the evidence that you have in support of it. A Thinker will realize as much. Consequently, if you ask whether they believe a claim, they might hesitate to give you a straight-out Yes or No answer, and might instead qualify their level of confidence: “Do I believe that the COVID pandemic resulted from a lab leak in China? There is a good chance that it did, but I am by no means certain.”

Thinkers’ tendency to qualify their level of certainty with respect to a claim will, for many people, be a turn-off. Given a choice between a Thinker who believes that there is “a good chance” that COVID is the result of a lab leak, and a YouTube pundit who is absolutely certain that COVID is caused by cell phone towers, they will be drawn to the pundit. Would he, after all, be that certain if his beliefs were mistaken? By way of contrast, Thinkers will instinctively distrust those who (outside of the special areas we have discussed) feel certain of the truth of the claims they are making. Although evidence-based reasoning can justify our being quite confident that our conclusions are correct, it can’t justify absolute certainty.

Although Thinkers will routinely qualify their level of confidence in a claim, they will typically be reluctant to quantify it. Suppose, for example, we ask whether they think a coin, when tossed, will come up heads. You might imagine that they would tell us that they are “50% confident” that it will, but this is unlikely. They will instead tell us that they are highly confident that there is a 50% chance that it will come up heads, which is an altogether different belief. And notice that they are unlikely to say that they are certain that there is a 50% chance, because they aren’t certain that the coin being tossed is fair.

We have seen that Thinkers will have very many nonbeliefs. When they do believe something, though, they will attach a level of confidence to that belief. Furthermore, Thinkers are perfectly willing to change their level of confidence in a belief if they come into possession of new evidence, if they come to question the reliability of old evidence, or if they discover that the reasoning that led them from evidence to their conclusion was flawed.

In an earlier post, I described a Thinker’s mindcleaning regimen. Its purpose is to find and “eradicate” their mistaken beliefs. In many cases, though, rather than eradicating a belief, a Thinker will adjust their level of confidence in it. They might also spend time and energy reassessing beliefs that they feel absolutely certain are true—again, outside of the special areas we have discussed.

*Descartes famously declared that “I think, therefore I am.” In saying this, he was not saying that the activity of thinking gave his life meaning. He was instead explaining how he could be certain of his existence—more precisely, of the existence of his mind: By the very act of thinking, he provided himself with compelling evidence of his existence. Indeed, by the very act of doubting his existence—“Maybe I don’t exist…”—he provided himself with compelling evidence of his existence. After all, a non-existent being couldn’t harbor such doubts. And to be clear, Descartes was not claiming that he could be certain of the existence of his body or even his brain. What he could be certain of (at least while he was thinking) was the existence of a “thinking thing,” namely, what we refer to as his mind. He also couldn’t be certain that other people have minds. That said, we would do well, in daily life, to assume that they do.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Want to listen to rather than read an essay? Open it on your mobile device’s Substack app and click on the listen button.

Paid subscribers can also listen to my initial 22 posts on their favorite podcast app, such as Spotify. Open the app, search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist. These are the posts in which I explain what is involved in being a Thinker, with a capital T, instead of a Feeler. By listening to them in order, you can, in under two hours, gain a full understanding of the Thinker concept.

Being reasonable means being reason-able—able, that is, to give reasons for holding the beliefs that we do, as well as for acting as we do. Thinkers (with a capital T) will be eminently reasonable. By definition, such individuals will rely on evidence-based reasoning in determining what to believe and how to act. As a result, if their beliefs or actions are challenged, their reasons will be ready at hand.

In contrast, Feelers (with a capital F) won’t reason their way to conclusions; they will feel their way. Stated metaphorically, instead of relying on their head to decide what to believe and what actions to take, they will rely on their heart and gut. The problem is that these organs are incapable of reasoning. Consequently, if we ask Feelers to justify their beliefs or actions, they will be at a loss to provide their reasons. They might say “Just because,” but that isn’t a reasoned response. They might also refuse to give their reasons—perhaps because they don’t have any to give?

Even though they have trouble justifying their beliefs, Feelers will often be emotionally attached to them. As a result, they might get upset or even angry if those beliefs are challenged. This might also be their response if we ask them to explain why they favor a certain course of action.

Suppose that, on being challenged, Thinkers are unable to come up with coherent, evidence-based justifications for their beliefs or actions. Under these circumstances, Thinkers won’t respond by getting upset or angry. They will instead rethink the belief or course of action we have challenged. They might also thank us for revealing their shortcoming. Thinkers, as we have seen, are intellectually humble. Their goal is not to maintain the appearance of infallibility; it is to optimize their mind by filling it, to the extent possible, with true and useful beliefs.

Before moving on, recall that the world isn’t neatly divided into Thinkers and Feelers. On the contrary, there is an intellectual spectrum, with Feelers at one end, Thinkers at the other, and most people somewhere in the middle, depending on the extent to which they feel or reason their way to conclusions.

That said, there are more people on the Feeler side of the spectrum than on the Thinker side. Stated bluntly, Feelers outnumber Thinkers. This is presumably because reasoning your way to conclusions requires more mental effort than feeling your way. Consequently, people are inclined to take the easy way out and feel rather than think their way to conclusions. Along similar lines, because it requires physical effort to exercise, adults who rarely exercise far outnumber those who routinely do so.

With respect to the intellectual spectrum, another comment is in order. There are no “pure Thinkers”—no people who exclusively reason their way to conclusions. Because of our evolutionary past, we humans are wired with an emotional element. We can take steps to reduce the influence it has on our beliefs and actions, but we cannot eliminate that influence. That said, “pure Feelers”—people who exclusively feel their way to conclusions—do exist; indeed, a month after your birth, you were one of them. Furthermore, if you slip into dementia, you might again become a pure Feeler.

Because Feelers outnumber them, Thinkers often find themselves having to deal with unreasonable people. This is difficult to do because the individuals in question won’t listen to reason; indeed, if we try to help them out by providing important information we think they lack, they might respond by cutting us off mid-sentence.

