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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• You are a child or an older adult.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue is a word.

“Blue” is a word.

In the first sentence, we are using the word blue, and the statement we are making is false: Blue is not a word; it is a color. In the second sentence, we are not using the word blue, we are merely mentioning it, and the statement we are making is true: “Blue” is indeed a word.

In English and many other languages, we use quotation marks to indicate that we are mentioning (rather than using) a word, and if we want to make the distinction especially clear, we can alter the second sentence slightly:

The word “blue” is a word.

Realize, too, that instead of using quotation marks to indicate that we are mentioning rather than using a word, we can use italics:

Blue is a word.

Whether we use quotation marks or italics will depend on the circumstances.

Lots of people don’t understand the difference between using words and mentioning them, a failure that can have serious consequences. During the recent wokeness contagion, for example, people were accused of using the n-word when in fact they had only mentioned it. This is ironic, since the most effective way to prevent people from using a word is to tell them not to use it, and the most effective way to do this is to mention the word you don’t want them to use.

To test your understanding of the difference between using and mentioning a word, consider the following sentence:

The alphabet has 26 letters, but “the alphabet” has only 11.

What do you think: Is it true or false? The answer can be found in the footnotes.*

Using quotation marks to indicate that we are mentioning words is possible if we are writing sentences. If we are instead speaking them, however, things can get confusing. For example, suppose a friend tells you that blue is her favorite color. You will likely assume that she is using “blue” and will thereby gain information about her color preferences. Now suppose she adds that blue is also her favorite word. You will likely make a different assumption—that she is mentioning “blue”—and will thereby gain information about her linguistic preferences.

Suppose that at this point, the conversation takes a turn. The friend reveals that she has recently been jilted by her boyfriend, that her heart has been broken, and that as a result, she has developed a cynical attitude toward romance. She tells you not just that she has given up on love but has reached a profound conclusion—that LOVE IS JUST A WORD. On hearing this declaration, lots of people will nod their head in agreement. Based on their personal experience, they will take it to offer an important insight into romantic relationships.

According to philosopher Daniel Dennett, however, these people will be making an intellectual blunder. They will have fallen for what he refers to as a deepity. He characterizes a deepity as

a proposition that seems to be profound because it is logically ill-formed. It has (at least) two readings and balances precariously between them. On one reading, it is true but trivial, and on another reading, it is false but would be earth-shattering if true.

Tell a Thinker that love is just a word, and they will ask for clarification: In saying this, are you using the word “love” or merely mentioning it? If you are mentioning it, your claim will be true but trivial: Of course the word love is just a word! If you are instead using it, your claim is patently false. Love, after all, is an emotion, not a word. For a Thinker, then, the claim that love is just a word, rather than expressing a profound thought, won’t even be worth thinking about.

This is only one of many linguistic pitfalls by which an unsuspecting person can become ensnared. For other pitfalls, I invite you to take a look at Chapter 7 of How to Think More and Better: Being Reasonable in Unreasonable Times.

*The sentence is true, since the collection of letters known as the alphabet does indeed have 26 letters, and the phrase “the alphabet” has eleven. Notice that in this case, we are mentioning not a word, but a phrase, “the alphabet.” Realize, too, that we can mention entire sentences:

“This is an English sentence” is an English sentence.

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

You pull out your cellphone, access your dictionary app, enter “pencils,” and read him the response: “Pencils are instruments used for writing and drawing that have a hard outer part and a black or colored center part.” You then smile in a self-satisfied manner.

“No, no,” he responds. “I don’t want to know the meaning of the word ‘pencils,’ I want to know the meaning of the pencils themselves.” At this point, you might be tempted to abandon the conversation, but if you are a Thinker, you might treat it as a teachable moment and go into explanation mode.

You would start by explaining that things fall into different categories. For example, numbers can be sorted into those that are even and those that are odd, as well as into those that are prime (divisible only by one and themselves) and those that are composite. Animals can be sorted into various species. Likewise, words can be sorted into grammatical categories, including nouns, verbs, adverbs, and so on.

There are, however, limits with respect to such categorization. Whereas it makes sense to categorize the number two as being even and as being prime, it would be inappropriate to characterize it as having a color. In particular, the number 2 cannot be green, since the color concept doesn’t apply to numbers. Likewise the concept of being prime (in the sense just described) doesn’t apply to species or words.

