The Jordan Harbinger Show - 136: Spencer Greenberg | Cultivating Clearer Thinking for Cloudy Times

Episode Date: December 20, 2018

Spencer Greenberg (@SpencrGreenberg) is a mathematician, entrepreneur, and founder of Clearer Thinking, a website that trains people to overcome their own biases and make better decisions rationally. What We Discuss with Spencer Greenberg: Common logical fallacies and concepts like black and white thinking, cherry picking, straw man arguments, and the typical mind fallacy. How these logical fallacies can be so powerfully persuasive even in the face of contrary evidence, and why they inhibit our thinking and keep us from getting closer to the truth. How to spot cognitive bias in ourselves and others -- and in the sources we choose to inform us about the outside world. How we can improve our critical thinking, cut through these faulty arguments and biases, and separate fact from fiction with logic over emotion. Practical tools that allow us to cultivate clearer thinking for these often cloudy times. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DePhilippo. When I heard about Spencer Greenberg over at clearerthinking.org, I was immediately interested in what he was doing. Spencer and his team are busy creating numerous free training tools we can use to improve

critical thinking and eliminate bias to improve our decision making. The skill of noticing bad logic, misleading arguments, and invalid evidence is extremely important. This skill can not only help you avoid being misled by others, but when used properly, it can help you avoid misleading yourself. Ideally, this skill becomes so honed that your brain alerts you to bad arguments via pattern recognition in real time as they are happening. Today, we'll discover common logical fallacies in concepts like black and white thinking, cherry picking, straw man arguments, and the typical mind fallacy, and we'll see why these inhibit our thinking and keep us from getting closer to the truth. We'll also learn ways to spot this type of cognitive bias in others, in ourselves, and in what we read as well as what we see is on television. Finally, we'll explore ways in which we can improve our critical thinking, cut through these faulty arguments and biases, and get closer to the truth, which is so sorely needed in this day and age.

If you want to know how I manage to book all these great people, all these great guests for the show, and manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits, just a few minutes per day, by the way, check out our level one. course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash level one. All right, here's Spencer Greenberg. Spencer, thanks for coming on the show, my friend. Thanks so much for having me. So you're a mathematician and entrepreneur. You know, I haven't heard those things go together that often. I really haven't. Yeah, I guess it's not that common, but I tend to think that the kind of mathematical way of using the world actually has a lot of use cases. Well, yeah, isn't that kind of the point? I mean, it's got to be one of the most, and I'm sure there's branches of theoretical math and stuff like that that aren't really used to solve any problems yet,

or maybe they're used to solve problems that don't exist yet, I don't know. But in theory, math should be one of the most practical disciplines around. So it makes sense that it applies to business as well. I think especially things like probability theory. Yes, probability theory makes a lot of sense. It seems like something that would be useful in deciding whether or not you're going to achieve a certain outcome, which I think is the whole point of business in the first place, right? Like we have a better chance of not losing our shirt than we do of actually doing so.

And I think for a lot of us in business, even if we're not mathematicians, so like everyone else, we are mostly just going off of a gut instinct a lot of the time. And we make calculations and we hire people to make calculations. But our calculations in our own head are nothing. They're not exactly done on pen and paper for most of us. I think, sure, the accounting is, but for a lot of us, we're just making bets, really. Right. And I think that a mathematical way of looking at the world, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're always making calculations. But the way you think about things is in line with kind of mathematical theory. So the idea is, for example, if you get some piece of evidence, how much evidence is that? Is that a lot? Is that a little? And mathematical theorems actually tell us some information about that. And they can guide the way we think, even if we're not doing an actual calculation. So today, I want to focus on the skill of noticing bad logic, right? misleading arguments, bad logic, invalid, can we say invalid logic or poor logic or non-existing

logic? And in today's day and age, I see this is extremely important. I'm a big fan of critical thinking. I'm a big fan of knowing how to think about problems, knowing how to think about arguments. And I was always one of those kids who, after high school or in college, I guess it must have been college because I was able to vote. I'd see these commercials on TV and they would say something like, vote no on Prop 7, unless you want to defund public schools.

And my mom, a public school teacher, would be like, I don't want to defund public schools. I'm going to vote no on Prop 7. And I'm like, let's research this a little bit. So I'd go on the internet and I'd go, all right, what does this exactly do? Oh, it allows gambling on certain property in Michigan, which is not good for people. Gambling is addictive. It's a vice.

It's going to be on these Indian reservations, which is fine. in theory, but then there's going to be, or it's like allows them to market outside of that or something. It was something like along those lines. And I thought, this is actually really bad. We're not defunding public schools. You're just not taxing casinos because they won't be able to advertise to people all over the state of Michigan, whereas before I think they could only have signage on their own property

or something like this. Absolutely. That's intentionally misleading. And they've got this kind of like old, kind looking guy. And he's like, I care about. where my kids go to school. And it's like, you're in a gambling commercial. This is a commercial for gambling, not against defunding public schools.

And I think that's a really good segue into where I think one of the most important fallacies to understand is, which is sometimes called black or white thinking, which is the idea of thinking of a thing as being all good or all bad or completely true or completely false. And this happens a lot with things when you're considering, let's say, a bill being passed by politicians, people tend to think of it like. oh, that bill is good or that bill is bad. But actually, these are huge conglomerates of all of these different subcomponents, some of which might be good in some ways and others bad and other ways and so on.

Yet the way the human brain works is we want to say, no, that's good or that's bad. And that's actually really, really problematic. Yeah, I've heard of black and white thinking before. And it seems like a really obvious black and white concept in itself. Okay, something's all good or all bad. I never do that. I always look at all the evidence and balance it. And then it's like, well, wait a minute.

