Ranju’s book club, Top 3 books of 2024
3. The Courage to be Disliked- Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
This book is about Adlerian psychology. In the beginning of 20th century, Alfred Adler established a completely new school of psychology, that was also in line with Greek philosophy. This psychology was completely new to me until this book. I was aware of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their philosophies. Freud (1856-1939), Jung (1875- 1961) and Adler (1870-1937) were around at that same era, however, the authors of this book claim that the Adler's ideas are said to have been 100 years ahead of the time and even today we have not managed to fully comprehend them. This book talks about self-help strategies for life in general based on Alder’s psychology, including change, how to deal with trauma, anger, how life is about here and now, why people are unhappy, why they dislike themselves, the life-lies, the desire of recognition, and interpersonal relationship probllems and so on. This book teaches us how to value what we have, how to accept ourself, and how to have a courage to be happy.
This book is about Adlerian psychology. In the beginning of 20th century, Alfred Adler established a completely new school of psychology, that was also in line with Greek philosophy. This psychology was completely new to me until this book. I was aware of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their philosophies. Freud (1856-1939), Jung (1875- 1961) and Adler (1870-1937) were around at that same era, however, the authors of this book claim that the Adler's ideas are said to have been 100 years ahead of the time and even today we have not managed to fully comprehend them. This book talks about self-help strategies for life in general based on Alder’s psychology, including change, how to deal with trauma, anger, how life is about here and now, why people are unhappy, why they dislike themselves, the life-lies, the desire of recognition, and interpersonal relationship problems and so on. This book teaches us how to value what we have, how to accept ourselves, and how to have a courage to be happy.
In the first few chapters itself the book will hit us with shocking perceptions. For example, it says past doesn't matter; it says trauma does not exist. It talks about this concept of teleology which is the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon rather than the cause. To explain teleology in simple example, we manufacture our emotional state such as anxiety or fear or even anger as a mean to achieve a goal. This is different from the concept of etiology which is the study of causation where we blame the event for our emotions. Therefore, we are not determined by our experiences but the meaning we give them in self-determining; we do not suffer from the shock of our experiences but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purpose.
Unhappiness is something we choose for ourselves. Book explains- your unhappiness cannot be blamed on your past or your environment and it is not the lack of competence, you just lack courage.
Our life is decided here and now, and authors talk about how past doesn't exist and future doesn't exist and there is only now. This reminds me of very good book ‘Power of Now’. Personally, I think about past quiet frequently, I indeed learned from it, I try to not repeat the same mistake, I'll learn from somebody else's mistake, past is staying rent free in my head. But life is series of dots ‘now’, live each dots at the moment without thinking about the cause (past) or effect (outcome). Remember Energeia, treat the process itself as an outcome. Dance the dance, dance is the outcome, enjoy the dance, do not worry about winning the competition which is the outcome. Have fun now.
The authors talk about community feeling inter-personal relationship as a source to happiness. Community feeling is basically switching from attachment to self (self-interest) to concern for others (social interest). And, how do we get community feeling? Community feeling is about self-acceptance, confidence in others, and contribution to others. Similarly for interpersonal relationship writer talks about 3 categories task of work, task of friendship, and task of love. Therefore, happiness is feeling of contribution, happiness is freedom, happiness is the courage to be disliked.
I was not aware about Alfred Adler until this book. This book pleasantly surprised me explaining his philosophies in a question-and-answer format. The book is simple conceptually, the language is simple, it is understandable, it is thought provoking and will definitely make you happy. Maybe because of the simplicity of author’s writing, I had read that people even consider this book as a superficial version of Adlerian psychology, but we are not diving deep into the academia of psychology here and I think for in general reading, this book is fantastic. If you're really into Adler’s psychology, I'm sure you'll find more complex read.
“For a human being, the greatest unhappiness is not being able to like oneself.”
“All you can do with regard to your own life is choose the best path that you believe in. On the other hand, what kind of judgment do other people pass on that choice? That is the task of other people, and it is not a matter you can do anything about.”
2. Meditations- Marcus Aurelius
This book is the basis of stoicism in my opinion. This book is a phenomenal read and every line in the book is worth highlighting and internalizing.
Meditations is the collection of journal entry of Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor born 26th April AD 121 and died on 7th March AD 180. This was written in Greek, a language of philosophy and is spoken by most educated Romans. This was not intended to be published, but here we are, benefiting from the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius. I am thankful for whoever first put together this book for us.
