Reading Journal 2024: The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

Reading Journal 2024: The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality
Author: Amanda Montell

Near the end of the book the author reflects on the current state of AI, calling back to a menial exercise she did one day out of boredom when she asked AI to describe the difference between its greatest value and humanity’s greatest value. In response, AI cites its greatest value as reason, while humanity’s greatest value is love. The author, whom takes a hard and cynical stance on the idea that AI can ever become truly humanlike, wonders in relationship to humanity, why not both? This provides a nice summary of what she was trying to accomplish in the book as a whole, arguing not for a denial of our penchant for irrationality, but in acceptance of it, seeing it as a tool of reason rather than a means for harm.

At the beginning of the book, author Amanda Montell describes the magical part of the book’s title as an ancient and necessary aspect of human nature, while the overthinking part of the title is a largely modern problem birthed by the enlightenment. This becomes important for knowing how to parse out when and how magical thinking, which can qualify as our penchant for irrationality, emerges as a potential tool for navigating this world in a healthy way. In recognizing that we all have these same operating tendencies, no matter how educated or smart (and sometimes more so when we are educated and smart, precisely because it leads us to believe that we aren’t irrational selves), it can foster empathy for others and ourselves in our common pursuit of what is true. And it is that empathy that can help protect against the human tendency to create necessary villains, to see and think in sharp binaries, and to get hyper focused on the negative and the problems. Precisely because nearly all of this is relational defined and built on a common concern for the truth. What’s important there is that truth can’t be reduced to one simple thing, which modernity has largely tried to do. Rather what we distinguish beteern is not truth as true or false, but as good or harm, which of course requires defintion.

The book is built around what feels like a collection of essays on different ideas, so it does feel a bit scattered. Much of it is a mix of social reflection and surface level social science, probably leaning more towards the former. Which isn’t bad, it’s just a particular approach that will work for some and not others.

I did find it interesting to try and hold her own conclusions up to the working assumptions she establishes in the book. For example, at one point she talks about the basic observational truth that while we can measure a certain kind of progress (technological, moral, science, social, civilization, medicine), we can also note that this progress has not resulted in greater and more happiness. Leaving one with the very real conundrum of not really knowing where all this progress is then leading or for. She roots an answer to part of this problem in magical thinking. We have an established penchant for seeing our time as worse than all the times before it, which leaves us with very little imagination for the future. In some ways it just results in a cyclical self fulfilling prophecy. One of the ways we cope with this is by leaning on nostalgia. We romanticize the past precisely because our memories are built to forget and filter out the negative so as to be happy and fulfilled. This qualifies as magical thinking. When looking at the present we intuitively long for a simpler time, even if that time wasn’t actually simpler. It is simply a time that memory has been able to process and recast, something we can even do for times before our time.

Given the assumptions of the author, this sort of irrationality should not be feared or disregarded in favor of overthinking. The function, even if its built on something that is technically not true, has a purpose and a reason, and we can develop the ability to use this belief to perhaps motivate us towards building towards a simpler future, one where our memories are capable of filtering out the mess and reimagining the good. If all we have is overthinking (reason), it effectively binds us to the bad by its nature.

What’s interesting to me is how this rests on the problem being an inherently modern one. Overthinking is a problem of reason, not magic, even as reason addresses the problem of magic. Overthinking actually makes us more irrational, making us vulnerable to things, like cults, which seems to be her favorite topic of discussion, that can actually harm us.

Much of this travels similar lines as Smith’s book Irrationality: The Dark Side of Reason, which is a much better treatment of the idea. But the idea is I think important for anyone parsing through the limits and shortcomings of the enlightenment project. Part of what makes Smith’s book a stronger overall thesis is that, unlike Montell, he doesn’t presuppose certain underlying values or truths. I haven’t read her book “Cultish”, but I suspect much of her assumed worldview comes from her own past experience with cults. Thus magical thinking is given the very clear boundaries of its functional and material source while maintaining a belief in certain unarguable truths. She argues at one point that this is simply a conflict and incongruity (allowing ourselves to believe in something false so as to build a healthier and better future in reality) that we must be willing to bear and carry as rational creatures. Where this challenges some of her conclusions is when she acrmtually needs to lean on hard and fast value claims. Perhaps AI is more right than even she wants to admit.

Nevertheless, lots of interesting bits of information here, even if it is a base treatment of its ideas. I liked the section where she dissects and deconstructs the whole self help for well being craze, where everyone and anyone magically becomes a health guru based on magical thinking. I like too how she goes out of her way to blur lines between what we might call extremism and our everyday thinking and function. We are all far more irrational than we think, and we all are equally indebted to our biases and often untold assumptions, and the more educated we become the more blind we often become to this. I also found it interesting how she makes a link between believing and belonging, showing how the push and pull between these two things is precisely the place where we find it most difficult to change our minds when confronted with facts or truths that push back on our conceptions of reality. If challenging what we percieve to be harmful truths leaves us isolated, we ultimately bind ourselves to these challenges by formulating beliefs that then can lead to a new community. Which is of course where the binaries and the oppositions and the tendency for overthinking emerges, and likewise our resistance to being challenged as supposed educated beings. The author is only willing to push this reasoning so far when it comes to her own worldview, but I do think it’s a fascinating idea to consider.

Overall I thought this was decent, if a bit underwhelming. Probably would work better with people to discuss it with, I’m sure, as each chapter kind of has it’s own thesis and argument. But interesting as a solo effort all the same.