Hold on a second. What's going on here? And I think this is human nature in a lot of ways. We are, maybe we were wired for black and white thinking. It's easier for me to say people who look like me are good and people who don't look like me are bad because it saves me a lot of work, right? Absolutely. But I would say just because we're hardwired for it doesn't mean we have to do it, right?

We can learn to be more nuanced. We can learn to think in gray. And this actually is, you know, almost a perfect segue into another really common fallacy, the naturalistic fallacy. When people assume that because something is natural, that means it's good or the way it should be, right? Cancer is natural, but cancer is very bad, for example. And so same with many of these biases. Many of these biases are natural. They're things that are programmed into our brains that came about through evolution because they had certain survival advantages in certain environments hundreds of thousands of years ago.

But in the modern world today, they can get us in trouble. and we can learn to do better in many cases. So how do we do better? What are we looking for? First of all, how do we spot this black and white thinking? Because I think it sort of seems obvious to me that we can see this. But at the same time, if it were that obvious and awareness was all we needed to fix the problem, nobody would have this problem in the first place.

Well, I think one of the most important things is not just awareness in a big sense, but awareness at the right moment. So imagine that you're thinking about some new bill that's coming out and you have this feeling that this is a good thing for the world or a bad thing for the world. That's the right moment to have a thought, hey, am I engaging in black and white thinking? If you have that thought the right moment, then you can do an override of like your default behavior. You can then say, oh, wait, maybe there's some good aspects, some bad aspects. Or maybe you can say, you know, it's not really that I'm totally sure this is good. maybe I'm 80% sure this is good.

And so a big part of this is actually noticing the pattern at the right moment. And so building up that pattern recognizer for fallacies and biases so that they pop into your awareness. And then using what's soon as your system two, which is your like conscious, rational, analytical part of your mind, to override your system one, which is sort of the automatic kind of more primal part of your brain, that there's intuitive part of your brain, during those times when the intuition is going to go haywire. So a lot of times our intuition and our kind of automatic part of our brain, there's a really good job. That's why it's there. But sometimes it goes haywire, and that's what we're talking about, the cases where it's known to cause problems.

How do we enhance our ability to notice that we're doing this in the moment? Because I think it's maybe it's a little bit subconscious, right? Maybe we don't think, we often do this subconsciously. We don't go, you know, I'm going to oversimplify this problem to the point of unfairness to the other party. And I'm going to say, this is always bad and this is always good. our brain just kind of jumps to those judgments and we don't necessarily we kind of have to stop ourselves and think is this fair does this make sense and most of us aren't going to do that we're too lazy or we're too busy or we don't even see the problem with that line of thinking in the first place right well to be honest in a lot of ways it resembles something like martial arts when you first learn martial arts you have to consciously know how to do the moves if you don't have a conscious awareness of how to do the move then you're not going to be able to do it at all right and when you're first starting out you really have to do it explicitly you have to say okay I have to remember, how do I do this punch? How do I throw this kick and then like think about it and then do it?

Eventually, over time, after a lot of training, it becomes subconscious because in a fight, you don't have time to think about it, but it has to start with a thought. And that means, first of all, you have to know how to do the, you have to, you have to know what the move is, you have to know how to do it, and you have to feel motivated to do it. And then with practice, you can, you know, it becomes automatic. And so until eventually, you know, the moment someone speaks something, you immediately think, oh, that was such and such fallacy. And then you're, you know, now you have this conscious override of your,

whatever your default reaction would be. Okay. So we're bringing some conscious awareness to this and trying to keep our brains from thinking this is automatically true or this is automatically false or this is automatically totally good or totally bad. We want to think in terms of probabilities or maybe shades of gray. And this reminds me a little bit of what we talked about with Annie Duke. Have you read her book Thinking and Betts?

I've heard about it. I haven't read yet. Yeah, I think a lot of that sounds familiar from the book. Essentially, instead of looking at something and saying this is A, B, or C, it's, I'm 90% sure. I'm 75% sure of this. So when you think in bets, you're not necessarily, you're getting rid of black and white thinking. You're not thinking, this is a winner. You're thinking, I'm 78% sure this is a winner based on all these different factors, which

allows us to bring an awareness to the idea that we may not be totally right or totally wrong about something or that maybe we're. never going to be 100% right about anything or 100% sure about anything in the moment. Exactly. And that makes it easier to look at things in shades of gray. Right. And the first step is accepting that premise that you can never be 100% sure about anything. It's sort of like the first step in martial arts is saying, okay, I'm going to train in this martial art. It's like, okay, the first step is saying probabilities are the way

to describe reality. You know, you really can't be 100% sure, which means everything is now a shade of gray. Now, all shades of gray are not equal. Some are, you know, 99% sure. Some are 90%, some are 50%. But that's sort of accepting that framework is the first step. And then there's a lot of techniques you can do to build on that to become a more nuanced, more accurate thinker. One technique that I use that I enjoy doing, although some people would find it very unpleasant, is actually make explicit predictions about important things in my life. I assign probabilities to them. I track them and see whether they come true or not. If you practice, working in probabilities and actually track whether you're right or not, over time, you can become what they

call probabilistically calibrated, which means that if you say something's 90% likely, it actually happens 90% of time. If you say it's 70% likely, it happens 70% of time. So your probabilities actually mean what they're supposed to mean. Gotcha. Okay. And so how do we orient ourselves more towards that frame of mind? Are there things that we can do to work these muscles out in our brain? Absolutely. So first of all, reframing the things you believe as probability. So when you catch yourself saying, I believe X or X is true, just do a quick mental shift and say, well, well, okay, but how sure am I, right? Okay, 90% chance X is true, right? So to convert those like those black and white thinking statements, this is true to I'm 90% confident, right? And that's kind of step one.