This would be bad enough, but Thinkers also have to deal with individuals who—despite being unreasonable (or maybe it’s because they are unreasonable?)—have acquired power over others. For Thinkers, such cases are the stuff of nightmares. They will have spent considerable time and energy developing their reasoning ability and might subsequently have used it to help other people rid themselves of mistaken beliefs, as well as abandon potentially ruinous courses of action. This reasoning ability will have become their superpower. On encountering unreasonable people who wield power, however, they are like Superman exposed to kryptonite. Their superpower will drain away.

Consider, then, the predicament of a Thinker whose life is being marred by an unreasonable person—maybe their boss, their caregiver in a nursing home, or—as improbable as it might sound—an elected official. This Thinker’s misery will be compounded by their feeling of powerlessness: “Why can’t people just be reasonable?” Why, indeed.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.

Want to listen to rather than read an essay? Open it on your mobile device’s Substack app and click on the listen button.

Paid subscribers can also listen to my initial 22 posts on their favorite podcast app, such as Spotify. Open the app, search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist. These are the posts in which I explain what is involved in being a Thinker, with a capital T, instead of a Feeler. By listening to them in order, you can, in under two hours, gain a full understanding of the Thinker concept.

On hearing this statistic, readers might form an unflattering mental image of me at work. I sit down at my keyboard. After 30 seconds of contemplation, I write—in the case of this essay—the word An. I then slip into thinking mode for another 30 seconds, at which point I write average. And so on.

Contrast this image with that of writers like Jack Kerouac, who relied on spontaneous prose to produce documents. Their fingers simply transcribed whatever ideas drifted through their minds, and they didn’t subsequently revise the resulting transcript. Here is a sample, taken from Kerouac’s novella The Subterraneans:

I was coming down the street with Larry O’Hara old drinking buddy of mine from all the times in San Francisco in my long and nervous and mad careers I’ve gotten drunk and in fact cadged drinks off friends with such “genial” regularity nobody really cared to notice or announce that I am developing or was developing, in my youth, such bad freeloading habits though of course they did notice but liked me and as Sam said “Everybody comes to you for your gasoline boy, that’s some filling station you got there” or say words to that effect ...

This, mind you, is only the beginning of a sentence that ends up being 300 words long. Enjoying such prose is, I think, an acquired taste.

Spontaneous prose is readily available on social media. It can take the form of long stream-of-consciousness rambles, in which an author presents readers with a list of what seem to be disconnected thoughts, leaving it to them to figure out the point of the list. More often, online spontaneous prose takes the form of pithy comments. These are the literary equivalent of Post-it Notes. If they are novel and insightful, they can play a useful social role, but most of them aren’t. If they seem novel and insightful to their author, it is likely evidence that the author isn’t well-read.

Although I avoid spontaneous prose, I find myself envying those who write it. By following in their literary footsteps, I could dramatically increase my productivity. I would be able to produce these essays, not in 8 hours but—by typing at 40 words per minute—in only 25 minutes. Think of all the free time generated! So why don’t I follow in their footsteps? Because I am convinced that the resulting document would be incoherent.

Instead of being spontaneous, my writing is meticulously planned. As a result, I spend far more time thinking about what I am going to write than I spend putting words on paper—or rather, on a monitor. As a Thinker, my goal in writing is not to impress or entertain people—it is to encourage them to think more and better than they currently do, and the most effective way to do this is by investing the time, energy, and thought necessary to produce prose that is coherent, reasonable, and persuasive.

I have described my writing process elsewhere. I start by doing research to construct an outline. During my research, this outline grows and evolves. New sections appear, and current sections gain material, get moved to another part of the outline, or in some cases get deleted. This process involves lots of trial and error. I try an approach, and if it doesn’t work, I abandon it and try another.

When this outline is finished, I transform it into prose. When writing a sentence, I am very much attuned to word choice: Of the many words I could use at a particular juncture, which works best? Answering this question used to mean consulting the dictionary, but these days, it is much easier to consult AI. (In doing this, I don’t, as I have explained, let it choose the word for me. I ask it to generate a list of words from which to choose.) I also think about ways readers could misconstrue a sentence and take steps to prevent this from happening. When all is said and done, I might have altered a single sentence a dozen times in the course of writing an essay.

I have argued that (serious) writing is thinking. I would likewise argue that (serious) writing is rewriting.

Besides examining individual sentences, I examine their relationship to other sentences. As a result, I might break sentences apart or combine them. I might also move a sentence elsewhere or delete it altogether.

When I think I am done with an essay, I have my computer read the document out loud to check the flow of my prose. I also use Claude as a test audience. I ask it to copyedit my essay. Besides checking my spelling, punctuation, and grammar, it has, on occasion, found inconsistencies in my reasoning and alerted me to blind spots in my research.

We have seen that I could dramatically increase my productivity by producing spontaneous prose. I don’t, because I fear that the prose in question would be incoherent. Realize that I could increase my productivity even more by asking Claude to play not the role of a research assistant, writing assistant, and copyeditor, but the role of a writer. I could prompt it to write an essay on a certain topic, and specify the length of that essay and its intended audience. In under a minute, the essay would be finished, and besides being coherent, it might be impressive.

And yet, I refuse to use AI in this manner. In a future essay, I will explain why.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here for narrations of my essays on “applied thinking.” Narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker are also available on your favorite podcast app. To play them, open that app and search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist.

Consider an American eighteen-year-old, let’s call her Olivia, who is about to enter college. She is faced with the question of how best to spend her college years. Among her options are studying, hanging out, and partying. It’s up to her to decide how much time to devote to each. If she’s going to college mainly to hang out and party, perhaps earning a degree along the way, what follows will likely be of little interest to her, but suppose her goal is instead to lay the foundation for a rewarding career. If this is the case, a bit of arithmetic is in order.

Suppose Olivia graduates from college at age 22. According to actuarial tables, she will probably live for 59 more years, to age 81. This is 516,840 hours, and if she sleeps eight hours a night, 344,560 of those hours will be spent in wakeful activity. Now imagine that Olivia goes on to have what used to be thought of as a traditional career, in which she works 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, until age 65. She will end up spending 86,000 of her 344,560 waking hours at work—25 percent of them. The other 75 percent will be spent doing other things, including personal care, driving, shopping, cooking, eating, recreational activities, and perhaps childcare and other family activities.