Do you journal? If you do not, you should give it a try. I think writing down the thoughts, problems on paper gives clarity to our mind, and helps us achieve solutions, and maybe eruption of the good ideas. The most amazing thing journaling does is the therapy, it is therapeutic to jot down your thoughts in a journal. When I journal, that's what I write, my thoughts, my daily stories, sometimes my rules and my virtues, and motivations for myself. Reading Marcus Aurelius's book made me question my journal contents. His journal entries are profound philosophies. And indeed, in his books Marcus writes about Socrates, epicurean writing, Pythagoreans, and Epictetus wisdoms.
In book 1, Marcus writes about what he had learned from his family members, his friends and his tutor. To work with my own hands and mind my own business to be deaf to malicious gossip. A wise person constantly learn from others, learn their virtues, good habits or learn from others mistakes as well.
I liked the thoughts on directing mind. We are made-up of flesh, blood, and directing mind. This directing mind is powerful; he encourages to give vigorous attention every hour of the day perform each action as if it were the last of your life. The directing and sovereign part of your soul must stay immune to any current in the flesh either smooth or troubled and keep its independence.
Marcus also points out the importance of being in the present. Even if you were destined to live 3000 years or 10 times that long, nevertheless remember that no one loses any life other than the one he lives or any life other than the one he loses. The present moment is equal for all; no one can lose either the past or the future how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess. In our life our time is a mere instant, our existence of flux, our perceptions fogged, bodily composition rotting.
“All is as thinking makes it so.” That's right, everything is in our mind, our weaknesses, our failures, and our successes and strength too; it's in our mind everything is the mind game. Do not waste the remaining part of our life and thoughts about other people. Be purposeful; you should take no action unwillingly, selfishly, uncritically or with conflicting motives.
In some parts of the book, it is as if he is talking about entropy in a different way. He questions how could a sort of private order subsist within you, if there is a disorder in the Whole? Yes, universe is disordered but that's what makes the Whole, the entropy of universe is increasing. So, everything happens for a reason, a part of higher order or disorder in my openion. Anything that happens is in balance with the universe. Marcus writes- I have now what universal nature wishes me to have now, and I do what my own nature wishes me to do now. Your directing mind must not have any judgment of good or bad to any events. Something inherently good in the result. All that happens to the individual is to the benefit of the Whole. And similar thing with the change; what is dearer or closer to the nature of the Whole than change? Can you yourself take a bath if the wood that heats is not changed, can you be fed unless what you eat changes, can any other of the benefits of life be achieved without change, do you not see then that for you to be changed is equal, and equally necessary to the nature of the whole. All comes about in accordance with the nature of the Whole.
“What does not benefit the hive does not benefit the bee either.”
Think of your final hour period, leave the wrong done by another where it started. Forgive them! Be kind! If you can, show them the better way. If you cannot, remember that this is why you have the gift of kindness. Accept humbly: let go easily. When other blames you or hates you, or people voiced similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you. But you should still be kind to them. They are by nature your friends, and the gods do help them in various ways- dreams and divination-at least to the object of their concerns.
He writes about sin. He says injustice is sin explaining that universal nature has constituted rational creatures for the sake of each other, to benefit one another as deserved, but never to harm anyone contravening her will is clearly guilty of sin against the oldest of the gods. Lying too is a sin against the same god. Pursuit of pleasure, and fear he says is also sin.
We are the part of the whole which is governed by nature. So keep constantly in your mind an impression of the whole of time and the whole of existence and the thought that each individual thing is, on a scale of existence, a mere fig seed; on the scale of time one turn of a drill.
Power lies in seeing the faults within us, understanding the invincibility of kindness. The closer we are to control of emotion, closer we are to the power. Looking within, reverence to our own mind and the value we give to it will make us acceptable to ourselves. The power of self-acceptance.
1. Thinking, fast and slow- Daniel Kahneman
Fast thinking is our intuitive thinking, a thinking system that operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, therefore the errors of intuitive thoughts are often difficult to prevent. This system “system 1” has biases. System 2, the slow thinking system is the rationale thinking; the conscious reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. However, this slow thinking is also not devoid of the biases because even this slow thinking may have no clue to the error. If system 1 is impulsive and intuitive; System 2 is lazy (at least for some people it is, as per author). Memory is susceptible to illusions, there are illusions of truth. We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness. Our impressions are illusions. We react to threat before recognizing. This is the reality of our everyday judgement and decision making. Thinking fast and slow will change your way of thinking. This is probably one of the best books I have ever read.
Repeated experience, primed idea, clear display etc causes cognitive ease which leads to the feeling of familiarity feeling or effortless easy. This cognitive ease creates the illusion, the illusions in our memory, the illusion of truth. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehood is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion. The author says, experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps the score and governs what we learn from living and it's the one that makes the decision. And when we remember, we remember the emotion, the duration rather than the true experience and that effects judgement.