Another part of the process is then learning to shift those probabilities. So suppose I'm really confident in something. I'm 95% sure it's true, and I get a little bit of counter evidence against it, right? The typical human thing to do is just to dismiss that counter evidence, say, hey, well, I'm really sure of this thing. The counter evidence isn't that strong, so I'm going to completely ignore the carbon evidence. But let's say then next week you get some more counter evidence, and then the following week, even more.

The problem is if every time you dismiss it, you never learn. So instead of just dismissing it each time, a technique you learn is to actually adjust your probabilities a little bit. Say, oh, I was 95%. Now I'm only 90% because I got a little bit of counter evidence. And so that's another part of probabilistic thinking is doing these adjustments. Right. So if we dismiss counter evidence, even if that counter evidence would have added up to something that would have changed our mind, we're starting at zero every time. So you can get 100 pieces of counter evidence to your one piece of current evidence. but if you get them all at a different time, you're not persuaded if you're not actually weighing it as a percentage.

Yeah. And this is part of why black or white thinking leads to really bad thinking where people don't never change their mind, right? Because once you decide something's true, unless you get an absolutely overwhelming amount of evidence all at once, you're just going to continue believing it for the rest of your life, perhaps. Gotcha. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

And I think a lot of us do this subconsciously, right? So if we're having black and white thinking, If we feel like we're falling victim to black and white thinking, if that's not too dramatic, then what we should do is what? Think of something in our life that we view as totally good, totally bad, or true or false. And then how do we start to examine the nuances or how do we open ourselves up to counter evidence, especially if we've dismissed that counter evidence in the past? Well, once you take that statement, I believe X or X is true and rewrite it as a probability,

I'm 90% confident X is true. immediately now you've opened the door to changing your mind. Because you're only 90% confident. It means there's a 10% chance in your view that you're wrong. So now it's a lot easier to say, oh, I've got some evidence against it. Well, now I'm only 80% confident, right? It's not, you know, you've already opened the door to being wrong. And I think that's kind of a crucial first step.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Spencer Greenberg. We'll be right back. Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode, so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Spencer Greenberg. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. And now back to our show with Spencer Greenberg. So black and white thinking, obviously something that's poisoning a lot of arguments these days, or poisoning ourselves, really, is what's happening here. But when we're discussing topics, especially controversial topics with others, what I see a lot is cherry picking, right? We're debating and we're maybe not really trying to figure out the truth. We just kind of want to be right.

Yeah. And I think this is a really important point, which is that there's two kinds of ways that we reason or argue. One is when we're trying to just convince others, right? It's a battle. The other is where we're actually trying to figure out the truth. my friend Julia Galeff has a wonderful TED talk about this and is writing a book about this. She calls it Soldier mindset versus Scout mindset. And the idea is a soldier, in the soldier mindset, you're just trying to win, right?

You're using any thing you can grab and throw at your opponent. In the Scout mindset, you're really trying to figure out what is true. I want to know what reality is. And, you know, in any given person, of course, sometimes you're going to be in one mode and sometimes you're here and be in the other. But it's really, really important that you'd not accidentally be in soldier mindset when you should be in scout. And this happens a lot.

For example, maybe if you're just trying to argue that your favorite football team is the best, fine, doesn't really matter. Sure, you can be in soldier mindset, just arguing, trying to find any argument you can throw with your opponent. But let's say you're trying to figure out, well, how do I treat this serious medical condition? Do I use homeopathy? Do I go to a doctor? What do I do?

You'd better be in scout mindset. that your life literally might depend on it. But the thing is that people are very often used to just arguing for their side. And that's where cherry picking comes in. Cherry picking is a technique to win an argument where you try to just find an example that supports your argument. The problem with cherry picking is that the other side can almost always find an example that supports their argument. It's completely asymmetric with regard to whether something's true or false. Regardless whether something is true or false, you can probably cherry pick examples to support it.

So it's a very, very bad way to figure out the truth, even though it can be an effective way to just try to beat down your opponent in an argument. So why do we, how do we counteract this? Because, of course, yes, it's great to pick out. It's great to cherry pick, right? It's really nice to go, oh, yeah, well, here's this one side, this one thing that supports my evidence. And you just kind of hope they don't come up with anything else, right? And we cherry pick to make our side look strong, even if the other side can. pick examples to make their side look just as strong. So what do we do specifically to counteract this?

Well, I think the crucial question when you're considering something is, do you really want to know the truth about this thing? And, you know, and part of that's going to depend on why you're, you know, you're arguing about it. You know, is it very serious? Is it important? Is it have serious life consequences for you? If you, and if you decide you really want to know the truth, you better switch into Scout mindset. And that means that you better be not using Terry Pick you better be using techniques that are valid forms of argument. You must be looking for valid forms of evidence. If you decide that you don't really care about knowing the truth and you just want to win,

then you know, you can use all these other techniques. And I think that's the first crucial step is, do I really want to know the truth? And this comes up a lot, for example, when we're learning information about ourselves, which is that let's say, you know, let's say we're getting a critique from our boss, right? Now, that could be really, really valuable. That might actually change the court. If we pay attention to that critique, really take it to heart and become better from it, Maybe that will change the course of our career and have huge positive benefits.

On the other hand, maybe we don't want to hear it. Maybe it's hurtful. Maybe it makes us feel bad about ourselves. And, you know, so that there's a crucial choice to make is, do I want to know the truth? Or do I want to argue that I'm, you know, that these things are not true, just to make myself feel better? All right. So we have to kind of be honest with ourselves and with others. Look, do I really want to find out what's right or am I just trying to look good on television and the radio generally?

Exactly. And this is probably why debates are so silly. most of the time, like public debates on TV, because they're not about the truth at all. They're just people slinging, just people trying to win a battle. Right, yeah, it's a political or performance in a way, right? Nobody wants to get up on stage and go, you know, I had never considered that. You're right. I'm not as smart as you.

