How to Inoculate Your Mind Against Bad Ideas

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Play with ideas so that that's your light touch. Just kind of entertain lots of ideas as if it's more interesting or a game, rather than defining yourself by ne of them. We need to get over the idea that our minds are agents and their contents are merely inert. Ideas are alive in much the way that viruses are alive. When you take on an idea and make it your own, your mind changes. Your mind changes in such a way that that ideas can delude and seduce and addict and confuse and disorient they are not. I think when we get, when we start taking ideas too seriously, we start to get defensive and angry... engaging one another in dia

Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. COVID-19 denial, anti-vaxxers compromising public health, conspiracy thinking hijacking minds and inciting mob violence, toxic partisanship cleaving our nations, the return of Flat Earth theory… What the heck is going on? Why is all this happening, and why now? More important, what can we do about it? Does our “right to our opinion” trump our responsibilities? Does the resulting ethos effectively compromise mental immune systems, allowing “mind parasites” to overrun them? Are conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, and garden-variety bad ideas all species of mind parasites, each of which employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems? In this conversation, based on the book Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that minds and cultures have immune systems, and that they really can break down. Fortunately, he assures us that they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. Can his ideas revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking?