Critical Thinking: The Foundations
The intellectual toolkit for clear reasoning — evidence, bias, logical structure, and how to hold well-calibrated beliefs in a world full of noise.
Tools for Thinking Clearly
The core concepts — evidence, bias, correlation vs. causation, and what "doing your own research" actually requires.
What Counts as Evidence?
Evidence, anecdote, and intuition each play a role in how we form beliefs — but they are not interchangeable. This topic explains what distinguishes strong evidence from weak, why the distinction matters, and how different types of evidence should be weighted when evaluating a claim.
Correlation vs. Causation
Two variables moving together does not mean one causes the other — a confusion that underlies much bad reasoning about health, policy, and everyday decisions. This topic covers the distinction between correlation and causation, confounding variables, the Bradford Hill criteria for evaluating causal claims, and the counter-intuitive puzzles of Simpson's paradox.
The Five Biases That Actually Shape Your Decisions
Cognitive biases are not rare quirks — five in particular reliably shape how people assess risk, evaluate evidence, and make decisions. Understanding confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, anchoring, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and the sunk cost fallacy is the first step to working around them.
'Do Your Own Research' — What That Should Mean and What It Often Doesn't
The phrase 'do your own research' has been weaponised to mean something almost opposite to what genuine research involves. This topic separates the legitimate call for intellectual autonomy from the epistemic dysfunction the phrase often signals — and examines when trusting established expertise is itself the epistemically correct move.
Good Judgment in Practice
How to apply critical thinking in everyday decisions: intuition, changing your mind, charitable interpretation, and living with uncertainty.
When to Trust Your Intuition (and When Not To)
Intuition is neither always wrong nor always right. Research on expert intuition shows when it can be trusted — and when it reliably misleads. This topic examines the conditions that distinguish reliable intuitive judgement from overconfident gut feeling, drawing on cognitive psychology and decades of forecasting research.
Changing Your Mind Without Losing Face
The social cost of changing your mind is real — but so is the epistemic cost of not changing it. This topic examines how belief revision works psychologically and socially: why updating on evidence is hard, what makes it easier, and how to distinguish genuine revision from mere capitulation.
Steelman, Strawman — Why This Distinction Matters
A strawman argument defeats a weakened version of an opponent's position. A steel man engages with its strongest version. The distinction is more consequential than it sounds — shaping not only the quality of argument but the quality of thought.
Sitting With Uncertainty
Intellectual humility means calibrating confidence to evidence — accepting that many questions are genuinely uncertain, without collapsing into the view that nobody can know anything. This topic examines the difference between uncertainty and ignorance, what well-calibrated confidence looks like, and why social and media pressures tend to reward false certainty over honest doubt.