Nobody's ever going to do that. Exactly. Yeah. So we definitely want to make sure that we're looking at the evidence as a bulk rather than using specific examples. But, of course, before that, underlying all that is, yeah, do I want to know the truth? And that's a tough question for us to ask ourselves. I think a lot of people don't want to sit there and go, you know, not really.

I'm more interested in looking good. It's really hard to get past that ego, right? Right, but then the question is, do you want to know the truth about that, too? Do you want to know the truth about your motivations? Yeah, I suppose you're right there. Because, I mean, we all kind of want to think positively of ourselves. I'll tell you something that I do that really helps me with this, which is that I imagine two worlds. World A, I find out this painful truth about the thing.

And then I work to correct it. You know, this flaw of myself, right? World B, I continue deluding myself but I'm thinking I don't have the flaw for the rest of my life. Once I frame it that way, I'm like, I'd much rather world A. I much rather know the bad thing about myself

and then be able to work to correct it than to live a life where I'm deluding myself. And that's just a thought experiment that I find very motivating. So exactly how do you do that? Do you sit down and write it? Do you just ask yourself these questions while you're on the subway?

How do you exactly execute that? Well, for me, it's really just like I imagine visualize these two scenarios. So it's like, let's say I've gotten a piece of feedback. And my temptation is to just deny that it's true, right? Because I don't want to feel bad about myself, right? It's critical feedback. Then I want to visualize these two worlds and say, okay, forget for a moment whether it's actually true or not.

Let's let me imagine these two worlds. Both worlds where it is true, one where it's true, I learn about it and I continue and I work to improve it. The other where it's true, I deny it. and I never figure it out. And it's just clear to me once I actually imagine those worlds, which one I want. I want to be in the one where I know the truth about my flaws and work to correct them. So that's kind of a technique that gets me motivated.

And I love this concept of trying to maybe deconstruct our own thinking and our own bias. It's really easy to just say, I want to get past other people's bias. But it's even more important to get past our own. And I think taking evidence as a bulk, deciding whether or not we actually want the truth, and opting, choosing to prefer methods of argument that are easier to use effectively is a part of getting to the truth. And that is easier said than done, because especially if you've already stated something in public, to go back on that and say, I was wrong without a, and we see this all the time in the news, people waiting until they're just faced with so many consequences and a bald-faced lie or blatantly being wrong on the wrong side of something,

then people go, well, you know, I've got a lot of growing to do or something like that. It's just, it just seems so disingenuous. Ideally, we get to that point first. Well, the reality is a lot of what we do is social. You know, a lot of our beliefs are social. Why is it that beliefs that seem like they have nothing to do with each other are so correlated, right? Like, why is it that people who tend to be against abortion tend to be pro-death penalty? What's the connection?

And a lot of these things are related to our group identities, right? a lot of times when we're debating, it's related to group identity. It's related to social status, it's related to being, you know, proving yourself right to others and things like that. And so that's another key element here is identifying like, well, am I trying, am I playing a social game here? Am I trying to fit in in a group? Am I trying to be one with my identity or am I actually trying to figure out the truth? And, you know, if your life is on the line or, you know, it's a really important thing about your career or whatever, you need to be careful that you're not just playing a social game,

you're actually going into scout mindset and trying to figure out what's real. Now, next step is something I learned in law school, quite, I heard, I should say, in law school and only learned it probably after hearing it 100 times, the straw man and the steel man. And these are logical fallacies that I find to be so common,

and yet most of us don't know we're using them when we use them. I don't know what it is about these logical fallacies. I guess human nature just builds these into us in a lot of ways because we always want to be right or prove our point or show some sort of strength in front of other people. And Strawman is just one of the most common arguments that we see that turns out to be false. Can you tell us what this is, why this is dangerous and what we can do instead? Yeah, so Strawman is a very common technique people use when they're debating where basically they attack a weakened version of someone else's. beliefs that the person doesn't really believe. And the reason they attack the weakened version is

because it's easier to disprove the weakened version. But to others and maybe themselves, they feel like they've won the debate. Right. Like you believe X, I attack, I don't attack X. I attack some tweaked version of X that's easier to refute. And then I say, ha, I beat you. And the steel man is kind of the opposite of this. The steel man is where we take someone else's argument and we try to formulate the strongest version of it that we can to better learn, right? Like, let's say you give me an argument for something you truly believe in, and I don't think it's that strong an argument. I can still learn from it by thinking, okay, maybe the way you stated it wasn't the strongest form of it. What is the strongest form of that argument? Let me actually think about that. And then let me think about

the strongest version of it, because that's the version that you need, if you're trying to figure out the truth, that's the version you need to grapple with. When you're dealing with the truth, It doesn't matter how many weak arguments are for a thing. What matters are the best arguments. I saw this a lot in law school, of course, and I see it a lot now, especially among people who are not trained to look for these sort of fallacies. We try to win arguments by representing the weakest form of the argument on the other side, as you stated.