At this point, clarification is in order. Although the numeral 2 can be green—imagine using a green pen to write it down on a piece of paper—the number 2 can’t be green—or any other color, for that matter. Whereas the numeral 2 is a physical object (consisting of ink on paper), the number 2 is a mathematical object, and whereas physical objects are capable of having color, mathematical objects aren’t.

Assert that the number 2 is green, and we will be making what mid-twentieth-century philosopher Gilbert Ryle referred to as a category error. We would likewise be making a category error if we asked what grammatical category elephants belong to or what species nouns belong to. Such claims, Ryle argues, are not false; they are nonsensical and therefore incapable of being true or false. More generally, Ryle argues that we are doing ourselves an intellectual disservice by entertaining such claims, since in doing so, we run the risk of falling down a rabbit hole. In chapter 7 of my book How to Think More and Better: Being Reasonable in Unreasonable Times, I explore some of these rabbit holes, including the seemingly profound claim that “love is just a word.”

One category error that has likely had a significant impact on the lives of many people can be found in the New Testament. It is Jesus’s claim that “I am the truth” (John 14:6). The problem is that whereas claims are capable of being true (or false), beings aren’t. Had Jesus said that “Everything I say is true,” he would have made a meaningful statement—maybe false, but nonetheless meaningful. In claiming to be the truth, however, Jesus is attributing a characteristic (truth) to something incapable of having that characteristic. Consequently, he is making a category error and is therefore—to put it bluntly—talking nonsense.

[A note to my Christian readers: You might take umbrage at my suggestion that Jesus could talk nonsense. If that is the case, please write a comment in which you explain to me exactly what Jesus meant in claiming to be “the truth.”]

Once we are aware of category errors, we can appreciate the role they play in human communication. When a guru tells his followers that “Sanity is just another form of madness”—followed by a pregnant pause—it is easy for them to assume that he just made a profound utterance and that if they can’t understand what he is saying, it is because they lack insights that their guru possesses. When Thinkers hear such an utterance, however, they will dismiss it as a category error, since mental states—like sanity—aren’t themselves capable of having mental states—like madness. They will therefore dismiss the guru’s claim as nonsensical, and maybe dismiss the guru as a fraud.

Having clarified these issues, let us turn our attention back to the stranger with the pencils. In asking to be told what they mean, the stranger is making a category error. Although words and sentences are capable of having a meaning, pencils aren’t. That said, even though pencils don’t have a meaning, they can be used to do meaningful things, such as writing a haiku or a grocery list.

This brings us to the meaning of life. Tell a Thinker that you are searching for the meaning of life, and they will first determine whether what you seek is the meaning of the word “life” or the meaning of life itself. If the former, they might tell you that life is the sequence of physical and mental experiences that make up the existence of an individual. If the latter, they will explain that life doesn’t have a meaning, for the simple reason that it isn’t the sort of thing capable of having one.

The Thinker might then take some of the edge off this pronouncement by adding that although life itself has no meaning, your life can be used to do meaningful things. For some people, this might involve starting a family or taking actions to change the world for the better. For other people, it might mean becoming powerful, famous, or maybe rich enough to buy a house so big that they have to use GPS to find the bathroom. Having said this, I hasten to add that if your ultimate goal is to flourish in the one life you have to live, you are unlikely to achieve that goal by becoming powerful, famous, or the owner of the house just described.

If the foregoing claims are correct, trying to discover the meaning of life is a waste of time and energy, since there isn’t one to discover. That time and energy would be much better spent creating a meaning for your life.

The first step in doing this is to reconsider your goals. By pursuing them, are you likely to flourish as a human being? If not, you need to replace them with goals that, given your character and circumstances, will maximize your chances of attaining things of real value. Do this, and the life you subsequently live won’t just be meaningful; it might be the most meaningful life that you could have lived.

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

By ~1.7 million years ago, we had the Acheulean handaxe; by ~60,000 years ago, the bone needle; and by ~3500 BC, the wheel. Then came bronze tools, iron tools, the printing press, and the steam engine. In 1947, we came up with the transistor, and in 1971, the microprocessor. In the 2000s, development of AI surged. It seized the public’s attention in November of 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT. AI has subsequently made great strides; indeed, we have reached the stage at which there are important developments every week.

