source: Respect Each Others’ Delusions · Collab Fund
🗒️我的笔记
I love the saying that people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.
我喜欢这样一句话：人们记不住书，却能记住句子。。
One sentence that knocked me off my feet when I read Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History was:
当我读到威尔和阿里尔·杜兰特的《历史的教训》时，有一句话让我大吃一惊：
Learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and respect one another’s delusions. 从历史中吸取足够的教训，耐心地面对现实，尊重彼此的妄想。
I love that so much. 我非常喜欢这个。
The key here is accepting that everyone is deluded in their own unique way. You, me, all of us.
这里的关键是接受每个人都以自己独特的方式受到欺骗。你，我，我们所有人。
When you realize that you – the good, noble, well-meaning, even-tempered, fact-driven person that you are – have views of how the world works that are sure to be incomplete if not completely wrong, you should have empathy for others whose deluded beliefs are obvious to you. I am such a fan of Daniel Kahneman’s observation that we are better at spotting other people’s flaws than our own.
当你意识到你——一个善良、高尚、善意、性情平和、以事实为导向的人——对世界如何运作的看法即使不是完全错误，也肯定是不完整的，你应该同情其他人，他们的迷惑信念对你来说是显而易见的。我非常喜欢丹尼尔·卡尼曼的观察，认为我们比自己更善于发现别人的缺点。
Of course there is a limit to respecting other people’s delusions. Delusions that directly harm or impede others shouldn’t be tolerated.
当然，尊重他人的妄想也是有限度的。不应该容忍直接伤害或妨碍他人的妄想。
But let me share just three causes of major delusions. And ask yourself: Do you think you are exempt from these forces?
但让我分享一下造成主要妄想的三个原因。问问自己：你认为你可以免受这些力量的影响吗？
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1. Nothing is as persuasive as what you’ve experienced firsthand.
没有什么比你的亲身经历更有说服力的了。
David McRaney has a great line here: “When the truth is uncertain, our brains resolve uncertainty without our knowledge by creating the most likely reality they can imagine based on our prior experiences.”
大卫·麦克雷尼（David McRaney）有一句名言：当真相不确定时，我们的大脑会在我们不知情的情况下，根据我们之前的经验，创造出他们所能想象的最有可能的现实，从而解决不确定性”。Quote
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And since we’ve all had massively different life experiences, what seems obvious to me may be bonkers to you, and vice versa. Most debates are not really debates; They are two people with different life experiences talking over each other.
由于我们的生活经历大相径庭，在我看来显而易见的事，在你看来可能是天方夜谭，反之亦然。大多数辩论都不是真正意义上的辩论，而是两个有着不同生活经历的人在互相倾诉。
This can occur even within the same person: Some things that I fiercely believed at age 20 I now consider hilariously wrong, and I’m sure the same will occur at age 60 when I look at things I believe today.
即使在同一个人身上也会发生这种情况：我在 20 岁时坚信的一些事情现在看来是可笑的错误，而且我确信当我在 60 岁时看待我今天所相信的事情时，同样的事情也会发生。
Everyone is trying to make sense of the world through the lens of their own experience, and as those experiences grow everyone’s lens tends to focus on a slightly different version of “truth” in the world – especially for social topics like politics, religion, and investing.
每个人都试图通过自己的经验来理解这个世界，而随着经验的增长，每个人的视角往往会聚焦于略有不同的世界 “真相”—尤其是政治、宗教和投资等社会话题。
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2. Your willingness to believe something is influenced by how much you want and need it to be true.
你相信某件事的意愿取决于你对某件事的渴望程度和需要程度。
If you tell me you’ve found an easy way to double my money in a week, I’m not going to believe you by default.
如果你告诉我你找到了一种简单的方法可以让我的钱在一周内翻倍，我不会默认相信你。
But if I desperately owed someone money next month that I don’t have, I would listen. And if my children were starving and my only hope for their survival was doubling my money next week, I would hang on your every word.
但如果我下个月极度欠某人钱而我却没有，我会听。如果我的孩子们正在挨饿，而我对他们生存的唯一希望就是下周把我的钱加倍，我会坚持你的每一句话。
The majority of lottery tickets are purchased by the lowest-income Americans. Why? I have a theory: The lowest-income Americans overestimate their odds of winning because when you feel trapped in poverty-stricken stagnation you desperately need to believe that you can buy a ticket out of your situation in order to maintain a certain level of functioning optimism.
大多数彩票是由收入最低的美国人购买的。为什么？我有一个理论：收入最低的美国人高估了他们获胜的几率，因为当你感到陷入贫困停滞时，你迫切需要相信你可以买到一张摆脱困境的门票，以保持一定程度的乐观情绪。
That’s a stark example, but the same force influences the beliefs of everyone.
这是一个鲜明的例子，但同样的力量影响着每个人的信念。
There is a thing in psychology called depressive realism, which is the idea that depressed people make more accurate predictions of the world because they are more attuned to how fragile, competitive, and ruthless life can be.
心理学中有一种叫做抑郁现实主义的观点，即抑郁的人对世界做出更准确的预测，因为他们更能适应生活的脆弱、竞争和无情。
But they are a minority. Most of us cling to the opposite, carrying around comforting delusions that guide our beliefs.
但他们是少数。我们大多数人都坚持相反的观点，带着安慰性的妄想来指导我们的信念。 A lot of decisions are statistically wrong but support the incentives of the person making them – a good thing to remember when analyzing the predictions you use to justify your own actions.
许多决策在统计上都是错误的，但却支持决策者的动机——在分析你用来证明自己行为合理性的预测时，记住这一点是件好事。
- Another McRaney quote fits well here: “Until we know we are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right.” 麦克雷尼的另一句话在这里很合适：“在我们知道自己错了之前，错误的感觉就像是正确的一样。 #Quote -
3. When there’s an absence of perfect information, emotion, passion, and tribal identity fill the void.
当缺乏完善的信息时，情感、激情和部落认同感就会填补空白。
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Astrophysicist Gregory Benford coined Benford’s Law of Controversy, which states that passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
天体物理学家格雷戈里·本福德创造了本福德争议定律，该定律指出，热情与可用的真实信息量成反比。Concept
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Uncertainty is painful to accept. It’s far more comfortable to form a complete narrative about how things work. In a quest to leave no question unanswered, emotion gladly fills the holes left by a lack of information.
接受不确定性是痛苦的。形成关于事物如何运作的完整叙述要舒服得多。为了不遗漏任何问题，情感很乐意填补因缺乏信息而留下的空白。
The problem with emotion and passion is they tend to be black or white, with no room for the nuance required to understand most topics. You get a false sense of confidence, and one that’s disguised as absolute truth.
情感和激情的问题在于它们往往是非黑即白，没有空间去理解大多数主题所需的细微差别。你会产生一种错误的自信感，一种伪装成绝对真理的自信感。
Some people are more susceptible than others, but no one is exempt from these. 有些人比其他人更容易受到影响，但没有人能幸免。
So as we finish up the year – yet another year filled with controversy, confusion, disagreement and passion, as they all are – I want to focus more on the Durant’s timeless wisdom.
因此，当我们结束这一年时——这又是一个充满争议、困惑、分歧和激情的一年——我想更多地关注杜兰特永恒的智慧。
Let’s bear reality patiently, and respect one another’s delusions.
让我们耐心地承受现实，尊重彼此的幻想。
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