Classic

Professor J,

I do hope you are feeling better. I often wonder when I'm really ill, as I was recently, if our bodies don't just decide we've pushed them too far and they are going to stop us in our tracks, smack us in bed, and finally get the rest they need whether we think we have time for it or not.

I am reading Dale Carnegie's classic, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. A friend actually gave it to me to give to my daughter, a chronic worrier, but I thought I'd read it before passing it on. I am always interested in how when I'm thinking about certain ideas I seem to encounter information from unlikely sources related to it. Kind of like when you've visited a city and then it seems to suddenly be mentioned everywhere. I always wonder if the universe is bringing me information to connect ideas I'm thinking about, or if I'm just paying attention to certain ideas and then I notice them. Perhaps both.

As I was reading the book I ran across this:

"...If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.'

But what do most of us do? If we bother with facts at all--and Thomas Edison said in all seriousness, 'There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labor of thinking'--if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts that bolster up what we already think--and ignore all the others! We want only the facts that justify our acts--the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justify our preconceived prejudices!

As Andre Maurois put it: 'Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true. Everything else puts us into a rage."

An early description of confirmation bias.

Our best thinking is done when we put our emotions aside but sadly the Maurois quote seems to pinpoint accurately the kind of "thinking" that is being done all around us. Some things it seems just never change. 

Another Maurois quote: "We appreciate frankness from those who like us. Frankness from others is called insolence."

Well, now. Isn't that the truth!:)

Speedy recovery, my friend!