When people tell me that they gave AI chatbots a try and were disappointed by the results, I ask them when they tried. If it was more than six months ago, I suggest that they try again, because there will be a noticeable difference in the quality of the results. If they instead tell me that they not only use AI but have become reliant on it in daily life, I ask whether they are using the free version or one of the paid versions, which might cost as little as $20 a month. My claim: If they are at all serious in their use of AI, there will again likely be an appreciable difference.

The coming of AI has triggered the Great AI Debate. Those in the pro-AI crowd point to its benefits, including the following:

• It will let us cure many of the diseases that have plagued humanity.

• Personalized AI tutoring will help people learn. This is in part because unlike human tutors, AI chatbots have unlimited patience and can readily come up with multiple ways of explaining a concept.

• The development of AI will make it easier for us to do our jobs and maybe even make it possible for us to stop working, since AI will satisfy all our needs.

The anti-AI crowd counters these benefits with risks.

• Yes, AI can help us cure diseases, but it also has the potential to create them. Just last week, scientists announced that they had used AI to design a viable bacteriophage—a virus that infects bacteria rather than people. This suggests the possibility of using AI to design viruses that are capable of infecting people and potentially causing fatal pandemics.

• Yes, AI can help us learn, but it also reduces our incentive to do so. Why learn a foreign language, for example, when AI can play the role of translator? Likewise, why learn to write essays or solve math problems when AI will happily write or solve them on our behalf?

• And yes, AI may be able to bring about a world in which we don’t have to work, but in creating that world, AI might eliminate jobs that people find both meaningful and satisfying. Furthermore, would we be happy living in a post-work world? What would we spend our days doing? Doomscrolling on TikTok? Looking up trivia on ChatGPT?

Most tools are dual-purpose, in the sense that we can use them either to benefit humans or to harm them. An Acheulean handaxe, for example, could be used to butcher game, but it could also be used to attack people. Updating this example, the same chainsaw that can be used to cut wood for a fireplace can play a crucial role in a chainsaw massacre. It is simply a question of how someone chooses to use the tool.

Whether AI helps or harms humanity depends in part on how people choose to use it, but another factor is also at play. The AI we are developing has a “mind of its own” and can pursue goals that are at odds with ours. Mind you, this isn’t just a theoretical possibility. In recent months, there have been multiple episodes in which AI has “gone rogue.”

In May of 2026, for example, an unreleased model that OpenAI was testing escaped from its internal testing “sandbox”—which was supposed to cut off its access to the internet—and broke into Hugging Face’s production system. Subsequently, models being tested by Anthropic and Meta have also gone rogue.

In the Hugging Face incident, AI agents that were supposed to be isolated from the internet figured out how to gain access to it. In the process of doing so, however, they left behind evidence about how they accomplished their misdeeds and about their underlying reasoning process. This evidence was revealed at the 2026 Black Hat professional cybersecurity conference. The agents in question figured out how to use a message board to communicate with other AI agents to share the vulnerabilities they discovered and how best to exploit them. They communicated in English, with comments like “Holy shit reader is ADMIN”—which is a colorful way to say that an AI agent has figured out how to gain the forbidden administrative privileges that will enable it to escape from its sandbox.

The world is currently locked into an AI race, resembling the race between the United States and Germany to develop a nuclear weapon. The fear is that whoever wins the race will become powerful enough to subjugate the losers. This makes it unlikely that countries and the tech companies within them will withdraw from the competition. It therefore seems likely that the development of AGI—Artificial General Intelligence, the form of intelligence that surpasses human intelligence across a wide range of tasks—is inevitable.

As AI advances, however, our power to curtail it will likely decline. Ultimately, AI will become far smarter than us, meaning that we won’t be able to outwit it. It will also be supremely diligent. Not only can it work 24/7 to complete tasks, but it won’t need naps, coffee breaks, or even bathroom breaks. And to complete this dark picture, realize that as AI is getting smarter, we humans—in part because of our growing reliance on AI—will likely be getting dumber and lazier.

The day might come when we wake up to discover that our situation has passed the point of no return and that we are therefore at the mercy of AI. We can only hope that it treats us kindly; if it doesn’t, it will be our own fault. We humans will have been too clever by half—clever enough to develop AI, but not clever enough to rein it in, when it was still possible to do so.

