Building Your Critical Thinking Practice: Concrete Steps
Knowledge isn’t enough - you need daily practice Reading 27 essays about how your brain fails you does not make somebody a critical thinker. It makes somebody a person who read 27 essays. Knowledge isn’t enough. Practice is where this actually works or doesn’t work. The gap between understanding a concept and being able to…
Motivated Reasoning: When Smart People Believe Dumb Things
Intelligence doesn’t protect you from bias - it makes you better at rationalizing Intelligence does not protect you from bias. In some ways, it actually makes you worse at it. This is one of the most uncomfortable findings in cognitive psychology, and it’s worth actually sitting with for a minute before moving on. Most people…
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Why Incompetence Breeds Confidence
The less you know, the more confident you feel The less somebody knows about a subject, the more confident they tend to feel about it. This sounds counterintuitive. It isn’t. And there’s a specific cognitive mechanism behind it. In the late 1990s, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger ran a series of experiments looking at…
When Pattern-Seeking Goes Wrong: Conspiracy Thinking vs. Critical Thinking
Your brain sees patterns everywhere - but most of them aren’t real Conspiracy thinking feels like critical thinking from the inside. That is what makes it so hard to fight. The conspiracy theorist genuinely believes they’re the one asking questions, doing their own research, refusing to just accept the story they’ve been told. From the…
How to Actually Change Your Mind (And Why You Should)
Changing your mind isn’t weakness - defending wrong beliefs is Changing your mind is supposed to be a failure. That’s the cultural story, anyway. Politicians get destroyed for “flip-flopping.” In arguments, the person who changes their position is often seen as weak, inconsistent, untrustworthy. We treat the unchanged mind as the principled one and the…
How to Survive Election Season Without Losing Your Mind
Political tribalism destroys critical thinking - here’s how to fight back Election season is basically a stress test for everything in this series. Every cognitive bias gets amplified. Every fallacy gets deployed, usually within the first ten minutes of any cable news segment. The emotional stakes are high enough that your brain’s already-thin defenses against…
How to Read Science News Without Getting Played
The study doesn’t say what the headline claims it says “Coffee cures cancer.” Three weeks later - “coffee causes cancer.” Both headlines were real. Both cited real studies. Neither one gave you the information you’d actually need to change your behavior based on what the science shows. Science journalism has a structural problem baked into…
How to Think About Healthcare Without Losing Your Mind
Applying critical thinking tools to actual policy questions Healthcare policy makes people’s brains stop working. I mean that almost literally. The topic activates so many cognitive biases at once - confirmation bias from Essay 6, identity-protective reasoning from Essay 7, false dilemmas from Essay 15.30, anecdotal evidence from Essay 15.17 - that most of the…
Being Wrong Is a Skill You Need to Practice
Critical thinking isn’t a destination, it’s a daily practice I believed something for years that turned out to be completely wrong. I thought anecdotal evidence - personal stories and individual experiences - was basically worthless for understanding how things work. Just bad data that people reached for when they didn’t have anything real to back…
The Questions That Actually Matter: Using the Socratic Method
Ask why until you hit bedrock Good morning! Let’s continue talking about critical thinking! This is part of my Critical Thinking series of essays - you can find the link to my other essays in the comments! Let’s go! Essay 19: The Questions That Actually Matter I’m going to tell you the most useful critical…
The Story You’re Not Being Told: How Media Framing Works
What gets covered and how it gets covered shapes everything Good Morning! Let’s continue talking about critical thinking! This is part of my Critical Thinking series of essays - you can find the link to more in the comments! Let’s go! Essay 18: The Story You’re Not Being Told Two headlines about the same event:…
Why “Studies Show” Means Almost Nothing Without Context
The plural of “study” is not “conclusion” Good Morning! Let’s continue talking about critical thinking! This is part of my Critical Thinking series of essays - you can find the link to 1-15 in the comments! Let’s go! Essay 17: Why “Studies Show” Means Almost Nothing Has anyone ever told you that “studies…