MAGICAL OVERTHINKING: Why Modern Life Is Making Us More Irrational

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2024

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Raise your hand if you've ever belittled a stranger online, made a decision based on astrology, or, heaven forbid, fallen for a conspiracy theory. No? Well, then, consider yourself lucky. And if your hand is raised, don't feel bad, because it turns out in our Information Age the cognitive biases that kept us alive a few millennia ago now make us susceptible to bouts of extreme irrationality. How this happened, and what we can do about it, is the subject of a brand new book by linguist Amanda Montell called "The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality."

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn presents.
0:05.0	I'm Rufus Griskam, and this is the next big idea.
0:10.0	Today, we live in an age of magical overthinking.
0:14.0	What can we do about it? One name has come up over and over again on this show.
0:36.0	So Danny Kahneman, who's probably a familiar name to many listeners.
0:41.0	Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist.
0:44.4	Like this concept ended up in the book because of a conversation that I had with Daniel Conaman.
0:48.4	Daniel Conaman died last month. He was 90. He leaves behind a groundbreaking body of work that has influenced
0:57.6	literally dozens of the big thinkers we've had on this show. And Kahneman will surely continue to influence economists, psychologists,
1:05.6	baseball gums, and even linguists. You're going to hear from one of them today.
1:10.0	Conaman is best known for the work he did in the 1970s alongside Amos Tversky.
1:17.0	Together they detonated one of the bedrock assumptions of classical economics, the belief that human
1:21.6	beings are rational.
1:23.7	Instead, Kahneman and Tversky showed,
1:26.0	our emotions and unconscious predilections
1:28.3	constantly cause us to act in wildly irrational ways.
1:32.4	They called these derailing quirks in mental hiccups. in wildly irrational ways.
1:32.5	They called these derailing quirks and mental hiccups cognitive biases.
1:37.4	You may have heard of some of them, confirmation bias, the sunk cost fallacy.
1:42.2	These and other cognitive biases are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago.
1:46.7	In fact, they may be even more relevant in our era of information overload.
1:51.6	They're certainly more pernicious. That's the argument put forth in a new book by
	...

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