In college, Olivia will be required to take some courses, but she will also get to choose electives. The required courses will depend on what major she chooses. By taking them, she will be preparing for her career. Although the elective courses won’t be career-related, they can help her thrive as a human being during the three-out-of-four waking hours that she isn’t working. For this to happen, though, she must choose them thoughtfully.

Taking elective courses in the liberal arts, for example, can help her develop a philosophy of life. (I would love to plug philosophy at this point but, regrettably, much of what passes for philosophy—in the US, at any rate—is blissfully unconcerned with living a good life. An ethical life, yes; a good life, not so much.) She can also acquire general knowledge about how the world works by taking elective history and science courses. This general knowledge is important to anyone who wants to think rather than feel their way to conclusions. And not to be forgotten, she can cultivate tastes. I can appreciate art in large part because of the elective art history course I took. In retrospect, I wish I had also taken a course in poetry.

After college Olivia will, if things go as planned, have an abundance of leisure time. Yes, she can spend it playing Candy Crush on her phone—or worse, endlessly scrolling on TikTok—but that is the opposite of flourishing. The same can be said of falling into an opioid addiction.

Most of those reading this post won’t be 18-year-olds about to enter college. For these readers, the arithmetic will be different. Consider, for example, a woman, let’s call her Karen, who just retired at age 65. According to those same actuarial tables, she will probably live 20 more years, to age 85. If she sleeps 8 hours a night, she has 116,800 waking hours of life left, none of which will be spent working. That’s a lot of free time.

My advice to Karen is to keep track of how she is spending those precious hours and to spend some of those hours considering whether, in order to flourish rather than merely survive as a human being, there might be a better way to spend them. Maybe learn new things? Maybe acquire new skills and cultivate new tastes? Maybe develop a philosophy of life or improve her ability to deal with the setbacks that old age is likely to present? At this point, I can unhesitatingly put in a plug for Stoicism. For more on this, see my Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, along with my Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here for narrations of my essays on “applied thinking.” Narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker are also available on your favorite podcast app. To play them, open that app and search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist.

What Thinkers won’t do is use an AI chatbot as a ghostwriter. They won’t, for example, ask Claude to write an essay on a subject and then pass themselves off as the author of the resulting document.

In this essay, I will examine the process Thinkers will use when conducting a research project. Students are often taught that such projects should be done in three steps.

• In Step One, they research a topic. This might involve taking a trip to the library or, more likely, accessing the internet.

• In Step Two, they intellectually assimilate their research. They ponder it, looking for connections between the concepts and claims they have encountered, with the goal of gaining a solid understanding of their topic.

• In Step Three, they put this understanding into writing. Do this well, and their readers will be able to acquire a working understanding of the topic without themselves having to do outside research.

This way of proceeding seems eminently sensible. If you haven’t done research, how can you meaningfully think about a topic, and if you haven’t thought through a topic, how can you possibly write about it? Also, for novice writers, this is actionable advice. It is a literary recipe that, with some effort, they can follow. This is why high school teachers advocate the three-step procedure. (They teach students to write five-paragraph essays for much the same reason.) A serious cook, however, will want to move beyond microwaving frozen mac and cheese to put dinner on the table. In much the same way, a serious writer will want to move beyond the three-step research procedure I have described—as well as move beyond five-paragraph essays.

Thinkers will want to level up their writing. With these individuals in mind, I have reconsidered the traditional three-step research process and found it wanting. Yes, the process is easy to describe and teach, but it is an inefficient way to do research. Here’s why.

The three-step process assumes that the bulk of the thinking done in a research project takes place in Step Two, when in fact thinking will permeate the project. Consider Step One. Effective research requires focusing on a subject, and such focus requires considerable thought. Where should we turn for information? Is an information source reliable? Is confirmation bias causing us to overlook or even avoid important strands of evidence? Likewise, Step Three will require deep thought. This is because, as we shall soon see, writing is thinking.

Another problem with the traditional three-step process is that the steps are not discrete. Writing, for example, won’t be confined to Step Three; indeed, in Step One, we will likely make notes in the course of doing our research. They might take the form of a running list of the sources we use, the information we acquire from those sources, and the insights we gain along the way. This manner of proceeding is inefficient, however, since we will later be confronted with the task of organizing those notes.

It is much more efficient to organize our notes as we take them. This can be accomplished by incorporating those notes into an outline, the structure of which can be modified as we proceed. New headings and subheadings can be added. Sections can be moved or combined. Sections can also be deleted because we realize that, although they contain interesting material, it is not germane to the topic we are researching.

I routinely outline in conjunction with researching a topic. As a result, by the time I finish Step One, I am in possession of a thorough and well-organized outline which might, in the case of a book-length project, be tens of thousands of words long.

Proceeding in this manner lets me skip Step Two altogether. I can instead get to work transforming my outline into prose. This transformation, I should add, will require thinking; indeed, it is when most of my project-related thinking takes place. This is because, as the saying goes, “writing is thinking.” More generally, a case can be made that instead of thinking to decide what they should write, experienced authors will write in order to find out what they think.

Historian David McCullough is one such author: “When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.” He adds that “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” Many other authors report that they write to find out what they think. In his Writing to Learn, William Zinsser summarizes the situation nicely: “Writing is thinking on paper.”

Many novice writers, I suspect, will be baffled by such talk. For them, writing means recording on paper whatever thoughts might drift into their mind. Likewise, those I refer to as Feelers—people who feel rather than think their way to conclusions—will be baffled. This is because they don’t consult their head to find out what they believe. They instead consult their heart and gut. For them, writing means emoting onto paper—or, these days, on an online forum. Yes, they are authors, but one hesitates to describe them as serious.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here for narrations of my essays on “applied thinking.” Narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker are also available on your favorite podcast app. To play them, open that app and search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist.

