wunder beta🧮 How to Think Clearly
Spot the biases and fallacies that quietly hijack your reasoning.
What you’ll learn
- Define critical thinking and recognize the major cognitive biases.Clear thinking proportions belief to evidence; biases like confirmation, anchoring, and availability are standing predispositions distinct from one-off fallacies.
- Identify common logical fallacies and learn steelmanning and Occam's razor.Fallacies like ad hominem, straw man, and false dilemma break arguments; steelmanning and Occam's razor are disciplines for reasoning honestly.
- Practice the habits that produce reliably clear conclusions.Ask probing questions, separate claims from evidence, keep confidence within the evidence, and update beliefs when better evidence appears.
Questions this course answers
Which principle best captures clear thinking?
Clear thinking means calibrating confidence to evidence: stronger evidence warrants stronger belief, weaker evidence warrants caution.
What is the key difference between a cognitive bias and a logical fallacy?
Fallacies are flaws in the structure of a specific argument, while biases are systematic predispositions that make future errors more likely.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to:
Confirmation bias leads us to seek, interpret, and remember information that confirms existing beliefs while discounting what challenges them.
A straw man fallacy occurs when someone:
The straw man misrepresents an opponent's argument as a weaker version that's easier to defeat, instead of engaging the real claim.
What does 'steelmanning' an argument mean?
Steelmanning is engaging the strongest version of an opposing argument, which guards against confirmation bias and produces sounder critiques.
Occam's razor advises that, among explanations fitting the evidence equally well, you should:
Occam's razor favors the simplest adequate explanation, the one requiring the fewest assumptions, though it's a guide rather than a guarantee of truth.
Grounded in trusted sources
- TeachThought, The Difference Between Logical Fallacies and Cognitive Biases (teachthought.com)
- Wikipedia, Confirmation bias (en.wikipedia.org)
- Farnam Street (fs.blog), How to Use Occam's Razor Without Getting Cut
- Critical Thinking Academy, What Is Critical Thinking (criticalthinkingacademy.net)
- LabXchange, Fallacies, Probabilities, and Cognitive Biases (about.labxchange.org)
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