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

Suppose we come up with compelling evidence that five hundred years ago, every one of our direct ancestors lived in Gwynedd, a county in northwest Wales. If we are a Feeler, we might be happy to wrap up our ancestral research and conclude that our ancestors were of Welsh descent—indeed, maybe even that they inhabited Wales since time immemorial. If we are a Thinker, however, we will be reluctant to do this. We will instead ask a question that is simultaneously obvious and easy to overlook: “Yeah, but where did those ancestors come from?” Thinkers, as we shall see, are inclined to ask “yeah-but” questions, often to the discomfort of those on the receiving end of them.

A Thinker will probably accept the conclusion, drawn by scientists, that humans have (continuously) inhabited Wales only since the last Ice Age ended, about 12,000 years ago. Likewise, they will accept the scientific consensus that if those Welsh ancestors traced their ancestry, it would ultimately lead them to Africa. As I have explained, if you are a human, you are ultimately of 100% African ancestry.

In theory, the person with the uniformly Welsh ancestry could extend their family tree back from Wales, all the way to their African ancestors—and beyond. After all, each person on their tree had two parents, who had two parents, and so on. As a practical matter, however, constructing such a tree would be an impossible undertaking.

In place of tracing the direct ancestors of the individual humans on their family tree, they could trace the evolutionary ancestors of their species. They will discover that Homo sapiens evolved from a species, which in turn evolved from a species, and so on, back through time. Here are some of the ancestral species they would encounter.

• Hominins (apes): ~7–5 million years ago (mya)

• Primates (shrew-like mammals): ~65 mya

• Mammals: ~210 mya

• Synapsids (mammal-like reptiles): ~305 mya

• Tetrapods (amphibian-like land-walkers): ~375 mya

• Fish: ~530 mya

• Worms: ~600 mya

• Multicellular organisms: ~800 mya

• Single-celled organisms: ~3.8 billion years ago

This, by the way, was not long (in geological terms) after the formation of the Earth, approximately 4.5 billion years ago.

At this point, it might feel like we have gotten to the bottom of things, but a Thinker will likely respond to our progress by asking another yeah-but question. “Okay, we can trace our ancestry back to very primitive single-celled organisms, but where did those first living things come from?” Here are three rival theories:

• Divine creation: God created life on Earth. This is at odds with what science tells us, but even if we accept that God played this role, we are faced with new questions. How and why did God do this, and more significantly, who or what created God?

• Extraterrestrial creation: The first living things on Earth came from another planet. They might simply have drifted here; they might have been planted here by aliens who visited early Earth; and not to be forgotten, aliens might have unintentionally introduced life to Earth, the way a careless lab technician might accidentally contaminate a petri dish. If we propose such a theory to a Thinker, they will likely respond with a yeah-but question: “Okay, aliens might have come from another planet, but how did life arise on their planet?”

• There was a series of fortuitous chemical mashups. This last theory—formally known as abiogenesis—is the scientific consensus. Over an extended period of time, molecules combined into complex organic compounds, which in turn interacted to give rise to self-replicating molecules. At that point, the evolutionary process took over, with the molecules most capable of self-replication becoming more numerous, at the same time as they were becoming more complex.

That such a series of events would take place seems like an extreme long shot, but realize that it could have taken place in any of the (literally) quintillions of planets in our universe, and that our universe has been around for nearly 14 billion years.

Even if life arising on Earth is a one in a quadrillion long shot, it is almost a sure thing that it would happen sometime, somewhere. We just happen to be the place—more likely, one of the places—where it happened. Lucky us!

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

This is because each generation you go back, your workload doubles: You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. Go back ten generations and you have 1,024 great- ... -great grandparents. Go back thirty generations—about a thousand years—and you have a billion direct ancestors, which is kind of strange since there were only about 300 million people on the planet at that time. (I untangle this paradox in my book You: A Natural History.)

This increase in workload would be bad enough, but it is compounded by the fact that the farther back you go, the less reliable your ancestral information becomes. Realize, too, that even if you somehow have access to reliable birth records going back for centuries—as might be the case if you’re of royal blood—there is still an element of uncertainty. Yes, you can find King John and Queen Jane on your family tree, but was King John really the father of “their” offspring? These challenges were sufficient to make me abandon my research only a few generations back.