When the research for a project is complete, a Thinker will resist the temptation to ask an AI chatbot to “write up” the results. (I will explore the reasons for this resistance in a future essay.) They will instead take on the task themselves—but might employ AI chatbots as “writing assistants.”

Along these lines, I routinely use Claude as a writing assistant; indeed, as I write this essay, my word-processing app is on the right side of the monitor, and the Pro version of Claude is on the left. I have “programmed” Claude to give particular responses to specific prompts. I have, for example, taught it that when I give a prompt consisting of a single word, I want it to return that word’s definition, its etymology, and a list of synonyms for it. I am asking it, in other words, to play the role of a dictionary. Here are some other prompt formats that I have developed.

• When a prompt starts with a ~ (tilde sign) followed by a single word, Claude should list antonyms for that word.

• When a prompt starts with a ? (question mark) followed by a sentence, Claude should check the grammar, spelling, and punctuation of that sentence. It should, in other words, play the role of a style manual.

• When a prompt has a / (forward slash) between two words or phrases, Claude should respond by explaining the difference, in terms of both denotation and connotation, between those words or phrases. Here, for example, is its response to the prompt “flout/flaunt”:

Flout means to defy openly and contemptuously, to treat a rule, law, or convention with scorn. You flout the speed limit, flout convention, flout an order. The object is almost always something that claims authority over you.

Flaunt means to display ostentatiously, to show off. You flaunt your wealth, your learning, your new car. The object is something you possess and want noticed.

So the two verbs describe different attitudes toward different objects: flouting is contempt directed at a constraint, flaunting is display directed at an audience.

• When a prompt starts with an @ (at sign) followed by a claim, Claude should assess the truth of that claim. If Claude tells me that it is false, I will carefully reconsider it, and if it tells me that it is true but potentially misleading, I will likely reword the claim.

• When a prompt starts with a > (greater-than sign) followed by a word or phrase, Claude should respond by providing a list of other ways to say that word or phrase. Although this is the prompt I use most often, I almost never copy and paste from the list that it provides—which might contain twenty items. Why bother, then? Because doing so makes it easier for me to fine-tune my sentences. As I scan the variants it provides, I might realize that I have become fixated on a particular way of expressing a thought. By exposing myself to alternatives, I can shake that fixation.

Realize that Claude didn’t come preprogrammed with these prompts. I had to instruct it regarding what I wanted it to do “from now on.” You can do this as well, with your own needs in mind.

On completing a document, I have my computer read it aloud to me. I do this because I have discovered that my ears are much better at judging “flow” than my eyes are. In a good piece of writing, readers will feel as if they are skating on perfect ice. They can glide from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next. [I leave it to my readers to determine whether I have accomplished this goal in this post.]

I then ask Claude to copyedit my essay—but before I go any further, clarification is in order. If a first-time Claude user asks it to copyedit a document, Claude will perform what, according to its training, counts as copyediting. It will also return a “polished” version of the document, ready for submission or publication.

I have instructed Claude that when I ask it to “copyedit” a document, I don’t want it to rely on its “preprogrammed” notion of copyediting. I instead want it to process my document the way a human copyeditor—one who works for a periodical or book publisher—would. Just so there is no confusion, I explain that I want it to return not a polished version of the document, but a marked-up version in which, paragraph by paragraph, it:

• points out errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage

• points out redundancy, along with inconsistencies in hyphenation, capitalization, and treatment of numbers

• points out mixed metaphors, along with any literary tics of which I might be blissfully unaware, such as overusing the word “indeed”

• points out non-parallel construction

• suggests ways to streamline sentences

• does light fact-checking

I also specify what I don’t want it to do. In particular, I don’t want it to tell me what I am doing right; I want it to tell me what I am doing wrong. Also, I don’t want it to tell me what a wonderful writer I am or how wonderful my essay is. Whereas Feelers will bask in this praise, Thinkers will distrust it. They know that AI companies have an incentive to make their chatbots obsequious, since this behavior is likely to retain users.

When Claude returns its critique of my work, I go through my manuscript paragraph by paragraph, reflecting on its comments. In some cases, it is clear that Claude simply doesn’t understand what I am up to, in which case I move on to the next comment. In many cases, however, Claude will have detected a blemish or outright flaw in my writing. In such cases, I will happily make the changes it has recommended. The key thing is that I am not letting Claude write on my behalf; I am responding to its critique of my writing and deciding for myself whether—and how—to address a criticism.

At this point, readers who are hostile to AI might object that a “real writer” won’t need a copyeditor. Such an individual will be an expert speller and grammarian, as well as a walking embodiment of, say, The Chicago Manual of Style. This, however, is not the case. Conventional publishers not only assume that submitted writing will benefit from copyediting but require that it be copyedited. Almost without exception, authors are happy to have their work copyedited. They don’t, after all, want some smart-aleck critic commenting on their use of an em dash (—) where an en dash (–) was called for.

In the course of my literary career, I have dealt with many copyeditors. I would judge Claude’s copyediting to be first-rate. It also has one big advantage over human copyediting. You can give Claude a document to copyedit at 3 a.m. on a Sunday, and it will uncomplainingly and efficiently get the job done in a matter of minutes. How cool is that!

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here for narrations of my essays on “applied thinking.” Narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker are also available on your favorite podcast app. To play them, open that app and search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist.

A year ago, my use of AI could be described as sporadic. Since then, I have become increasingly reliant on it. At this point, deprive me of AI, and I would experience the writing equivalent of withdrawal. I would continue to write, but my productivity would decline; so, likely, would the quality of my writing. In this post, I will describe the role AI currently plays in doing research for my More Better Thinking essays, and in my next post, I will describe the role it plays in putting that research into words.

There was a time when doing research had a distinctly physical component. It meant going to a library, visiting its card catalog, and walking into the stacks—only to discover, in many cases, that the resource you needed was checked out. The advent of the internet rendered such trips unnecessary. If you had a computer with an internet connection, you could access books and articles from the comfort of your home—or maybe even while lying in bed, if you had a laptop. You could also access web pages devoted to providing information about a variety of topics. The first web page appeared on August 6, 1991, but within a few years there were thousands of them. This proliferation gave rise to search engines that let users find sites with information of interest. These engines were the technological successors of card catalogs.

