How to think

I saw this New York Times opinion piece with a funny title: “How To Think About Trump’s War with Iran.” (It’s written by eternal hack Thomas Friedman, who has been writing the worst fake analysis slop for decades).

The content of his “piece” doesn’t matter (it’s empty propaganda of course)—but the title is kind of interesting: How to think. This is ostensibly a piece of writing aimed at smart people—sophisticated New York Times opinion readers. And yet it is explicitly framed as telling them how to think about something.

This seems odd—shouldn’t smart people know how to think about things? Isn’t that basically all that being smart is? And yet this is a very common thing in articles and books intended for ostensibly smart people. Smart people love this, apparently, being told how to think. Because it shows a kind of first level desire for knowledge—a desire to know what to think. A certain kind of “smart” person, who thinks that the New York Times opinion page is actually a smart, useful source of knowledge and insight—and for them, being “smart” onlyl extends as far as wanting to be told what to think.

An actual smart person, of course, knows that you can only figure out how to think for yourself. You don’t need to read anything that tells you how to think—that means your brain is empty.