Remember the Four Steps
You now have a good skeptical toolbox in your hands! 💪 It may never be intuitive, but you can't and shouldn't ever forget about it. Let's look again at the four paths:
Don't trust your interpretation of facts! Don't let your biases override useful heuristics. Suspend judgment when your instinct is to get involved in a decision-making process that's beyond your expertise.
Practice rational doubt, like the scientific community. Be sure that a phenomenon or fact exists before considering its ramifications. Aim at disproving an alternative theory rather than confirming your starting premise.
Exploit a technique for judging a source's quality—a tool for separating the possible from the likely.
Know how to detect fallacious arguments that aim to belittle, discredit, or mislead a statement or its origin. For other people's opinions as well as your own.
Put Your Critical Thinking to Good Use
Wow, what a lot of information! But how am I supposed to use all this critical thinking I've learned? In what situations? 🤔
Here are some tips to make the most of this skill! ⭐️
When you start to exercise your critical thinking, it is easy to fall into an aggressive mode, which is often not very constructive! It is tempting to challenge everything and everyone. By highlighting everybody else's cognitive biases, insisting on source references, pointing the finger at logical fallacies, discussions that were previously interesting can become hard work and aggressive.
To avoid going down that road, try taking a step back to create peaceful relationships, as they will often take you further! Use tact, empathy, and consideration. You'll see, you will only enhance your debates and approach to communication.
Remember that everyone gets it wrong, and very few people know about these tools, which you can now share in a considerate way.
Here are some extra resources to keep you from falling into traps:
Behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely on why even when we are convinced of something we might not act on it.
The YouTube channel of Anthony Magnabosco, which is mainly about Street Epistemology, a considerate approach to beliefs, based on asking questions.
Let's Recap!
Your views on various subjects will probably change as you use your critical thinking tools. Along with other soft skills, these will help you, especially in the workplace, as long as you use them with tact and consideration. With those caveats, they will ensure more coherent and rational decision-making, which hopefully will help you prosper at work. To conclude, this chapter helped you:
Complete your list of skeptical tools with a bad arguments detector.
Prepare you for good critical thinking practices.