Although search engines were useful, they had shortcomings. You might explore a promising site, only to discover that it didn’t provide the information you needed. You might then explore other sites, only to realize that they, too, were dead ends. An hour later, you might abandon your search, empty handed. More optimistically, suppose that the first site that appeared in your search results provided exactly the information you were looking for. At that point, you might be tempted to terminate your search—but what if other sites had contrary information? Maybe more research was in order?

The advent of AI chatbots has simplified online research. Instead of personally accessing and exploring websites, you can ask a chatbot to access promising sites on your behalf, filter out the dead ends, and summarize the information it turns up. If sites disagree, it will tell you as much, leaving it to you to decide which site to believe. Research that previously might have taken hours could be done in seconds. Much as search engines displaced card catalogs, chatbots are displacing search engines.

At this point, some readers will be raising their eyebrows. Am I condoning the use of AI chatbots as vehicles for serious research? They have, after all, a reputation for being not just wrong but laughably so. This was certainly the case when ChatGPT appeared late in 2022. Since then, however, chatbots have improved dramatically. If you haven’t used a chatbot in years—or if you are annoyed by Google’s transformation from a search engine that provides website links into an “answer engine” that gives you an “AI Overview”—you owe it to yourself to give AI chatbots a second chance. Two that I can (currently) recommend are Claude.ai and Gemini.google.com. In doing the research for this essay, I relied on the Pro versions of each chatbot.

Other readers might point out that even though AI chatbots make fewer mistakes than they used to, they still make them—which is why any serious author should be reluctant to rely on them. I would respond to those raising this objection by challenging them to recommend what they take to be infallible sources of information. Notice that even websites maintained by experts make mistakes. The same can be said of print media, including peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Thinkers will strive to minimize the number of mistakes they make in their writing, but they will do so in a pragmatic manner. If they are writing for a medical journal, they will take great care to avoid making mistakes. After all, people’s lives might depend on their being right. They will also take care to indicate their level of confidence in the results they report.

If they are writing for a general audience, however, they might relax their standards for accuracy. I did just that when, earlier in this essay, I asserted that “it has been estimated that a quarter of self-published books are AI-generated.” I could simply have said “many self-published books.” I could also have provided the percentages that different studies have reported, along with explanations of how they obtained their results. I considered these options, but concluded that for my intended audience, “a quarter” did the job adequately.

So will Thinkers use AI chatbots as research assistants? Yes, but they will do so with care. As I have explained in earlier posts, Thinkers will also use AI chatbots to stress-test their beliefs and might even consult them before voting. At the same time, Thinkers will readily acknowledge that although AI chatbots are currently reliable—albeit imperfect—sources of information, we shouldn’t assume that this will always be the case. In particular, we might be experiencing what I have referred to as our AI honeymoon. My advice: Enjoy it while it lasts.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here for narrations of my essays on “applied thinking.” Narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker are also available on your favorite podcast app. To play them, open that app and search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist.

People can be so annoying. They fail to thank us for all the things we do for them. They cut us off in traffic or take the parking space that, to our way of thinking, is rightfully ours. In the middle of a conversation with us, they might start looking at their phone. They might also insult or belittle us.

As a result of repeated encounters with annoying individuals, we might be tempted to withdraw from society. We might become a recluse, living among other people but keeping our interactions with them to a minimum. In an extreme case, we might decide to abandon humanity and retreat into the wilderness to live the life of a hermit.

Most people would find it emotionally difficult to take such measures. As I have explained, our minds have been wired by evolutionary processes. More precisely, they were wired so that behaviors that increased our ancestors’ chances of surviving and reproducing felt good, while behaviors that reduced those chances felt bad. This is why it feels good for contemporary humans to have sex or eat sweet foods, and why it feels bad for them to get cut or burned.

On the savannas of Africa, where our ancestors acquired this wiring, a solitary individual would likely perish. Meanwhile, those who sought out the company of other people and cooperated with them were much more likely to survive and reproduce. We were therefore wired so that being around other people—and gaining social status within a group—felt good, while a solitary existence felt bad. As a result, we are by nature social beings. We can get along without other people for a time, but we will probably spend our solitude thinking about and maybe even longing for them, and will take delight on being reunited with them. A case can be made that to flourish as human beings, we must be in regular contact with other people.

Here is another way to think about this. For our body to stay healthy, we need vitamins. If our diet is deficient in vitamin A, we will experience night blindness and, eventually, total blindness. If our diet is deficient in vitamin C, we will experience scurvy. Thus, consumption of vitamins is essential for our physical health. For us to flourish in life, though, we also need to maintain our emotional health. This is where vitamin P comes into play. And before I continue, some history is in order.

In the 1930s, Albert Szent-Györgyi and his colleagues discovered what they took to be a new vitamin. They dubbed it vitamin P, with the P standing for “permeability.” Nutritionists later determined that the compounds in question didn’t check the boxes necessary to count as a vitamin; in particular, they were not essential for normal function and their absence did not cause a specific disease. Today, nutritionists refer to the compounds that caught the attention of Szent-Györgyi as flavonoids. They are readily available in a balanced diet. They can also be bought as dietary supplements, with some sellers referring to them, misleadingly, as “vitamin P.”

But back to my theme. When I refer to vitamin P, I have in mind neither chemical compounds nor dietary supplements. For me, the “P” stands for people. Interaction with them is essential if we are to maintain our emotional health, which in turn is essential if we are to flourish as human beings. Realize that you obtain your vitamin P, in my sense of the term, not at a grocery or health-food store; you get it by interacting with other people. Realize, too, that in the act of obtaining vitamin P, you provide it to those you interact with. Isn’t this incredible?

Having stretched the concept of a vitamin, let me stretch the concept of an allergy. Most people are allergic to poison ivy. Some people are allergic to cats—more precisely, to the Fel d 1 protein in cat dander. There is also evidence suggesting that people can be allergic to other people’s dander.

These are biological allergies. I would like to suggest, however, that psychological allergies are also possible. In particular, we can be allergic not just to other people’s dander but to their personalities. When you are with them, you find yourself itching to get away, and even after you have escaped, you have negative thoughts about the encounter. In an extreme case, you might lie awake at night, thinking about things they said and did.

If you have a biological allergy, you can take specific steps to deal with it. You can, for example, learn how to identify poison ivy so you can avoid it. You can also avoid cats—unless your partner is a cat lover, in which case you will have to get more resourceful. A similar strategy can be used if you are psychologically allergic to a person. You can avoid them, and when circumstances put you in contact with them, you can come up with a reason to keep the contact short. But what if the person is, say, a coworker with whom you are forced to interact on a daily basis? One useful psychological strategy is to remind yourself that they didn’t choose their personality—no more than you chose yours. As you go about your daily business, you are just being you. So are they.

One last tip for dealing with people to whom you are allergic: It is possible—not likely, I know, but possible—that there are people who are allergic to you. You want to get along with other people? Then go along with them, and hope they do the same for you.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here.

Although Thinkers will readily admit that science is imperfect, they will be staunch advocates of the scientific method. If we ask them to defend this advocacy, they might point to the incredible progress we have made since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. We have ready access to things that were beyond the wildest imaginings of those who lived in 1600. We have electricity, radio, and radar. We have X-rays, antibiotics, and anesthesia. We can travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours rather than days, weeks, or even months. We have, in our pockets, cell phones capable of playing music, recording hi-res videos, and letting us have conversations with someone on the other side of the globe. Without the implementation of the scientific method, none of this would have been possible.

As I have explained elsewhere, we should do our best to stay grounded in reality, since doing so increases our chances of correctly predicting the future, so we can affect it in a way that increases our chances of having a good life. Although the scientific method is imperfect, employing it is the best way for us to accomplish this goal.

At this point, readers might recognize that they should stay abreast of scientific research, but at the same time they might feel overwhelmed by the task of evaluating scientific studies. One way to ease this task is to acquire a basic understanding of the different kinds of research that scientists do.

In observational studies, scientists look for correlations between characteristics. They might, for example, investigate whether smokers are more likely to get cancer than nonsmokers. If this is the case, there will be a positive correlation between smoking and cancer. Alternatively, they might investigate whether users of fluoridated toothpaste are less likely to get cavities than users of unfluoridated toothpaste. If this is the case, there will be a negative correlation between brushing with fluoridated toothpaste and getting cavities. Realize, however, that such studies can at best establish the existence of correlations and that from such correlations, we cannot infer causation.

Unfortunately, the press often writes about links rather than correlations when reporting the findings of an observational study: “Scientists Discover Link Between Smoking and Cancer.” The word link is ambiguous: It can refer either to a correlation or to a causal relationship. Thinkers realize as much and will therefore avoid talking about links and will ask for clarification when other people use the word.

To establish causation, we can’t simply observe the world; we must change it in some way and then see what happens—stated succinctly, we must do an experiment. In chemistry, this might mean adding baking soda to vinegar. If the chemicals subsequently fizz, we can safely conclude that combining them caused the fizzing.

Proving that fluoridated toothpaste prevents cavities will require a more elaborate experiment. We will start by obtaining a random sample of people from a population. We will then randomly divide these experimental subjects into two groups. Those in the test group will use fluoridated toothpaste daily, while those in the control group will use unfluoridated toothpaste only. We will subsequently keep track of how many cavities members of the two groups get. If those in the test group get fewer, there will not only be a (negative) correlation between using fluoridated toothpaste and developing cavities, but we will also be able to conclude that the reduction was caused by the use of fluoridated toothpaste.

Suppose that instead of finding out whether fluoridated toothpaste prevents cavities, we wanted to find out whether taking a capsule of powdered mummy could alleviate the pain patients experience after a tooth extraction. (Yes, you read that right: a capsule of powdered mummy. This sounds far-fetched, but at one time, consumption of powdered mummies was thought to cure a wide range of maladies.) To perform this experiment, we would select a random sample of dental patients who had undergone tooth extraction, randomly divide them into test and control groups, and give mummy pills to those in the test group but not to those in the control group. We would then assess the pain these patients subsequently experienced.

So far, so good, but there’s a complication. It could be that the patients in the test group experience less pain, not for a pharmacological but for a psychological reason. In particular, they might feel less pain because they believe that mummy pills are effective. This is an example of the placebo effect, and to neutralize it, researchers will give mummy pills to those in the test group and give identical-looking dummy pills—filled with an inert substance—to those in the control group. They will also keep members of the two groups in the dark about which pill they are getting. The resulting experiment will be subject-blind.

Whereas experimental subjects run the risk of experiencing the placebo effect, experimenters run the risk of falling victim to confirmation bias. More precisely, when they assess how much pain patients are experiencing, they run the risk of unconsciously downplaying the pain experienced by the test patients and exaggerating that experienced by the control patients. To prevent this from happening, experimenters will take steps to stay in the dark about which patient is in which group until the results of the experiment have been recorded. Do this, and their experiment will be double-blind.

We can’t establish the causal efficacy of medical treatments by doing observational studies. We must instead do experiments—ideally, ones that are randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled.

Suppose that the above-described experiment revealed that mummy pills were remarkably effective in reducing the pain that patients experienced after tooth extractions. Suppose, too, that these results were published in a leading peer-reviewed medical journal. Would Thinkers finally be satisfied?

Probably not. They know that, as surprising as it may seem, many published scientific studies can’t be replicated. They also agree with American sociologist Marcello Truzzi’s observation that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” They will therefore wait until the mummy-pill experiment has been replicated by different groups, perhaps multiple times. Only then will they become mummy-pill advocates.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here

As you get older, you will be asked to take medical tests. First comes a colonoscopy, maybe at age 45, and when you turn 65, your doctor might start giving you a cognitive assessment, informally referred to as a dementia test. President Trump took one in 2018 and got a perfect 30 out of 30 points. He took it again in 2025, with the same perfect score. In his terminology, he aced it. This week he went in for more medical tests but a cognitive exam apparently wasn’t included.

I will be honest: Trump is aging well. At 79, he is still playing golf. He is also making trips to distant places involving considerable jet lag, but remains functional on arriving. And while not traveling, he can cope with what looks like a demanding schedule. Although I am six years younger, I’m not sure I could keep up with him.

With aging comes memory loss. In my case, it is a curiously selective process. Although I am able to remember the detailed structure of a seventy-thousand-word manuscript, I have to rely on Google maps to go to a store that five years ago I would have driven to “on autopilot.” Part of the reason is that I don’t go out nearly as much as I used to. Instead, I stay home and write. Memory loss at an advanced age is inevitable, and given that I have limited capacity for memory, it seems wise to “spend it” on things that matter to me. At this point, writing matters much more than navigating my city.

My mother had dementia, and because she lived nearby, I was a frequent visitor. On one visit, I watched her take a cognitive exam in which she was asked to identify a crudely drawn rhinoceros. She misidentified it as a pterodactyl—which, if you have to misidentify it, is a pretty impressive misidentification, particularly on the part of someone who graduated from high school in a logging town in Montana and didn’t subsequently attend college.

Some medical tests require preparation. Before taking a blood test, for example, you might be required to fast. And before taking a colonoscopy, you will not only have to refrain from eating solid food but have to drink an inordinate amount of fluid. Patients can also come up with their own preparation routine, with the goal of “improving” their test results. When they are scheduled to take a blood test for cholesterol, for example, they might stop eating eggs.*

I did something like this when, a few months ago, I was scheduled to have a cognitive exam. I was aware that Trump had received a perfect score on his, and for reasons that I don’t fully understand, I took myself to be in competition with him. I therefore spent some time “studying for” the test. More precisely, I thought about questions that I had been asked on the tests I had taken in the past and reflected on how best to answer them:

• If they asked if I knew where I was, I would say, “Right here, of course!”

• If they asked what day of the week it was, along with the date, month, and year, I would complain that as a retired person, my days are pretty much alike, meaning that I don’t really need to know these things. And if I did—well, that’s what cell phones are for.

• If they asked me to spell “world” backward, I would respond with a “cognitive pun”: “Do you mean D-L-R-O-W or D-E-L-R-I-H-W?”

• If they asked me to draw a clock showing a time of 10 past 11, I would respond with a request for clarification: “Do you want a digital or analog clock?”

This is all very clever, I thought, but what if they were having a bad day? Did I really want to run the risk of annoying the person who was assessing my cognitive ability? I subsequently decided that it would be wise to keep my jokes to a minimum.

I also started thinking about my motivation for coming up with them. I suspect that it was a desire to provide my inquisitors with extra evidence that I wasn’t demented. I also suspect that a deep-seated fear lurked behind this desire. As someone who identifies as a Thinker, I am frightened by the prospect that my rational powers will someday fail me—that the aging process will transform me into the pure Feeler I started out as.

When test day came, I realized that I wasn’t being asked the questions I had expected. It turns out that there are two commonly-used cognitive tests, the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). Both have 30 as a perfect score, but the questions they use to determine that score are different. In recent years, I had been taking the MMSE, but this time the doctor was giving me the MoCA.

I was therefore surprised when my doctor gave me five rather than three words to memorize—and even more surprised that I was able to remember them.

I was also surprised when she asked me to count backward from 100 by 7. For me, this was no challenge, inasmuch as I do backward subtraction whenever I need to distract my restless mind in the middle of the night.** Another way I mentally distract myself is by making a mental list of the people who have been president while I have been alive. There are fourteen of them, starting with Truman. (I doubt that Trump does this, but if he did, his list would be the same as mine—and silver lining, he would appear on it twice!)

Another surprise was when I was asked to come up with words that begin with F, but not names of people or countries, with a time limit of one minute. This sounds easy, but try doing it under pressure, when your mental acuity is being tested. By the end of the minute, I had come up with only eleven words, one of which was “flatulence.” Like I say, I was desperate.

At the end of the test, the doctor informed me that I had done quite well, coming only one point short of a perfect score. “One more F-word would have done it,” she said. On hearing this, a twelfth F-word immediately came to mind, and in case you are wondering, that word wasn’t “fudge.”

These more-and-better-thinking posts usually have a specific takeaway, but I’m not sure this one does. Maybe the lesson is that even Thinkers can be too clever by half.

*Such steps are arguably misguided. For one thing, egg consumption does not appear to have a substantial impact on blood cholesterol. Also, for the test to provide medically useful information, you should eat as close to your regular diet as you can before taking the test.

**Instead of counting back from 100 by 7s, I count back from 147 by 3s, allowing only one subtraction per breath. Sometimes I am asleep before reaching 100. If you also have a restless mind at night, maybe you want to give this a try? And maybe Trump could do this instead of spending the night cranking out texts filled with ALL CAPS?

Thinkers might not deem this claim worthy of their attention—they have more important things to think about—but if they do investigate it, their first step will be to figure out what, exactly, is being claimed. To do this, they will ask a number of questions:

• Do you in fact need to drink 64 (= 8 x 8) ounces of water a day to stay healthy?

• If this is the case, do you need to drink that water in eight separate acts, or can you instead drink smaller amounts of water more often or greater amounts less often?

• Do you need to drink the water from glasses, or would cups or thermoses be just as effective?

• Does the water you drink have to be “straight,” or can it be mixed with other things? Can it, for example, come in the form of Kool-Aid, lemonade, coffee, beer, wine, or milk (which is 87% water)?

• Can you eat rather than drink the water, say by eating watermelon (which is 92% water) or cucumber (which is 96% water)?

Having gotten clear on what, exactly, is being claimed, Thinkers might track down the source of the claim. Turn to Google Books Ngram Viewer, and they will find that the phrase “eight glasses of water a day” was first used in 1907, that its use peaked in 1998, and that it has subsequently declined. This sounds plausible. At the turn of the millennium, it wasn’t unusual for people to carry around a bottle of water.

