Thinking & Personal Effectiveness
Evaluating arguments, including your own.
10 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Wonder and Skepticism
Carl Sagan · 1995
Argues that wonder and scepticism are not opposed but must operate together, since wonder without scepticism accepts any claim that delights while…
+6 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Fixation of Belief
Charles Sanders Peirce · 1877
Distinguishes four ways belief gets settled, tenacity, authority, a priori appeal and inquiry, and argues only the last ties belief to something…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
GRADE: an emerging consensus on rating quality of evidence and strength of recommendations
Gordon Guyatt et al. · 2008
Proposes a four-level system, high through very low, for grading how much confidence to place in a body of evidence, separating the quality of the…
+2 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Carl Sagan
Argues that wonder and scepticism are not opposed but must operate together, since wonder without scepticism accepts any claim that delights while scepticism without wonder forecloses genuine discovery.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael Shermer
Offers a checklist of questions, how reliable is the source, has the claim been verified independently, does it fit with what is already known, for telling a well-supported claim apart from a merely plausible one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Scott Alexander
Argues that people defeat inconvenient arguments by quietly substituting an easier version of the opponent's position, and that genuine reasoning requires deliberately arguing against the strongest form instead.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bryan Caplan
Proposes that you only truly understand a view you disagree with when you can state it well enough that its actual holders cannot tell you apart from one of their own.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kathryn Schulz (TED)
Argues that the feeling of being right is indistinguishable from the feeling of being wrong until the moment of correction, so intellectual humility has to be built into how you hold beliefs rather than triggered by noticing your own error.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Julia Galef (TED)
Distinguishes the soldier mindset, which defends a position, from the scout mindset, which maps the terrain, and argues that good judgement depends on motivation rather than intelligence.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Matthew J. Van Cleave
Teaches how to identify an argument's premises and conclusion, tell deductive from inductive structure, and test validity and soundness, using ordinary-language examples rather than symbolic notation throughout.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Sanders Peirce
Distinguishes four ways belief gets settled, tenacity, authority, a priori appeal and inquiry, and argues only the last ties belief to something outside the believer, which is why it alone can correct itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hans V. Hansen
Surveys competing theories of what makes an argument fallacious, from Aristotle's original list through modern pragma-dialectical accounts, and shows why no single theory has settled the question.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David Hitchcock
Traces critical thinking from Dewey's reflective thought through the modern skills-and-dispositions literature, and surveys the empirical evidence on whether it can be taught and whether it transfers across domains.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gordon Guyatt et al.
Proposes a four-level system, high through very low, for grading how much confidence to place in a body of evidence, separating the quality of the evidence from the strength of a recommendation built on it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Dan M. Kahan et al.
Finds that subjects more skilled at quantitative reasoning did not interpret a numeracy test's data more accurately when the correct answer clashed with their political identity, and were in fact more polarised than less numerate subjects on identical data reframed as a politically charged issue.
link checked 17 Sept 2026