Think Again: The Power Of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Adam Grant

The central problem of this book is that the author is not nearly as good a model of the sort of thinking he wants to promote as he think he is. He thinks he is open-minded like a scientist, but instead the sort of “scientific” thinking he champions is the same sort of highly politicized openness to be quick to jump on the next “big thing” that is pushed by corrupt leftist elites and try to promote it to the general public. The author spends a great deal of time in this book trying to lambast others (especially more conservative types) as being rigid in their thinking and overconfident about their insights, and he tries to score some cheap laughs by pointing to things that people often think that they “know” but really don’t know, and then he manages to cite a rather poor understanding of abracadabra based on some superficial reading of Jewish mystical sources. On top of this, the author tries to make the claim that he really isn’t all that political, despite the fact that most of his discussion involves politicians and how they act, and his bias is pretty clear despite his own willful ignorance of it. If the author knew what he didn’t know, he probably would have realized that he didn’t know enough to write this book in an authoritative manner and would have been better to leave it to someone who wouldn’t beclown themselves.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t useful or interesting anecdotes here to be read. The author is at least a skilled writer and the book is edited competently. This is so even though many of the examples of the book–including Darryl the black musician who made a regular habit of engaging racist KKK-types in conversation that would help them to overcome their prejudices–are heavy handed and partial in their meaning. It would have been more useful to see, for example, whether one could engage racist blacks in their biases against viewing their anti-white feelings as being racist at all would be as successful, as a sort of contrast to the author’s approach. The problem is not so much the author’s skill in crafting words, but rather his lack of self-awareness. It is an especially difficult challenge to right an effective book about self-awareness being a key to wisdom, especially when combined with humility, when the author finds himself neither particularly humble nor particularly self-aware. This is the sort of book where the author wishes the reader to do as they say and not as they do, and that is not ultimately very satisfactory.

In terms of its contents, this book is divided into four parts and eleven chapters and takes up about 250 pages or so of material. The book begins with a prologue and then contains four chapters that deal with the subject of individual rethinking and updating one’s own views (I), namely four personalities that are present in all of our minds (preacher, prosecutor, politician, and scientist), finding the sweet spot of confidence between overconfident and underconfident (2), finding joy in being wrong (3), and enjoying constructive conflicts (4). The second part of the book contains a discussion of interpersonal rethinking–namely opening the minds of others–with chapters on how to win debates and influence people (5), how to diminish prejudice by destabilizing stereotypes (6), and a discussion of how dishonest doctors seek to promote vaccines (7). The third part of the book then examines collective rethinking (III), with chapters on charged conversations and the need to depolarize our discussions (8), easier said than done, the need to teach students to question knowledge (9), and how to build cultures of learning at work (10). The last part of the book contains a conclusion that discusses how to escape tunnel vision, after which the author closes the book with an epilogue, actions for impact, acknowledgements, notes, illustration credits, and an index.