February 02nd, 2023

​A little information insertion to the journal. This approach (leveraging collective experience and wisdom) to realize best possible outcomes for teams and communities has been foundational to almost everything I do. And I can point, even recently, to decisions I made on my own, without applying this approach, that turned out badly.
Why changing your mind is a feature of evolution, not a bug

If argumentation led to nothing, it would soon be thrown into the evolutionary dustbin.
By David McRaney
January 31, 2023

Kenny Eliason / Unsplash
Excerpted from HOW MINDS CHANGE: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney, published by Portfolio, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by David McRaney.
Research shows people are incredibly good at picking apart other people’s reasons. We are just terrible at picking apart our own in the same way.
Reasoning is biased in favor of the reasoner, and that’s important, because each person needs to contribute a strongly biased perspective to the pool. And it is lazy, because we expect to offload the cognitive effort to a group process. Everyone can be cognitive misers and save their calories for punching bears, because when it comes time to disagree, the group will be smarter than any one person thanks to the division of cognitive labor.
This is why so many of the best things we have produced have come from collaboration, people working together to solve a problem or create a work of art. Math, logic, science, art—the people who see the correct path from moment to moment are able to guide the others and vice versa. With a shared goal, in an atmosphere of trust, arguing eventually leads to the truth. Basically, all culture is 12 Angry Men at scale.