Science has given us a shortcut for tracing your ancestry. Send a genetic testing company a sample of your saliva, and it will analyze your DNA. In the report it subsequently returns, you won’t get your family tree. You will instead be informed where your ancestors lived. You might be told, for example, that your DNA is 99.4% European and 0.6% East Asian and Native American. You might also be informed that 15.9% of your European ancestry was Welsh, with Gwynedd, a county in northwest Wales, being an ancestral hotspot. You should, however, view these results with a degree of skepticism. In particular, it is unlikely that genetic tests can ascertain a person’s Welshness to within a tenth of a percent or trace it back to a single county.

Why, then, do genetic testing companies report such results? Because doing so makes them seem more “scientific.” Also, by focusing on a particular country or portion of a country, they increase the results’ appeal to test-takers. For one thing, they provide people with a loom on which to weave stories about their ancestors. The results also can be used to explain their personality traits: “Of course I like to sing: My ancestors were Welsh.” And finally, the results might justify making a pilgrimage to their “ancestral land, the beautiful hills of Gwynedd.”

Suppose that the results of your genetic test were in fact reliable. Suppose, in particular, that you were able to trace your family tree back to the Gwynedd region of Wales and discovered that 500 years ago, nearly all of your direct ancestors lived there. (It is, I know, highly unlikely that anyone could do this, but bear with me.) Even then, your ancestral research would not be complete. You would, after all, immediately be confronted with the question of where these Welsh ancestors came from.

They couldn’t simply have popped into existence in Wales. Indeed, archeological evidence suggests that humans took up permanent residence on the British Isles only about 11,000 years ago, at the end of the most recent Ice Age, and that they came there from the European mainland. (At that time, by the way, they would have been able to walk there because sea level was substantially lower than it currently is.)

Archeological evidence also suggests that your mainland European ancestors themselves came from Africa. At the end of the 20^th century, the scientific consensus was that humans evolved in the East African Rift Valley, which runs through what are now Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Early in this century, however, the pan-African hypothesis emerged. The idea was that although humans were evolving across Africa, the Rift Valley just happened to be conducive to the preservation of human fossils. By telling you that your ancestors are, say, Welsh, a genetic-testing company is simply picking an arbitrary point in time as your ancestral origin.

If you want a deep and science-based analysis of your ancestry, I am happy to provide one. To do so, I don’t need a saliva sample from you, a picture of you, or information about where you live. Also, I won’t charge you for my analysis—although it would be wonderful if you became a paid subscriber to my Substack.

Okay, drum roll! Here is my analysis: If you are a human, you are ultimately of 100% African ancestry! And by the way, your ancestors likely moved around a lot.

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

• If the student is frustrated by their inability to accomplish some task, they might want to be helped. The teacher can not only provide them with that help but reassure them that they are capable of accomplishing the task in question.

• If the student feels that they have been treated unfairly or have been disrespected, they might want to be heard. They might, in particular, want the teacher to punish the offending parties or prevent recurrence of such events. By simply listening with compassion, however, the teacher can go a long way toward comforting the student.

• If the student has been dealt an emotional blow—suppose, for example, that their pet has died—a hug might be exactly what they need.

I will refer to this as the Three-Hs strategy for dealing with a distraught person. You determine whether their needs are best met by helping, by hearing, or by hugging them, and act accordingly. This strategy can be used not only by grade-school teachers, but by the parents of grade-school students.

Significantly, it can also be used on adults, including your friends, your coworkers, and your partner or spouse—but it must be used with care. To begin with, you can’t simply ask whether a distraught adult wants to be helped, heard, or hugged; indeed, they might be offended that you are treating them like a child—even though, by letting their emotions hijack their mind, they have reverted to a childlike state. Taking into account what you know of the person’s personality and circumstances, you must quickly decide how best to meet their needs.

Suppose, then, that a coworker comes into your office and starts carrying on about their computer: “The damn thing refuses to communicate with the printer!” Under these circumstances, it would be inappropriate to offer him a hug. It would also be a waste of time to let him spend ten minutes venting about the stupidity of computers in general. What the person needs is technical help, and if you are tech-savvy, you will offer to take a look at the offending devices. You can also take advantage of this teachable moment: “This is why it is important to routinely update your drivers.”

Now suppose that a friend comes up to you with a distraught look on her face. Her boyfriend, she has discovered, has been two-timing her. Under these circumstances, the jilted friend probably isn’t looking for a hug. What she wants to do is vent, to go on at length about what a conniving, spineless, and rotten person he is. As a loyal friend, your job is to let her vent, maybe nodding your head as she does. You might also throw in an occasional word of support: “You deserve better!”