The biases in thinking and belief exist from general population to scientist. Simple example of confirmation bias. Science by testing hypothesis tries to refute them, but people and scientists quite often seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold. Very good example I give is alcohol, how much alcohol is good for you? If you drink 0 alcohol a day, you'll find evidence supporting that no drinking is good for overall health. If you believe that drinking 1-2 or even 3 drinks a day is good for you, you'll find evidence for doing that. The reality is that there is no good evidence to refute either hypothesis. The reality is there are confounders. This is just an example in daily life. We tend to rationalize what we do and when system 2 is otherwise engaged we'll believe almost anything. Because we are blind to our blindness. Also, overconfident! The other error is decorrelated errors, the principle of independent judgments. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinion of those who speak clearly and assertively, causing others to line up behind them. To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make those sources independent of each other.
I was especially intrigued to know about WYSIATI (what you see is all there is) and this results in list of biases in judgment and choice leading to overconfidence, framing effect, and base rate neglect.
Our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with the mere statistics. If you think like econ, you will apply these statistics to the daily decision and judgement, for instance simple Bayesian inference, and regression to the mean.
Then there is illusion of understanding, and narrative fallacy which arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. And then there is outcome bias what I call it a hindsight bias. Hindsight is tough for the decision makers who act as the agent for others such as physicians, CEO's, politicians so on and so forth. We are prone to blame decision makers for decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact. It is a clear outcome bias. When my colleague decides about a particular treatment choice based on the outcome of the most recent patient of same diagnosis, I try to warn them that deciding based on one patient's outcome is not the good way of judgment and decision-making. As a professional we are trained to think like statisticians. Simple statistical rules are superior to intuitive clinical judgments.
Another interesting part of the outcome bias is Halo effect. Lets see an example of Halo effect- a CEO of company that we are keenly aware of whether the company has recently been thriving or failing and based on that awareness we come to the conclusion about the CEOs leadership. The CEO of the successful company is likely to be called flexible, methodical and decisive. But after a year or two when things have gone wrong the same executive will now be described as confused, rigid and authoritarian. This is Halo effect because of the Halo effect we get the causal relationship backward: are prone to believe that the firm fails because its leader is rigid, when the truth is that the leader appears to be rigid because the firm is failing. This is how illusions of understanding are born.
The importance of outside view; The proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with the public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person's judgment. This is the problem with most corporate meetings and why most of the meetings are useless.
We jump to conclusions, we believe in WYSIATI, considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our belief is preposterous. Delusional optimism rather than relying on the rational weighing of gains, losses, and probabilities leads to planning fallacy and executives fall victim to the planning fallacy when forecasting the outcomes of risky projects. We are prone to overweight the improbable outcomes. We follow the victim of possibility effect as well in which unlikely events are considerably overweighted. We pay more attention to the threat (thus amplifying in our head), and we worry. Because of the possibility effect, the worry is not proportional to the probability of the threat. Furthermore, we should not focus on a single scenario, or we will overestimate its probability. The way to decision making is considering all the specific alternatives and make the probabilities add to the 100%. I'm impressed by how econs think. Their belief and preferences are reality bound. In the same way this book will teach you how to be reality bound.
The book talks about the choices we make and how econs think. There is utility theory- rational agent model. An individual make choices to maximize their utility, which can be defined as either benefit, advantage, or pleasure. This utility is the psychological value or desirability or money. And there is a difference between this utility and the actual amount of the benefit. If people make choices based on psychological value, Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss scientist observe that most people dislike risk and wish to avoid the worst outcome. Bernoulli invented psychophysics to explain this aversion to risk. This explains why poor people buy insurance and why richer people sell it to them. But Bernoulli's model lacks the idea of reference point. Based on the reference point some people are risk averse but some people are risk seeking too. For example multimillionaires or entrepreneurs etc. In prospect theory, you need to know the reference state. Prospect theory is the behavioral economics that describes the decision making based on a neutral reference point, a principle of diminishing sensitivity, and a loss aversion mind. Think like econs, read the fine prints, block the errors in that judgment, know how to proceed when you encounter Muller-Lyer illusion in life. How the decision is made is more important than the outcome of situation. Constructive criticism and identification of judgment errors is a diagnostic task. Remember about anchoring effect, narrow framing, or excessive coherence brings the biases in decision making but now we know the causes, its effect and what can be done about it. Thanks to this book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
1/19/2025
