Philosophers are the most rigorous thinkers I know.

Like intellectual boxers; they come to understand ideas by making them fight with each other.

most of the time a philosopher spends writing doesn’t involve typing. Rather, it’s a form of intellectual exploration—following intellectual embryos and running into various roadblocks on their way to discovering an idea’s mature form.

you understand an idea not when you’ve memorized it, but when you know why its specific form was chosen over all the alternatives.

ideas are like clothing. They change with the times and reveal how much the actions of others influence our decision making.

The faster you jump to conclusions, the more likely you are to default to fashionable thinking.

Humanity has succeeded not because of the intelligence of atomic individuals, but because we’ve learned to outsource knowledge to the tribe.

social learning is humanity’s primary advantage over primates and, in Henrich’s words, “the secret of our success.”

as Duke University professor Timur Kuran has shown, people who try to maintain a secret religion for a long time usually abandon their faith. Psychologically, the burden of falsifying your beliefs in public is too heavy to shoulder. That’s when the magnet of culture pulls us in and kidnaps our beliefs. 

The more people are exposed to an idea, the more likely they are to believe it. The more fashionable it is, the more exposure it’ll receive. But the popularity of an idea doesn’t make it correct. Like the secret menu at In-N-Out Burger, the best options aren’t always advertised.

Jumping to conclusions limits your ability to discover the truth, because you can’t jump to conclusions outside the spotlight. Philosophers know that every idea comes packaged in an implicit frame.

Knowing that axioms will mold the ultimate shape of an idea, good philosophers tend to critique the premise of an idea—the frame—instead of the conclusion.

when you restrict yourself to one side of the intellectual spectrum, you limit your capacity to find truth.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Philosophy, like regular life, is best experienced with an attitude of intellectual grace. “What can this person teach me?” is a much more productive question than “How is this person wrong?” 

the world progresses when people with conviction take action, often against the tide of consensus.

We distort information to make ourselves appear better than we actually are.

Our brains are simultaneously designed to seek out information and destroy that information after we acquire it.

Trivers once said: “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”

if history is an unceasing sprint toward the future, human nature doesn’t change. Only the laws of physics are more predictable. What’s happened in the past will happen in the future — again, again, and again.

Social media has turned so many into public relations professionals who pursue likeability instead of truth.

Through the twin principles of reason and rationality, philosophers risk their social credit scores in the short term to improve civilization in the long run.