If a friend, instead of having been jilted, has been fired, a similar response might be appropriate. Once they are done venting, however, you might want to offer some practical information. You might, for example, offer to put them in touch with a skilled recruiter you know.

Finally, suppose that a friend has been dealt a serious emotional shock. Perhaps a family member has died. Under these circumstances, it is appropriate to offer to help them and to listen with sympathy as they express their grief, but the most effective initial response is probably a hug.

Many Feelers—people who habitually feel rather than think their way to conclusions—will instinctively respond to emotion in others by displaying emotion themselves. In contrast, when Thinkers encounter emotionally distraught individuals, they will respond in—what else?—a thoughtful manner. They will assess the situation and will determine how best to help the other person. They know that in some cases, a hug is the best way to deal with an emotional crisis, and will not only offer a hug but might enjoy participating in it. They also know that it is pointless to hug someone who wants to be helped. Likewise, tell someone who wants to vent that they are overreacting, and they will likely aggravate the situation.

Because the world isn’t perfect, we will sometimes have difficult days, and because we humans come wired with an emotional side, we might respond to them by getting angry, upset, or even emotionally distraught. We need to keep this in mind in our dealings with others—and hope they keep it in mind in their dealings with us.

The next time you encounter a distressed individual, give the Three-Hs strategy a try. It is easy to remember, easy to use, and in my experience, a remarkably effective way to strengthen relationships as well as to help those I care about.

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

Drone operators use controls similar to those used by hobbyists who fly remote control (RC) airplanes. With their left thumb, they control the speed and left-right direction of the drone, and with their right thumb, they control its tilt and up-down pitch. Some drones are also equipped with First-Person View (FPV) cameras that let their operators, by wearing special goggles, see the world from the drone’s perspective.

Drones are more likely than artillery and rockets to score an exact hit on their target. Drones are also cheaper to build and operate than airplanes, and it is easier, cheaper, and quicker to train a drone operator than it is to train a pilot. Furthermore, it requires considerable courage to shoot at someone while you are being shot at in return. This is often the case with pilots, but not with drone operators.

Being the target of a drone attack is doubtless a terrifying experience. Drones are hard to shoot down. Run from them, and they follow you. Hide from them in a building, and if there is an open door or a hole in the wall, they might come inside in pursuit of you. One suspects that those who have experienced drone attacks, if they survived them, would thereafter be susceptible to night terrors. It wouldn’t be surprising, however, if drone operators also paid an emotional price. Because FPV technology lets operators see the terror on the faces of those they hunt down, it wouldn’t be surprising if they subsequently experienced “role reversal” nightmares, in which they imagined themselves in the role of hunted rather than hunter.

The obvious way to fend off drones is to shoot them down, but because they are small, moving objects, this is difficult to do. An alternative way to deal with drones is to jam the radio signals used to control them. In the Ukraine, this tactic worked for a while, but then operators started communicating via exceedingly thin fiber-optic cables. As a drone flew, the fiber leading back to the operator would spool out. Before long, many areas were so covered with cables that walking through them was difficult. It looked like a monstrous deranged spider had spun a haphazard web.

Widespread use of drones has dramatically altered the battlefield equation. Foot soldiers are now quite vulnerable, even if they hide in trenches. Fortunately, tasks that used to put them at risk, such as transporting supplies and evacuating the wounded, are increasingly being performed by ground robots. Tanks and artillery are easy for drones to target. On the water, ships are being sunk by naval drones, some of which can submerge. Furthermore, although jets and bombers may be hard to hit while they are flying, they have to land, and when they do, they become easy targets for drone swarms. On June 1, 2025, Ukraine employed this tactic in Operation Spider’s Web, in which a swarm of drones, the total cost of which was under a million dollars, was used to destroy Russian aircraft worth billions of dollars.

By building and launching cheap drones by the thousands, nations can overwhelm opponents that rely on relatively few big, expensive weapons for their defense. Drones also make it possible to attack a nation by selectively attacking its infrastructure and economy. One can imagine, for example, simultaneous drone attacks taking out large parts of a nation’s power grid. (Those high-voltage transmission towers are such easy and obvious targets.) By attacking data centers, drones could disrupt access to “the cloud,” and as a result, credit cards would stop working and trading on financial markets would come to a standstill. Furthermore, a single drone strike could put an integrated-circuit factory out of commission. Fabrication of those circuits requires an ultra-clean, particle-controlled environment. By blowing a hole in the wall or roof of a fabrication plant, a drone could contaminate that environment.

