Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine - by Bryan Caplan
ISBN: 9798337850184Date read: 2024-10-18
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Collection of various essays from an interesting thinker with surprising perspectives. Read the notes for a sampling.
my notes
We know what the right path is, but don’t take it because it’s too hard.
“Sorry, I can’t come to your party.” This common excuse is almost always literally false.
The truth is “It’s too costly for me” or “I don’t feel like it”.
We lie when the truth sounds bad.
If you’re depressed despite great career success, try some experiments in living.
Perhaps you’ll be miserable whatever you do. But if you’ve only experienced one narrow lifestyle, how do you know?
Maybe you’d feel better if you tried putting friendship or hobbies above “achievement.”
Think twice before asking anyone for help.
Make your request easy to refuse.
“How would you feel about…” is much better than “Please, please just do me this one favor!”
Live in a beautiful bubble.
Don’t feel the least bit bad about it.
Wall yourself off from society. It’s dreary, insipid, ugly, boring, wrong.
Make your small corner of the world beautiful in your eyes.
Leave the security of your Bubble to walk the earth, but do so as a tourist.
Hunt for the best that a society has to offer.
It’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
How to create a Beautiful Bubble:
Don’t get angry at strangers.
Stop paying attention to things that aggravate you unless they concretely affect your life.
Stop following national and world news.
Pay less frequent attention to what’s going on out there. Read history books, not newspaper articles.
Emotionally distance yourself from people you personally know who aggravate you.
“Money doesn’t buy happiness” clashes with the obvious fact that money CAN buy happiness.
Buy your way out of unpleasant chores by hiring other people to do them.
Use your money to build and maintain your Beautiful Bubble.
If you don’t have clear and convincing evidence that doing something is better than doing nothing, do nothing.
Bet on (or retract) any public statement.
Unfollow pundits who refuse to put their money their mouths are.
Exposure therapy: face your fears.
Deliberate exposure to a feared stimulus, until the intensity of distress recedes.
Continue until the experience or imagination has become less frightening.
Being single is more expensive than being married.
Married people cut their total housing costs, the total cost of furniture, appliances.
Impulsive and short-sighted people tend to mess up their life in every way.
They don’t invest in their career or relationships.
Why pack for the same trip twice?
Permanently store one trip’s worth of supplies at each destination you often repeatedly visit.
How would you like it if someone you depended on kept trying to change you?
You have little effect on your child’s intelligence, success, or even character.
But you have a genuine effect on his appreciation of you - how he feels about and remembers you.
Expressing anger at your children is counter-productive.
It undermines your authority and gives wayward children hope of besting you.
“I’m your parent, not your friend” should mean “I’ll treat you better than any friend ever will.”
Read Judith Harris’ The Nurture Assumption.
I love education too much to respect the mediocre substitutes that schools actually offer.
Most educators are boring. They fail to bring the liveliest of subjects to life.
Marxism is no more a merit good than creation science, the thoughts of economically illiterate 19th-century hate-mongers.
Education is only good when experienced by appreciating minds.
Institute for Humane Studies’ summer seminars: They’re beautiful.
Self-selected students from around the world show up and happily participate. The students receive no academic credit, just a week of learning, sharing, and debating mind-blowing ideas.
Even when students remember something with practical applications, they still usually fail to apply what they know, unless you explicitly tell them to do so.
If filling my students with life-long knowledge were my top priority:
I’d replace my thoughtful lectures with catechisms.
I’d make the students chant aloud with me.
I’d break every lesson into baby steps, and drive the students to master them one by one.
How? I’d randomly and mercilessly put students on the spot, pressing them to apply the lesson aloud - and correct the slightest misstep.
We’d meet seven days a week for half an hour, endlessly recapping what we’ve learned.
Almost all good colleges impose an admission requirement of 3-4 years of foreign language instruction.
A teacher is an entertainer or a failure.
Unschoolers have only one obvious problem. They’re weak in math!
Anyone who wants to pursue a vast range of high-status occupations requires math.
Math is extremely unfun for almost everyone.
I’ve done piles of math, yet I’ve never really liked it.
Math is highly cumulative. Each major stage of math builds on the foundation of the previous stages.
Unschooling + Math:
Every day, like it or not, you have to do 1-2 hours of math.
No matter how boring you find the subject, you’re too young to decide that you don’t want to pursue a career that requires math.
And if you postpone the study of math for long, it will be too late to start later on.
Never preach to the choir.
Each essay is a persuasive case to the reader who doesn’t initially agree with you.
Economics is inherently advisory.
Get quality of converts, not quantity.
If your main goal is to convince as many people as possible, you naturally focus on emotional appeals - especially to anger, fear, and disgust. Everyone feels these emotions, so everyone’s a potential convert. Don’t bother anticipating and answering the best objections to your views. Just troll!
If your main goal is to improve the intellectual quality, do the opposite.
Start by urging your allies to calm down, because anger, fear, and disgust impede careful reasoning.
Then offer better arguments - and more reasonable conclusions.
The few who remain will be better thinkers and better people.
Don’t think less of people who sincerely disagree.
Do think less of people who insincerely agree.
Do think less of people who think less of people who sincerely disagree.
Lancelot:
“Your rage has unbalanced you. You, sir, would fight to the death, against a knight who is not your enemy. Over a stretch of road you could easily ride around.”
Arthur:
“So be it. To the death!”
Lost friends to misunderstandings or malevolence?
Difference between malevolence and misunderstanding?
Imagine both sides calmly describe what happened to a neutral outsider.
If the outsider would tell both sides to forget the dispute and stay friends, you had a misunderstanding.
If the outsider would say, “This is a bad match,” you still had a misunderstanding; just one that’s likely to recur.
But if the outsider would tell one of you, “Get away from this toxic person,” it’s malevolence.
The main reason misunderstandings arise is because most human beings rush to assume malevolence.
Adults remain prone to misinterpret mere misunderstandings as malevolence.
Mighty social and political movements that angrily strive to amplify this error – to ascribe malevolence recklessly.
The Me Too movement is the highest-profile example.
Me Too scandals deserve the consideration: “Maybe it’s all a big misunderstanding.”
If you can’t wait to scoff, “So the Nazis just had a big misunderstanding with the rest of Europe?,” you are fostering a misunderstanding between us. (Over a stretch of road you could easily ride around).
What are you currently doing that isn’t already in your selfish self-interest?
Not stealing? You’d be risking years in jail for stuff that you could safely buy with a little work.
If we think in terms of the selfish gene rather than the selfish individual, parenting is selfish.
How would you change your behavior if you were totally selfish?
Charity to strangers would probably vanish.
Drivers would be less courteous, and strangers ruder.
Imagine a world where NO ONE was willing to die for a cause - country, religion, ethnicity, whatever.
To make soldiers risk death, they’d have to start awfully poor and be richly rewarded.
That sounds like a recipe for world peace.
When a great mind offers mediocre arguments, you should be actively repelled: “That’s the best you can do?!”
Bayesian reasoning: “Is this evidence stronger or weaker than I would have expected?”
Failure to argue is, on average, an admission of intellectual defeat.
The continuation of argument is at least weak evidence in favor of whatever you’re arguing.
Build a credible reputation for talking only when you have something novel to add to the conversation. Then instead of interpreting your silence as, “I’ve got nothing,” Bayesian listeners will interpret it as, “I’ve rested my case.”
Read Eliezer Yudkowsky: “An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem.”
Agnostic, neutral thinkers have little to say and less to teach.
Yes, it’s better to suspend judgment rather than embrace error.
But intellectual progress only occurs after someone discovers and publicizes good reasons to adopt an -ism.
Every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points.
Labels can blind us to counter-evidence.
Good-versus-evil stories give us an excuse to damn the messenger instead of considering his message.
But the wise response is to strive to compensate for these specific risks.
Labels and good-versus-evil often effectively drain IQ. Many drain 25 points or more.
But there’s no substitute for actually examining the specific content of the labels and stories.
Stupid worldviews reduce IQ.
Smart worldviews raise IQ.
Declaring “a plague on all your houses” solves nothing.
On a typical day, absolutely no one upsets me, because of tolerance.
I have little in common with most people. But why should I expect anything else?
How other people live their lives is their business, not mine.
Focus on how to avoid unpleasant experiences, not who to condemn.
Search for the 1% worth talking to, instead of lamenting their scarcity.