- Our brains try to minimise surprisal (which is how we learn anything: we fine tune our predictive machine to better match reality) and Perception is controlled hallucination. Wishful thinking is the dangerous combination of these two: Our brain tries to minimise surprisal by sticking to a predictive model that puts itself in the center of the world. It thus fails its purpose: determining which action to take in response.
- I first read explicitly about wishful thinking in Richard Rummelt’s excellent book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. He describes the connections of wishful thinking with new age religion. I remember I found it interesting to read, but I do not remember many details. However, the concept of wishful thinking stuck with me.
- One of the beliefs that underpins wishful thinking is that by wishing for something, it will become true. While human will is powerful - in that humans can chose challenges and overcome them - just wishing for something without acting accordingly is not effective.
- Wishful thinking gives a way out of the “uncomfortable struggle” with problems and thus reality. It’s a form of avoiding reality.
- In The Crux, Richard Rumelt calls the outcome of reality avoidance in organizations “positive thinking success theatre”.
- The term fact-value distinction captures what people fail to understand when they go from an ought to an is. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction.
- When trying to change the world, talking about how you want things to be is not getting you closed to the change. Should is a useless word
- As Marcus Aurelius once said
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We get angry, sad, or disappointed because reality doesn’t meet our expectations.
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