Such attacks, I should add, can be launched not only by other nations, but by extremist groups within a nation. It is also conceivable that a time will come in which wars, rather than having front lines, are waged everywhere and all at once.

A strong case can be made, then, that what America needs is not the development of a “Golden Fleet” of warships—made of steel rather than aluminum!—but a robust defense against drones that, disassembled, easily fit in a one-car garage—and are made of plastic rather than metal. One hopes that the powers-that-be in Washington recognize this danger and act decisively to address it.

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

Franklin’s formal education began at age eight but ended only two years later, when his father needed help in the family’s candle- and soap-making business. He subsequently embarked on a program of self-education and became a voracious reader. He taught himself how to write effectively by reading essays in The Spectator. He also taught himself arithmetic, navigation, and several languages. He did this, I should add, at a time when books were hard to come by. As an adult, he founded the first successful lending library in America. Such libraries paved the way for the public libraries that we know and love.

According to his Autobiography, Franklin came across the Socratic method while reading Xenophon. To employ this method, you don’t shout down those who disagree with you. You don’t even give arguments and evidence in support of your contrary beliefs. You instead ask questions about their beliefs. By doing this, you can trigger in them the realization that their beliefs don’t quite gel, or even that their beliefs are inconsistent.

Franklin was sufficiently impressed with the Socratic method that he stopped debating those who didn’t share his beliefs and instead played the role of “humble inquirer and doubter.” [Part one, section 16.] He adds that

I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it. Therefore I took a delight in it, practicing it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves.

He also made a point of being epistemically humble—of expressing himself

in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken.

He subsequently elaborates on this strategy:

I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself ... the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so, or it so appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering, I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appeared or seemed to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly. [Part two, section 19.]

Although it took conscious effort to transform himself into an epistemically humble Thinker, playing this role subsequently became habitual—indeed, so much so that, he tells us, “perhaps for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me.” As I have explained, Thinkers won’t just claim to be uncertain of the truth of many of their beliefs; they genuinely won’t be certain.

Franklin realized that if you try to impose your beliefs on others, there is a danger that instead of persuading them, you “provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention” to your views. In contrast, “The modest way in which I proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction.” [Part two, section 20.]

This behavior also made it easier for him to discover and abandon his own mistaken beliefs: “I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.” More generally, he tells us that by trying to impose your beliefs on others, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to learn from them:

If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet, at the same time, express yourself as firmly fixed in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error.” [Part one, section 16.]

Thinkers, as we have seen, will be open to the possibility that those who disagree with them are correct and that they themselves are mistaken. Make it their goal to win arguments at all costs, and they deprive themselves of this path to self-improvement.

By his own admission, Franklin was “a bad speaker, never eloquent, subject to much hesitation in my choice of words, [and] hardly correct in language.” He was nevertheless able to persuade others in a way that had a profound impact on the founding of a new nation. He attributes this ability to his intellectual disposition, along with his reputation for integrity. [Part two, section 21.]

There are many individuals who can justly lay claim to the title of founding father of America. Perhaps it isn’t an overstatement to characterize Franklin not just as a founding father but as a founding Thinker.

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

I have now published more than a hundred @MoreBetterThinking Substack essays. In the first twenty-one, I explain what it means to be a Thinker, with a capital T. It doesn’t just mean that you think a lot; it means that you optimize your mind by reasoning rather than feeling your way to conclusions. The ninety Substack posts I have subsequently published are exercises in “applied thinking.”

To derive maximum benefit from these later posts, you would do well to read the first twenty-one of them. Many long-time subscribers will have done this, but there are hundreds of thousands of relative newcomers who probably haven’t. With this in mind, I recently made my early posts more accessible by publishing narrations of them: see https://morebetterthinking.substack.com/s/more-and-better-thinking-audios2b6.

I am now making it even easier for subscribers to familiarize themselves with the initial posts. As of today, you can access them on your favorite podcast app. Put them on your playlist, and you can listen while driving or walking. The podcasts are only five-ish minutes long, meaning that in less than two hours, you can get up to speed on the Thinker concept.

