Tag: critical-thinking
All the articles with the tag "critical-thinking".
Why even wrong ideas are worth keeping
Hasok Chang's Is Water H2O? shows chemistry moving forward by combining right hypotheses with wrong ones. That habit has a name, pluralism, and it's the same idea behind mental models and Charlie Munger's latticework thinking.
How to be better than a honeybee
A bee that can't describe what it found dances nonsense anyway, and so do people who answer every question with confidence. Here's how to say only what you actually know.
Why don't we have flying cars yet?
Aswath Damodaran sorts ideas into possible, plausible, and probable. Only the last one comes with a number, and that's the test most ideas fail.
What losing 3 million won on P2P lending taught me
Philip Tetlock's three patterns of closed thinking, the politician, the preacher and the prosecutor, and the fourth job that gets you out of them.
What matters more than the survivors
The bombers that never came back hold the answer. How survivorship bias works, and what to ask before you judge from the data in front of you.
The 2-4-6 rule that 96% of people get wrong
Wason's rule-finding experiment shows why stacking up supporting evidence never proves you right, while a single counterexample can prove you wrong.
How to dodge bad advice, from a Wharton professor
You can't judge advice on a subject you don't know, so judge the adviser instead: does he want you to do well, does he know the field, and does he know you?
What if your brain stops and you never notice?
Certain words and certain people trip a breaker in your head that shuts your thinking off, and you can learn to catch it and switch it back on.
Why Ray Dalio's Principles is hard
Dalio tells you to be a hyperrealist and moves on, so here are the two things that stop you: your desires and your guesses.
Three ways to avoid a bad book
The three filters I put a book through before I trust it: whether the author is writing inside their own expertise, whether the claims have evidence, and whether the writing is clear.