James E. Alcock - Tips for better critical thinking

I was going through Skeptical Inquirer recently. This magazine is one of my favorites. It is all about blasting something out of its foundation. With that gleeful cackle that the demolition workers don't really do but you expect them to. While reading about all sorts of stuff that is beyond questions, doubts or other kinds uneasy discontent -

The newest issue (November/December 2018) contained Harriet Hall's review of the book "Belief: What it means to believe and why our convictions are so compelling" by James E. Alcock. Judging from the review - it was nice and sweet exploration of the cognitive processes. Then i went and check it out for myself.

It was really good. I finished it in just a couple of hours.

In the final chapter, Alcock gives eight tips on developing and improving your critical thinking skills. I think these are worth sharing:

1. Remember that we can all be fooled.
2. Be wary of your intuitions.
3. Be wary of the Fundamental Attribution Error: attributing people’s behavior to their characters and intentions while overlooking the power of the situation.
4. Be wary of validation by personal experience.
5. Don’t rely on a single source of information.
6. Don’t over-interpret correlations.
7. Ask “compared to what?”—a wine was rejected because it was found to contain two million asbestos particles per liter, but the concentration of asbestos particles in the city water supply was higher than that.
8. In the face of inadequate evidence, suspend judgment rather than jumping to conclusions

The most important thing he points out is that we should be prepared to disagree with ourselves, which is not the easiest thing.