Thinking Is a Group Sport
A Guide to Clear Thinking in a Confusing World: Alan Jacobs’s ‘How to Think’
During the early days of the Vietnam War, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wanted to know if American military efforts were effective. He charted the numbers of weapons lost, enemies killed, and so on. McNamara’s accounting was exhaustive and exacting, but he overlooked something.
A critical colleague told McNamara he’d failed to count “the feel…
