Diversify your thought portfolio
De-risk your thinking as you would de-risk an investment portfolio
You’re hanging out with your friends and someone says something you don’t agree with. It makes you feel negative emotions and before you know it your body temperature has literally spiked to the point of you sweating a bit and questioning whether you should either let your inner rage take over or leave the gathering all together.
You’re in disbelief that you are associating with someone who has such views that are contrary to yours. Later that night, without you noticing, you’re debating the ghost of this person to release some of your heat, but can’t seem to string together enough logic to understand the flaw in the person’s stance, so eventually you conclude that they’re just dumb.
What does this say about you? The first thought you may encounter is that it reflects poorly on your reputation to be around a person with these sorts of beliefs. But really what it says about you is that you lack diversification of thought.
This interaction provokes such a response because it is uncommon, but why is it uncommon? Because we prefer comfort, ease, and convenience.
It’s normal to want to feel at ease when you’re with socializing in your personal time. But there’s a line so fine it’s become hidden in our society today, that demarcates being at ease and being lazy in our thinking. To shut off our brain is not to be at ease, but to rest. It makes sense the average human seeks to sloth around at most times given how they are almost always in a tired state. It’s no accident that sharing political beliefs has become taboo.
An opposite angle for a mechanism that fosters groupthink is that how much more ego-enriching it is to be around people that agree with our views all the time. What better feeling for the ego than to constantly be told that you’re right, and for people to only talk about what you believe is correct? It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is an echo chamber.
You know what’s inconvenient? Having a civil disagreement with someone. You know what’s a skill, that is becoming less prevalent by the day and therefore more valuable by the day? Having a civil disagreement with someone.
Consider what’s going on in your mind when you’re confronted with needing to think about what is correct in a given situation. How often do you seek other perspectives? Do you even know how to tap into other perspectives within your own mind? Without this ability, you will keep getting into accidents since you can’t see your blindspots. There is nothing more threatening to our thought process than to only know one way to see things.
Imagine you only know one way to think about something. That’s futile, unless you assume that you can interpret and understand all of everything outside of you, and somehow you encapsulate all thinking by all sentient beings.
Investors de-risk their portfolio by seeking investments that are least correlated, or as different from one another as possible. This way, if one tanks, it will not affect the other thing and the value of the portfolio is maintained.
Diversifying our thoughts by internalizing opposing viewpoints and ways to think means we don’t hit a wall when approaching a disparate set of problems over our lifetime and instead can tap into other paths that we’ve learned from other people.
De-risk your thoughts by actively seeking to include people in your social circle who have at least one opposing view as you and you can engage with in a discussion about such views.
Seek understanding by leading with curiosity. We focus more on whether the person in front of us is pro Trump vs. Democrats, or pro Palestine vs. Israel, or techno-optimist vs. sceptical about AGI. This is the equivalent of caring more about someone’s face than the words coming out of their mouth when talking to them. Pretty hilarious, isn’t it?
Stop being shallow. Stop paying attention to labels. Stop defining what the opposite side is for any belief you hold. Focus on substance, on content, on quality.