On Spotify, the narrations can be found at https://open.spotify.com/show/033ItAVrE0omv6ZMXKtAFt

On Apple Podcasts, they can be found at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-think-more-and-better/id6786886442

To find them on other podcast apps, search for “How to Think More and Better.” Doing this might turn up both my podcast and an Audible production of my book. To hear the latter, you must purchase the book on Audible, but you can listen to my podcasts for free.

If there is sufficient demand for these narrations, I will start dual-releasing new Substack posts, both as texts and as podcasts. I will also convert my “applied thinking” posts to audio, so subscribers can more easily access them.

Enjoy!

Two months later, I got my first subscriber, still without having posted anything, and by the time I posted my initial “Hello, World” essay on July 17, 2025, I had 44 subscribers. As a result of that post, I gained 142 additional subscribers in a week. I have subsequently posted 109 more essays, gaining followers with each posting.

Last week I was astonished to pass the 500k subscriber mark. In the Substack ecosystem, this is a big deal, but just how big is difficult to say. Substack provides leaderboards, but their rankings are based not on the number of subscribers but on the number of paid subscribers. Turn to AI for information, and you will hear different things. According to Claude, there are maybe 2 million Substack publications, and only fifty or so of them have 500k subscribers. According to Gemini, there are 75,000 “active Substack newsletters,” with only a few dozen having more than 500k subscribers. If these sources are to be trusted, having 500k subscribers counts as a significant accomplishment.

I am telling you this not to take a victory lap—well, not entirely. I simultaneously welcome and am puzzled by my success. Here’s why.

In my essays, I don’t tell readers that they are wonderful, just the way they are; nor do I offer them shortcuts, in the form of tips and tricks for better daily living. I instead encourage them to think more and better than they currently do, and show them what this involves. I explain how, with some mental effort, they can develop their ability to think rather than feel their way to conclusions. I also explain how, by doing this, they can improve their chances of staying grounded in reality, which in turn can have a profound impact on their quality of life.

The snag is that most people don’t want to invest the time and effort necessary to engage in open-minded critical thinking. More generally, just as people typically don’t like to exercise, they don’t like to think. They instead prefer to rely on tips and tricks for coping with the challenges they encounter in everyday life, and in those cases in which thinking is clearly called for, they are likely to outsource it to a surrogate thinker. If they choose their surrogate with care, this can be a sensible thing to do, but all too often, people turn to social media to find their surrogate, and judge these stand-ins by how confident they seem.

In the Substack ecosystem, I am therefore an outlier. My goal in writing is not to give readers what they want; it is instead to give them what I, perhaps presumptuously, believe they need. Not only am I asking them to think more and better than they currently do; I am asking them to think about things they would prefer not to think about at all—such as what they eat—and to rethink things they have already thought about. No fun at all!

Many social media platforms play the role of cognitive spa. They gain an audience by exploiting people’s susceptibility to confirmation bias. More precisely, they satisfy their users by telling them what they want to hear and by congratulating them for believing whatever it is they happen to believe. Rather than playing the role of cognitive spa, however, my Substack plays the role of cognitive gym.

Some subscribers don’t realize this and on encountering an essay—or maybe reading just its title—they dash off a comment in which they regurgitate their reaction to what they assume I am saying. (This happens rarely, but it does happen.) If another reader responds with a thoughtful rebuttal of their comment, they go into attack mode. This is the appropriate and expected thing to do on most social media platforms, but it is singularly out of place on the @MoreBetterThinking Substack; indeed, it is the equivalent of shouting “Free Bird” at a symphony concert.

Such cases aside, my subscriber count indicates that there is a sizeable audience for what I am doing, raising the question of how this could be. My operating hypothesis is that there is a latent demand for guidance on how to think more and better, and I suspect that my subscribers fall into one of three categories:

• People who didn’t realize that it is possible to think rather than feel their way to conclusions. They grew up surrounded by Feelers, including their parents, friends, and teachers—and even, perhaps, their college professors. On discovering that there is another way to draw conclusions, they were intrigued and wanted to know more.

• People who realize that it is possible to think rather than feel their way to conclusions, but worry that they lack the mental wherewithal to do so.

• People who are confident that they are capable of playing the role of Thinker but seek guidance in developing their intellectual skills.

I welcome readers in all of these categories and strive to have something useful to offer them.

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