In this engaging conversation, Dr. Vikram Mansharamani, a Harvard lecturer and author of "Think for Yourself," delves into the pitfalls of outsourcing our thinking to technology and experts. He highlights how this reliance can lead to echo chambers and misinformed decisions, especially in areas like health. Vikram emphasizes the importance of maintaining critical thinking skills while navigating complex information, advocating for personal judgment and diverse perspectives to enhance decision-making. It’s a call to reclaim independent thought in a data-saturated world.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
GPS Reliance
People rely on GPS devices for navigation, outsourcing their spatial reasoning.
They blindly follow directions without understanding their location or the overall route.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Bookstore Browsing vs. Algorithms
People used to browse bookstores, discovering adjacent titles and exploring diverse perspectives.
In *Think for Yourself*, Vikram Mansharamani explores how our reliance on experts and technology has diminished our ability to think independently. He provides principles and techniques to integrate these sources effectively, empowering readers to make more nuanced decisions. The book offers a critical approach to decision-making in a complex, data-driven world.
In an age where endless streams of data, options, and information are available, it can feel like every choice -- from what TV show to watch to how to invest our money -- ought to be optimized, and yet making any choice, much less an ideal one, can seem completely overwhelming. How do we figure out what to do? Much of the time, we don't. Instead, we outsource our thinking to technology, experts, and set protocols. This, my guest today says, is where some real problems start.
His name is Dr. Vikram Mansharamani and he's a Harvard lecturer who studies future trends and risks, as well as the author of Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence. Today on the show, Vikram explains how our increasingly complex lives have led us to increasingly rely on algorithms, specialists, and checklists to make decisions, even though experts are best suited to untangling complications rather than complexities. We then discuss the issues that can therefore arise in relying on expert advice, including the siloing of information and the application of misdirected focus. Once we diagnose the problem (and how the problem can, for one thing, muddy medical diagnoses), we turn to the solution, and how we can harness the good that technology and experts can provide, without undermining our ability to still think for ourselves, by doing things like asking experts about their incentives, knowing our own goals, triangulating opinions, and crossing silos. We end our conversation with how the serendipitous discovery of perspectives that can come from flipping through a magazine and browsing a bookstore can be part of restoring self-reliant thinking in the 21st century.
The Art of Manliness 