But if we really, again, if we get down to brass hacks and we ask ourselves, honestly, if we really want to find out the truth, we really want to do the opposite of this. So being able to spot a strongman, can you take us through this? what's an example of one that you think is common these days, maybe in pop culture or something like that? And how do we know what we're looking at when we see a straw man? An example might be someone arguing in favor of lowering the minimum wage, right? And, you know, other people might say, well, lowering the minimum wage, that's crazy. You, you know, clearly, what's really going on here is that you're just trying to have businesses keep more money

because, you know, you're pro business or something like this. And so, you know, But there might actually be other reasons why they're arguing for that. So you're basically kind of like assuming that something about their argument that weakens it. Whereas in reality, maybe what they're worried about is unemployment. They're worried that in that area, minimum wage is too high, causing companies not to hire enough people causing too much unemployment. And so they're actually, they are worried about the workers, but they think this is a better solution for the workers in that particular case. So very often this happens that there's a particular argument. for a thing and we make a bunch of assumptions about that argument that allow it, make it easier

to refute. But, you know, until you actually dig into all the reasons underlying it, you know, you may not fully understand it and you may also may miss out on something valuable to learn from it. Maybe this is a different logical fallacy, but what is it when we're actually mischaracterizing the other side's argument? So someone says, I'm pro-life and somebody says, oh, you must hate women. It's like, well, no, that's not really what we're doing here. Is that also straw man, or is that something completely different? You know, I think it's a gray, you know, gray area to speak a, like we were talking about before. But, but, yeah, I mean, I think you could, you could construe that as a straw man. If you said, oh, well, your real argument is that women don't matter or something

like that. Right. That would be mischaracterizing their argument, but it'll also be a straw man argument. And a lot of the things we've been talking about, these sound very theoretical and you might wonder, well, but how could I actually do this stuff? Like, this is all very impractical to, like, always be thinking in this way. One of the companies that I founded, Clearer Thinking, this is exactly what we help people do. We have a whole bunch of free tools on our website, clearthinking.org, where we train you in these techniques. So we have one on cognitive biases. It's called Mental Traps. It's an interactive program. We have another one on rhetorical fallacies, which are these common ways that people in argument, make that, you know,

basically make fallacious arguments to manipulate people or the way we make fallacious arguments that manipulate our own beliefs to feel better about ourselves and things like that. We have a program called a belief challenger that actually helps you challenge your deeply held beliefs and think about the alternatives. So while it sounds theoretical, actually a lot of this is very practical. Yeah, this stuff is practical and you'll see it a lot. When you start looking for things like straw man, black and white thinking, and some of the

other stuff will go over in a minute, you really do see this everywhere. You'll see it from your parents. You'll see it from your spouse. You'll see it from your kids, certainly, if you have any. Absolutely. People at work. You'll see it on television. You'll see it from politicians, obviously.

And you'll read it in articles. And it's really useful to be able to deconstruct this stuff. So if you're listening and you're going, what, I'm not going to be writing complex policy. I don't really need this. You're going to be able to see different shades in pretty much any argument, opinion, piece of journalism, article, book anywhere. And I feel like I use these a lot on the show as well when I'm researching. guests, I look at these fallacies and this different type of thinking and go, oh, okay, this person's saying this, does it actually mean that?

And of course, you know, I'd like to think I'm trying to get to the truth. And sometimes my own bias creeps in, of course, as it always does. That's forever on. It's, yes. And what I do see, one thing I learned in law school that I always thought was really interesting and very hard to do was the idea that we should zealously try to argue the other side of an argument. So this is kind of your steel man concept, which will go over in a second.

But you'd hear an argument and you would just, your gut would say, no, I don't like that. I disagree with this. I hate everything about this. It makes me feel bad. And I'm looking for a reason to reject this. And then instead of saying, let's argue against this and try to find all the reasons I hate it that I can back up that are logical other than it just goes against my religion or my upbringing or it makes me feel bad in some other way, what we would do is actually do. the opposite. We would say, huh, let me think about why I want to create some policy in theory or why I might want to create some policy in theory that makes it so people can't get citizenship

unless they make over $100,000 a year and it's some job or something like this, right? And you zealously argue that side and you find not only some emotional understanding of the other side, but of course you find all the holes in your own argument as well. Exactly. Yeah. And that's an incredibly valuable technique. And actually, we have a free tool called the Belief Challenger that literally teaches you that technique and it'll help you practice it. It's one of the best ways to double check your own thinking. And I think going back to this question of why does this stuff matter? Well, it matters insofar as your beliefs matter. If you don't think your beliefs matter. If you don't think it matters what you think is true, then yes, this stuff is irrelevant. But I tend to think that actually our beliefs matter a great deal. because they influence decisions we make. They influence what we try to achieve. They influence how we try to achieve things. And they also influence a bunch of practical life decisions,

like who we decided to marry, where we decide to live, what kind of work we decided to do. And so what we're really talking about fundamentally are the methods by which you form true beliefs as opposed to false police. And the methods that tend to lead to true beliefs are the good epistemic methods

and the methods that lead to bad beliefs are the bad ones. And the technique you gave where you try to take the other side and give the strongest argument you can for the other side is a great technique for forming true rather than false police. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Spencer Greenberg. We'll be right back after this.

Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air, and that's no joke. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of our interview with Spencer Greenberg. So tell us about the Steelman.

I know I sort of stole your thunder a little bit because zealously argue the other side is kind of what that is. But I would love to hear your version as well because I think from a practical standpoint, which is what this show is about, it's extremely useful. Yeah, exactly. It is very much related to what you're saying. But, you know, imagine, so the Strawman, remember, is giving a weakened version of your opponent's argument so you can use more easily refute. it. So imagine a straw man blowing in the wind is, you know, really easy to knock over, right? The steel man's the opposite. You take the argument your opponent gave and you build it up. You make it as strong as you can and you consider that version of the argument, not necessarily when you're debating them, because

that might be really frustrating for them to ignore the argument they gave and instead replace with a stronger argument. But on your own time, you make a stronger version of the argument, and that's the one you have to grapple with. Because again, if we're thinking about the truth, all that matters is the strongest argument in favor of a thing. It doesn't matter. There could be a thousand weak arguments that's irrelevant. And this actually goes to another fallacy called a fallacy, where just because there's a bad argument for something doesn't mean that thing is true because there might be some other

argument you haven't thought of that actually is really strong. Okay. So essentially, pick an argument made by the other group and try to steal man this thing. Find or come up with the strongest version of that argument that we can and then hopefully discover that the other side has some good points and deepen our understanding of the truth, possibly change our mind, but let's be realistic, probably not, but at least find the holes in our own argument and get closer to what actually might be. Yeah, and maybe at least adjust how confident we are, right? Maybe you don't completely flip your opinion, but now you're a little bit less

confident than you were, and then that opens a door to maybe changing your mind down the road. Can you explain the fallacy, fallacy again? I think I was giggling to myself while you said that and possibly missed it. I think that's a ridiculous name, but it is. Drop that on me one more time. Basically, what can happen, one of the, one of the drawbacks of learning about this stuff is that people will start using it as weapons. You know, they, instead of thinking about the, this as tools to figure out the truth, they think of it, oh, I have some cool new weapons to batter my opponent with. So your opponent makes an argument or something,

and you say, that's such and such fallacy, therefore you're wrong. But even, but refuting someone's argument by even correctly labeling as a fallacy doesn't mean that the person's wrong. You could have 10 fallacious arguments in favor of something and it could still be true because all you need is one correct argument that's valid for something to be true. So the fact that there's a bad argument being made doesn't mean that the person who's making argument's wrong. Maybe they're just not, maybe they're just not doing a good job of explaining why the thing's true.

Yeah, I've definitely been guilty of this. You know, I learned what the two quok is, right, where if someone else does it too, the same thing that you're pointing out as bad behavior and I'll go the old two quoke and they're like crap and I can just I sit back as they furiously Google what that is or at least that's what I assume they're doing and they're like damn I did that and it's a logical fallacy

and I just sort of like sit back and smoke my imaginary pipe and go I'm right because I used Latin or whatever right and people are like oh he's a lawyer he's he's smart but none of that's really happening that's all that's going on in my head all that And what's really happening is they're like, yeah, but I'm still right, even though I can't think of a cool Latin phrase to counteract yours. I'm still right. But I've stopped looking for the actual truth at that point because I sort of flipped over my, I laid down my hand of cards and I was just like, yeah, I got a full house here, so suck it.

Right. And that's the fallacy fallacy. Interesting. Exactly. I like to think of our beliefs using a metaphor of a multi-level house. and that house has a bunch of pillars, which are the sort of the core underpinnings that the kind of hold up our belief structure.

The thing is, if you're arguing with someone, let's say you're arguing about a belief that's like at the third level of the house, right? So there's all these other pillars of a belief that support that belief. You might knock down that pillar on the third level, and nothing happens, right? So you think, oh, well,

they're saying they believe this because of X, if I just refute that, If I were sure if you've X, well, then I win the argument. I've changed their mind. Well, that's usually not true because actually there's a whole bunch of these pillars holding up that belief. And X is just what they happen to say about it at this moment. It's just one of those pillars. And so one way to think about this, if you're actually trying to change someone's mind,

is you can ask the question, what are the weight-bearing pillars in their belief system? What are the ones where if you actually change their mind on that thing, then they would change their mind about the topic? And most of the things we say are not weight-bearing. They're not things where, oh, if someone refuted it, we'd just change our worldview, right? Right. So if somebody says, hey, the ocean is salty because a long time ago, somebody dropped a magic salt shaker into the ocean while it was switched on. And now we've got all the salty water, right? That's not correct, obviously.

Science doesn't support that. But we don't just have to refute that that magic salt shaker thing never happened. we still have to figure out why the ocean is salty. So it's really tempting, and that example is so obvious, right? Oh, of course, you're still wrong about why the ocean is salty, but we do this with complex concepts all the time. We just say, oh, well, that person believes that because they're religious, or this person believes that because they grew up in New York City. So, of course, since that's not the case with everybody else here, the whole thing is wrong. And it's like, well, wait a minute. Just because the rationale behind something is wrong doesn't mean that the concept it's. is wrong or the reason that someone believes something is wrong doesn't mean that the belief itself is wrong. And that's tricky to wrap our mind around sometimes. I think one interesting example is that sometimes people will make these kind of naturalness arguments. Like someone might say, well, homosexuality is unnatural, therefore it's bad, right? And someone else might go and they actually might look at what's natural and they might study the animal kingdom and they might say, hey, actually

homosexuality appears in all kinds of animal species. So actually, you're wrong about it being unnatural. And, you know, what do you think is going to happen when that debate occurs? Like, do you think that person's suddenly going to be like, oh, actually homosexuality is fine then? Because, you know, I thought it was unnatural, but I was disprove it. You know, no, that's not what's going to happen. Turns out, you know, for the vast majority of people making an argument like that, that statement, oh, it's unnatural, is not really the weight-bearing pillar of their belief system, right? You can knock down that pillar and they'll continue believing it's wrong. And if you really dig into it, you really investigate it, you might find that there are other kind of cornerstone beliefs

They're actually holding up that belief about homosexuality, right? And this is generally, I think, how our belief systems work is that we have a lot of reasons for believing things, but only certain of them are actually going to, if it need to be knocked down to actually change our mind. All right. So moving right along, the typical mind fallacy. This is something that I've learned a long time ago. I never knew it had a name, of course, like both fallacies. But we tend to assume that other people's minds work similarly to our own, but the reality. but the reality is that people are very different from each other.

Tell us what this means, because I think for a lot of us, we go, wait, and this might be the first we've ever heard of this. Yeah, so this is a really interesting one. We only have direct experience with one mind, which is our own. And so when we think about the way people are, the thing that our brain tends to do is it simulates them, but the thing is it's using our own brain to simulate them, right? It's imagining ourselves in that scenario and how we would react or what we would do. And this actually creates a lot of problems between people.

Because, for example, let's say, you know, your spouse forgets your birthday. You might get very upset because you might think, I would never forget their birthday. This must mean they don't care about me or something like that. But maybe their mind works really differently than yours. Maybe they're not the sort of person that tends to remember things like birthdays. And this has just been a universal truth about them for a long time. It has to do with the way their memory works. And it actually says nothing about how they feel about you.

Right. So the fact that you forgetting someone's birthday might mean that you don't care about them doesn't mean that's true about them. And an interesting kind of example of this that's happened to me fairly recently is I learned that a friend of mine has a very different mind than mine in a very specific way. Question for you, at any given moment, how many emotions would you say you're typically experiencing? Oh my gosh. I have no idea. It's there's, gosh. So zero. but probably so many that it just looks like zero because it's like white noise? Yeah. So it's a tough question. So for me, I would say that typically, you know, my typical emotional state is I have a low-level

mood that usually I have when I woke up, like it lasts for hours. And it's not very strong. And then I'll have like either zero or one emotion on top of that. And that will be a reaction to what just happened. So if nothing really happened, I might have zero. If like something just happened that was good or bad, I might have one kind of stronger. emotion on top of that. A friend of mine, I recently learned, at any given moment, she's feeling between like two and four emotions all the time, very, and they're usually very strong. And when

she says she's a happy person, what she means is that typically the like two or three positive emotions she's experiencing outweigh the two or three really strong negative emotions she's feeling. Whereas when I say I'm a happy person, that means that most of the time I'm in like a positive of mood, right? So, like, we actually mean, like, totally different things. And, like, our minds work very differently with regard to emotions. And this is something that, despite knowing her for years, I'd never noticed about her. So that's just one example of the typical mind fallacy is that we we tend to assume people are way more like us than they actually are. Why does this happen? This seems strange, because I guess, yes, we only have experienced with one mind, but how different are our

minds? Or can we never really kind of know that? I mean, I actually think they're pretty radically different. Because first of all, the way people behave radically differently, right? Some people, their ideal Friday night is to sit at home reading a book. Other people, it's to, you know, go out partying until 4 a.m. in a large crowd, you know, with loud music blaring, right? You know, so that's a behavior. So there's massive behavioral differences. Some people would, you know, if they found a dollar on the street, they'd spend 10 minutes trying to figure out who it belonged to. Other people would go into a bank and rob it, right? So, you know, just on the behavioral side, we see massive differences. On personality, we see massive differences, right? You know, in conscientiousness,

extroversion, neuroticism, you know, you can measure those things and you can just see there's a whole spectrum. Most people are in the middle, but if you compare two people at the extremes, they're radically different. I think, you know, my suspicion of why this happens is that it's actually basically has to do with the way we model people. Like our default mode for trying to figure out the way other people will work or react is to literally kind of run a simulation in our own brain of that person, but we're using our brain. So in effect, it's biased by the way our own brain works. Well, that makes sense and also is really frustrating if you're trying to get closer to the truth.

Exactly. And actually, it comes up in argument, too, because we can assume that other people have bad motivations because we think that if we made the, what's said with the other person said, we would have bad motivations, right? So we might, you know, it can actually cause us to kind of mischaracterize other people or assume bad things about them when they aren't really true. Interesting. It sort of has a head nod to the fundamental attribution error where we judge other people based on their behavior, but we judge ourselves based on our intentions, right? So if we're late, it's because there was a lot of traffic and because our kids were crying and, you know, I needed to make sure that I got this done safely because somebody else needed it so you don't understand. But if somebody else is late, it's like, well, you're an irresponsible prick. It doesn't care about anybody else's time. So this isn't quite the same thing, but it still has a little bit of a head nod to that because yeah maybe if somebody is bumping around

and stepping on my foot and kicks me twice underneath the table I think you are a clumsy person that doesn't ever care you don't care about other people's personal space and yet that's because if I did that it would be that for that reason because I know better or because I was raised differently or because I have a different spatial awareness or something like that exactly whereas somebody else doesn't have that they they've gone 40, 50, 50 years, they've never known that they're constantly kicking other people under the table. They, when they kick their wife, she doesn't say anything because she's really nice.

So nobody's ever said anything to this poor guy. Exactly. And I think when people have deficits in certain areas, like social deficits, this comes up too. You know, someone might think, oh, that person's really rude. The person's really obnoxious. But maybe that person just has, it's bad at reading, you know, facial expressions, bad at reading voice. And so they, you know, they say things that offend people. And they literally don't realize they've offended anyone. And so they never learned to not. I want to wrap with one that we hear all the time. People, you hear this, he screamed a lot all the time on the news and in books and in magazines and in classes with smart people and not so smart people where they say, well, correlation doesn't imply causation.

And people go, oh, yeah, okay. And then half of us go, what was that? Why is that? What does that even mean? I don't understand that. Or they say, yeah, that's true. And then we kind of let it drop, not knowing that maybe it's not even relevant in the moment. Yep, exactly.

So what's going on with, what does it mean when people say, well, correlation implies causation or correlation doesn't imply causation? Right. So some of the simplest examples are to consider things where when one thing goes up, the other thing tends to go up, but clearly the first doesn't cause a second. So for example, as you get older, you both tend to get taller and you tend to learn more things. But getting taller doesn't cause you to learn more things.

It's just they both are caused by getting older, right? So the fact that your height is correlated with how much you know doesn't mean that your height causes or growing in height causes you to know more. Interesting. Okay. That should be obvious because that example is really clear. Getting taller doesn't make you smarter. Exactly. But it gets more nuanced when we're looking at other things, right?

Precisely. Precisely. Because imagine you're in a situation where, for example, there's a new government policy and they implement this policy. and then after that crime goes down, you know, and as they, the more they ramp up the policy, the more crime goes down, you might, you know, naturally jump to the conclusion, oh, that policy is reducing crime. But maybe there's some other things that are happening that are happening to reduce crime at that time. And it's just sort of a fluke that the policy went into place then. So in that example, a lot of people would make the error of assuming the correlation implies causation

when, in fact, it may not be justified. And we do this all the time throughout our lives where, you know, we, we do something, like, let's say we change the way we dress and maybe someone happens to make, give us a nice compliment about something else, not about our clothing, but it's something else. We might attribute it to the fact that we changed the way we dress that day, basically because it happened in, you know, close correspondence. So this is actually, you know, one of the really, really common fallacies that occurs and especially in things like policy and government people make these mistakes. Yeah, we see this a lot where people will say something like, Like, look at Chicago, they have the strongest gun laws in the country, and there's tons of violent crime.

So clearly, stronger gun laws makes it more dangerous for good people out there. And I said, well, wait a minute. Stronger gun laws caused violent crime than Europe would be a terrible place to live. Right. Right. And that's a good example of both people assuming that correlation implies causation, but also cherry picking, right? They're just picking one example that happens to try to, you know, support their particular point where they could have picked another example. that supports the opposite point.

Perfect. So we want to know what caused what, but the only thing we can get data on is what is correlated with what. So we just say, you know, that's good enough for me. I'm going to jump from correlation to causation, but then it's tricky. It's often invalid,

and then we try to provide that useful evidence for causation. And sometimes the correlation can play a part, but sometimes it's actually just completely wrong, like getting taller makes you smarter or getting taller makes you have more life experience. things like that. Exactly. So if we have two variables, A and B, and they're associated, which means that when one goes up, the other tends to go up, there's a few different possible scenarios that

could be happening. One is that A could cause B. Another is that B could cause A. A third is that there could be some other variable that causes both of them. And that's why they're associated. A fourth thing is that there could be a feedback loop. A causes more B, which causes more A, which causes more B in a feedback loop. So those are four possibilities. And then there's some other subtler possibilities as well. But those are kind of the four big ones. And in reality, it can be often very tricky to figure out which of those four things is actually happening in the real world. But unfortunately, a lot of times what we really want to know is not just the things are associated, but what causes what. For example, let's say you're trying to reduce crime. Some people believe

there's an association between impulsiveness and committing crimes. And that leads to a causal theory that says, well, if we train people to be less impulsive, they'll actually commit fewer crimes, right? But that's, but that doesn't necessarily the case. For example, it could be that there's some factors that makes both make people more impulsive and more likely to commit crimes. So, for example, maybe being in poverty makes people more impulsive because they don't have time as much time to think about things because they're working too hard to make enough money, but also being in poverty means you need money really badly, so maybe you're more likely

to get it in a legal way. So there's a lot of these possibilities where, you know, you really want to know the causal answer, but all you really have is an association. Spencer, thanks so much. There are a lot of, how many logical fallacies are there, actually? Oh, I mean, there's an absolutely huge number. That being said, some are kind of more common than others. And when it comes to cognitive biases, some are more accurate than others in terms of describing the way our minds typically work. But, I mean, there's easily dozens.

And on our website, clearthing.org, we actually have these interactive. free training programs for a whole bunch of them. So you can learn about how to fight them in your own life. Well, we'll link to that in the show notes as well. And thanks so much for coming on and discussing just a tiny sample of these logical fallacies and cognitive biases that we see so often. Straw man, steel man, typical mind, correlation implying causation, cherry picking and black and white thinking is just scratching the surface.

But I've really appreciated it. I think there's a lot here. I use a lot of this stuff when I'm preparing for a show, when I'm talking with somebody else because as you might imagine in the personal growth field we see a lot of this this is this is the self-help guru you know personal growth yutz bible here right what sort of thing can i pick out and then turn it into a concept ignoring all of this oh look when i did this this happened. So therefore, the best way to X is this. Talk about correlation implying causation. I invested a lot of tech companies early on. So what you need to do is invest in a bunch of tech

companies. Okay, maybe that's a good idea. Maybe that's a great way to get wealthy, but maybe it's correlation implying causation in some ways or maybe, you know, the circumstances are different. Or, you know, what you need to do is this. This is the best way to do A, B, or C. That's very much a typical mind fallacy type of argument that I think we hear a lot, especially in, you know, self-help or personal growth and cherry-picking, hey, what about this? Well, let's ignore that. Here's one story that illustrates my point. I'm going to make a whole book about it and hit the bestseller list. I mean, we see that stuff all the time. Absolutely. And to that point, one reason to learn this stuff is so that you can figure out the truth about the world so you can

get the things you want by having true beliefs. But another reason is to knock your self-gill yourself against others who will use these against you. And that's a really important thing to do. So not only to get what we want out of life, but for self-defense against other people who might be using this to persuade us of something that's not in our best interest or not true at all. Exactly. Spencer, thanks so much, man. Thanks so much for having me. A lot of cognitive bias stuff. I really do enjoy this.

What's funny is there's so many biases, but we all end up using them unconsciously. So bringing awareness to it is kind of a big deal because it does help you think and argue better with other people or with yourself. It's like digging into the operating system of your brain. That's what I love about this stuff and cognitive biases in general. It just kind of gives you an insight. And once you get introspective on what's happening, then you can kind of see where you're broken sometimes and you know how to fix it in the future once you internalize it and can practice it. Great big thank you to Spencer Greenberg.

His stuff is at clearerthinking.org. Of course, we'll link to that in the show notes. A lot of cool little tests there on helping you think better, becoming more logical, listener or arguer. It's really, really useful website. Kind of the Cosmo Tests for Smart People type of page. I hope I just didn't unsell that to everyone. Hey, if you want to know how I managed to book all these great guests for the show and meet all these amazing people, while I manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits, I manage my outreach, the keeping in touch, everything. I've made a course for this. It's free, and it's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash level one.

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