Rethinking

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s new book Think Again starts off sounding like the stereotypical hit self-help book you see these days. There are engaging anecdotes, easy-to-remember stories, good common-sense advice, and the brisk narrative is designed to generate “aha!” moments. Much like the books of the brothers Heath, for example. There’s also a core idea that is dissected every which way, in this case: Rethinking. And it has a catchy subtitle: “The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know” with a front-cover endorsement by Melinda and Bill Gates.

 

I read the first half briskly, being familiar with many of the anecdotal examples (re)used in Grant’s book, including the opener about the Mann Gulch fire, often discussed in disaster-related books. There are also humorous self-deprecating diagrams, bar-graphs, pie-charts, cartoons, which are eye-catching and get you to laugh at yourself – always a good sign of a popular pleasing book. Grant is an engaging writer, no doubt about that. So is Jamie Holmes. His book, Nonsense, has the opposite subtitle: “The Power of Not Knowing”. You’d think these books should go head-to-head, but alas, no such luck.

 

You’d think that the world would be a better place if only we could all apply the wisdom of these self-help books that seem to preach a lot of common sense. Doesn’t seem like that will happen in the near future. If anything, common sense seems to be getting less common thanks to media bubbles, fake news, and nasty polarization of political views. Grant does his part in trying to improve the situation, and multiple chapters are devoted to things like learning to embrace being wrong, focusing on the argument and not the arguer, how to debate or even persuade people you disagree with, and how to be more “open-minded”. My goal is not to be curmudgeonly about Grant’s book, or sound like a hater, I quite liked his book actually.

 

First, it reminded me of something that I’ve missed in the researcher part of my vocation once I became a faculty member. It sounds oxymoronic. Isn’t becoming a faculty member and running your own independent research (group, at least in the sciences) what you’re working towards? Yes, except that I’m at an undergraduate-focused liberal arts college where I’m the only computational chemist. (In a smaller department, there’s no reason to hire two computational chemists.) Unlike in graduate school and my postdoctoral research lab, where I was in large research groups and had plenty of people to argue with on a day-to-day basis, that was no longer the case once I started my faculty position.

 

I miss the arguing. That’s probably because I was fortunate to be in situations where I found people to argue with who cared very much about the “meat” of the argument, were very thoughtful, and avoided ad hominem attacks. I confess that I’m not an arguer by nature. My PhD adviser enjoyed getting into a robust argument (focused on the science), and I learned by watching. There was also a senior “pessimist” who people said I should talk to because he would dissect everything and help you think about the problem you were working on regardless of whether it was in his area. (He was very helpful but I had to be careful not to let his gloomy disposition infect me.) My postdoctoral adviser was the opposite: easy-going and argument-avoiding in general. But my office-mate, a fellow postdoc, enjoyed getting into robust arguments, and that’s when I learned to really argue (productively) as an equal with a fellow scientist. I’m honored to call him a good friend! As a result of reading Grant’s book, I approached a senior colleague with complementary expertise but related interests to be my arguing buddy. I plan to start regularly robust discussions where we disagree and try to do better science as a result. (He helped pick apart my draft of a grant proposal last month!)

 

Secondly, Grant’s book made me rethink the teaching of my quantum class offered in the upcoming Fall semester where I’ve finally decided to do away with the textbook. While Grant has a chapter titled “rewriting the textbook” about rethinking teaching in higher education, he repeats mostly popular punditry although he is a little more careful and thoughtful than others, at least in my opinion. That chapter wasn’t the spark, but for some reason after reading his book, I got really excited about what I could be doing differently and now I need to pick out some winners from my flood of ideas. I’ll blog about some of them this summer when I start formally re-working the course, but right now I’m enjoying the swirl of ideas. I suppose I’m Rethinking!