Are You Showing Them How To Be A Student? | Expect To Change Your Opinions

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from The Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

2:09Are you showing them how to be a student? If you think back to when you were a kid, what appeared to you to be the best part about being an adult? No more school. Our parents didn't have to carry around heavy books or do homework. We never saw them applying to get into this school or that one. It's sort of sad that, by and large, we show our kids that education stops. That while adulthood isn't always fun, one perk is that you no longer have to go to class. That graduation is a final destination. It doesn't have to be this way. There's the story of Epictetus teaching one day when a student's arrival caused a commotion in the back of class.

2:50Who was it? It was Hadrian, the emperor. Hadrian's example clearly had an impact on his successor and adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. Late in his reign, a friend spotted Marcus heading out, carrying a stack of books. Where are you going, he asked. Marcus was on his way to a lecture on Stoicism, he said, for learning is a good thing even for one who is growing old. I am now on my way to Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know. If you want your kids to value learning, if you want them to never stop furthering the education you've been investing so much time and money and worry into, then we have to show them what an adult committed to lifelong learning actually looks like.

3:35We have to show them that we have not graduated, that we are not on summer break, and we have not arrived at the final destination of education. Wisdom, they must learn, is an endless pursuit.

3:51You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

4:30Over 150 ,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than$2.5 billion over the last several years, and research suggests that these donations will save over 300 ,000 lives. I myself am one of those donors. I donate to GiveWell every year. It means a lot to me. and you can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. And thanks to the donors that sponsor this research, GiveWell doesn't take a cut from your tax-deductible donation to their recommended funds. And if this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last.

5:05To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under Podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's givewell.org, code thedailysteic to donate or find out more.

5:24Expect to change your opinions. This is the April 7th entry in the Daily Steic. There are two things that must be rooted out in human beings, Epictetus says in Discourses 314, arrogant opinion and mistrust. Arrogant opinion expects that there is nothing further needed, and mistrust assumes that under the torrent of circumstances, there can be no happiness. How often do we begin some projects certain we know exactly how it will go? How often do we meet people and think we know exactly who and what they are? And how often are these assumptions proved to be completely and utterly wrong? And this is why we must fight our biases and preconceptions, because they are a liability.

6:11Ask yourself always, what haven't I considered? Why is this thing the way that it is? Am I part of the problem here or the solution? Could I be wrong here? Be doubly careful to honor what you do not know and then set it against the knowledge that you actually have. And remember, if there is one core teaching at the heart of this philosophy, it's that we're not as smart and wise as we'd like to think we are. And that if we ever do want to become wise, it comes from questioning and from humility, not as many would like to think, from certainty, from mistrust, and from arrogance. Of course, this is the idea of ego is the enemy.

6:50Epictetus says you cannot learn that which you think you already know. And this is the irony, the tragedy of most stupidity is that the stupid are too conceited, too dumb to know how dumb and stupid they are, right? Ignorance often also hides from us the extent of our ignorance. This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's a primary strain in our politics, our cultural life these days. It's not just a disinterest in ideas or what's going on in the world, but it's a sense that one already knows all these things, that one knows better, and thus is superior. There's a great book that I recommend.

7:39I carry it in the bookstore, and I had him on the podcast a while back by Tom Nichols called The Death of Expertise. right the sense that we know better than the people who have spent their entire lives studying and exploring these things i even see this with ego as the enemy right people go ah but isn't ego a good thing and i go you know i i talk about that at length in the book and oh i haven't read it and it's interesting oh it's so nice that you have a strong opinion about the book that you have not bothered to read, right? That's it in a nutshell, right? What gets in the way, and I think Zeno said this, that conceit is the impediment to knowledge, right?

8:22That our sense of what we know, our preconceptions, our suspicions, our cynicism, right? This isn't just from ignorance. It can also come from a sort of a jadedness or a sense of superiority or a sense of, it could come from that other place too. But the point is, we get in our own way and we close ourselves off, right? And this prevents us from learning, prevents us from having our minds change, prevents us from understanding new things. And it's a toxic force in the world today. It's just a toxic, terrible force. And it holds us back. But let's go back a while, right? Let's go back to Socrates, this hero of the Stoics.

9:09Socrates is considered wise. But what is the source of Socrates' wisdom? Diogenes Laertes says it's that he is aware of his own ignorance. Now, whether Socrates really says this himself, you know, that quote comes later, it doesn't really matter. Think about what the Socratic method is. It's Socrates asking questions. It's almost exasperating listening to Socrates, never coming out and taking a position or making an assertion. Just it's all questions. But that's who Socrates was. He was trying to learn, trying to ask, trying to get to truth. He wasn't trying to prove that he was smarter than anyone else.

9:53He was trying to really articulate how elusive and complicated the truth actually is. Think about what the scientific method is. It's a hypothesis. But then the next thing you do after the hypothesis is try to disprove the hypothesis. Try to get the information that points one way or another whether that hypothesis is correct. The hypothesis isn't a conclusion. It's not a certainty. It's a sense, here's what I think based on my knowledge, based on past information, based on what's intuitive. But then I'm going to go do the work. I'm going to get the evidence. I'm going to poke holes in this. You know, we talk about this idea of the confirmation bias, that when you think things are a certain way or when you're looking for something, when you have a preconceived notion, you tend to only find the things that confirm that preconceived notion.

10:49But the opposite of that is true. It means you don't see all the things out there that would make you see it differently, that would make you think differently, that would open your mind to this or that or the other. So remember, the Stoic comes to knowledge from a place of humility, from a place of questioning. Our forefather is Socrates in this regard. It's humility. You cannot learn that what you think you already know. Focus on what you don't know. Focus on learning. Focus on getting better. if you think you know everything. In one sense, you're right because you have made yourself incapable of learning anything new.

11:28So expect to change your opinions. Keep your mind open. Focus on all you have yet to learn as opposed to all the things you think you already know.

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