Continue their research, and Thinkers might encounter the water consumption recommendation that the U.S. National Research Council’s Food and Nutrition Board released in 1945. It recommended daily consumption of 64 ounces of water. It didn’t, however, speak in terms of drinking eight 8-ounce glasses of water; indeed, the 64 ounces included the water obtained by eating foods. Thinkers will also discover that the current scientific consensus is that how much water you should consume in a day depends on a number of factors. In particular, you need more water if

• You are sweating, as the result of exercising, having a fever, or being out in the heat.

• You are in a dry environment. This will be the case if you are in a desert or at altitude. (Jet airplanes, which routinely fly at more than 30,000 feet, typically pressurize their cabins to 8,000 feet, meaning that it makes sense to drink additional water on a plane flight, even though you aren’t hot or physically active.)

• You are a child or an older adult.

More recent research indicates that adult men and women typically require a total daily water intake from all foods and liquids of 125 and 91 ounces, respectively. It also indicates that adult men and women typically have a total daily water intake of 117 and 93 ounces, respectively. Consequently, despite what “they say,” you probably don’t need to supplement your diet with additional water—and certainly not with 64 ounces of additional water.

Nevertheless, there are circumstances under which you should make a point of drinking more water, such as if you are exercising in the heat. You should also monitor your body’s hydration signals. If you are thirsty, drink water; likewise if your urine is amber or brownish.

So much for water. What about apples? Consider the claim that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” This advice has been circulating since at least 1913, and it seems to be a repackaging of a less memorable rhyming adage dating back to 1866: “Eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”

Is this sound medical advice? Despite being 86% water, apples have nutritional value. They don’t contain as many minerals and vitamins as many other fruits, but they can be a significant source of fiber, especially if you eat the peel. In 2015, however, scientists found that consumption of apples was not statistically associated with a reduction in the number of visits to a doctor.

Like the advice to “drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day,” the advice to “eat an apple a day” is both memorable and repeatable. A medically sounder bit of advice, however, would be to “eat lots of fruit.” Although it is admirable for its brevity, it doesn’t rhyme, and as a result it has as little chance of going viral as, say, the exhortation to “think more and better.” Sigh!

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here for narrations of my essays on “applied thinking.” Narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker are also available on your favorite podcast app. To play them, open that app and search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist.

Emojis play an important role in today’s communication landscape. They include happy faces, sad faces, and angry faces; praying hands, hands with thumbs up, and hands with thumbs down; and not to be forgotten, eggplants, tacos, and poop. For most of human history, people had no need for emojis, but now they are ubiquitous in texts and emails. How come?

To answer this question, we need to reflect on the difference between spoken and written language. In spoken language, we can easily express emotion. Consider the word “really.” Depending on how we say it, the word can express certainty, but it can instead indicate skepticism. If we can see a speaker, we can also take their facial expression and body language into account in assessing the emotional content of their utterance—something impossible to do in written communication.

The advent of email and texting has dramatically decreased our dependence on in-person communication. We instead exchange typed messages in which it can be difficult for the reader to discern the intent of the writer. Was a comment meant as a joke, or was it an insult? This led one computer scientist to suggest, in 1982, that those using his department’s electronic bulletin board employ the characters :-) to indicate that they were joking. The idea caught on, and the emoticon was born.

In the late 1990s, emoticons were supplanted by emojis, at first in Japan and then globally. Rather than being “abstract pictures” constructed with ASCII characters the way emoticons were, emojis were tiny pictures, designed to be used in cell phone texting. These static emojis have subsequently been supplemented with animated emojis: In addition to the heart emoji, for example, there is the visibly-beating-heart emoji.

The advent of the graphical user interface (GUI) in the 1980s gave rise to icons, which performed a different function than emoticons or emojis. The latter could be sprinkled into an email or text to indicate the writer’s emotional state or intent. By way of contrast, icons were virtual buttons that, when pressed, made something happen, such as opening a file or launching an app.

Before 2009, Facebook users could add a thumbs-up emoji 👍 to a post. In that year, a thumbs-up icon (also known as a “Like button”) was introduced. Although the icon resembled the emoji, it had a different function. Clicking on the Like button incremented a counter that was publicly visible. Clicking on it also had an impact on the algorithm Facebook used to determine what content you and other users were exposed to.

This brings us to the icons that appear in Substack posts and notes. Here is what currently appears at the bottom of a Substack post:

The heart on the left is a heart icon, not a heart emoji. The other three icons allow you to comment on, restack, and share the post.

The appearance of the heart icon here seems arbitrary. Why use a heart icon rather than a thumbs-up icon? This would be useful if, although you didn’t love a post, you liked or at least approved of it. And why not add a thumbs-down icon with which to indicate that you disliked a post?

In response to these suggestions, the powers-that-be at Substack might argue that they have limited space to work with and that they want to maintain a positive vibe among users, which can be accomplished by forcing them to characterize their approval of a post as loving it rather than merely liking it, and by not allowing them to express their dislike of a post.

I realize that there isn’t a lot of available space for icons, but there is room for one more, and the icon in question would maintain a “positive vibe.” As an aspiring Thinker, I propose the addition of a “brain icon”:

People would click this icon when they found a post to be both thoughtful and thought-provoking. They would, in essence, be declaring that “It made me think.” The current Substack icon layout is Feeler friendly. It helps users find things that other people like. Thinkers are unimpressed by what people like, though. What interests them is posts that, by exposing them to new information and encouraging them to rethink their current beliefs, help them attain their mind-optimization goal.

Realize that it would be possible for a Thinker, after reading a post, to hit both the heart and brain icons. This would be the case if they enjoyed reading a thought-provoking post. In other cases, though, they might hit only the brain icon, for the simple reason that they did not like discovering that a long-held belief was in fact mistaken, or that they were in the grips of confirmation bias. Ouch! At the same time, however, they would understand that in the long run, the benefits of abandoning mistaken beliefs and overcoming confirmation bias would more than make up for this initial discomfort.

To the Substack powers-that-be: I would love it if you took my brain-button suggestion seriously. ❤❤❤

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here for narrations of my essays on “applied thinking.” Narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker are also available on your favorite podcast app. To play them, open that app and search for “Thinking More and Better,” and add episodes to your playlist.