The Best Articles on Thinking Better

How should you think about the issues that matter to your life? Make tough decisions, reason clearly and avoid common mistakes? Below are some of my best articles offering insights into thinking better:

The 5 Best Articles on Thinking Better

Here are the five best essays I’ve written to help you think better in your life:

How to Improve Critical Thinking – Hint: Just learning about mental models, rationality or taking a logic class won’t help much.
Unraveling the Engima of Reason – I cover one of my favorite books, explaining how human reason works, and why this has big implications on how we think about ourselves.
Twenty-Five Useful Thinking Tools – Thinking of professions as mindsets you can cultivate to solve your problems.
The Art of Unlearning – To think better, we must first unlearn all the things we think about the world that just ain’t so.
How to See Reality As It Is – There’s no such thing as seeing reality as it is, just different perspectives that are useful for different purposes.

Useful Mental Models

Some ideas are so powerful that, once you learn them, you start to see them everywhere. My series on useful mental models includes many of these patterns, shows you how to use them and also how to avoid applying them to situations where they don’t fit:

Efficient Markets (and the Efficient Market Hypothesis)
Exponential Growth
Normal Distribution
Evolution by Natural Selection
The Two Types of Mistakes (Type I and Type II Errors)
Multiply or Add? Asking yourself the operator in question can make a big difference.
Chaos, Ignorance and Newton’s Great Puzzle – An intro to chaos.
The Isomorphism of Ideas
What are the Intellectual Ideas Everyone Should Know?

Thinking about Thinking

The World is a Hierarchy (Our Theories Aren’t) – Our reality is built out of simpler building blocks, but the theories *of* those blocks are built on human minds. Does our philosophy say more about the world or ourselves?
Life’s Wicked Problems (and How to Get Past Them) – Wicked problems are really difficult to solve, here’s how to spot them and work on them despite their wickedness.
Is Ultimate Truth a Superstimulus?
How to Think Better
Building Up Your Intellectual Immune System
Does Choice Exist? My views on free will, and what I think most people get wrong when they take either extreme view.
Choose Your Signal Wisely – We tend to think in terms of signals and correctives, this means how you frame an issue can make a big difference in how you choose to act.
Discovering the Meta – What’s the next level of abstraction or reference that you’re not seeing in the problems of your life right now?
Gri-Gri, Money and Bootstrapped Truths – Does thinking something is true make it so? For some things the answer is actually yes!
Simplicity Beats Nuance: Why The Wrong Answer Can Often Beat the Correct One
Advice Reversals – When does useful advice actually become harmful?
Is Rationality Overrated? What an 18th Century Medical Mystery Can Tell Us About the Power of Blind Copying
When is it Good to Be a Hypocrite?
Here’s Some Things I’ve Change my Mind About (circa 2015)
The Two Ways to Evaluate Ideas
You Don’t Pay Enough for Information
Why the Smartest People Don’t Always Give the Best Advice — The Importance of Local Wisdom
Different Kinds of Difficulty
Bias is Inescapable
How Do You Make a Good Analogy?
Why Do Engineers Think They’ll Be Good at Picking Stocks?
Does Speaking Another Language Change How You Think?
The Danger of Easy Skepticism
Don’t Think for Yourself
Are Blogs Better Than Books for Mastering Complex Ideas
The Strangeness of Everyday Things
Healthy Delusions?
Learning to Doubt
The “Single Flaw” Fallacy
Why Honest People Cheat
Why I’ve Decided to Be Wrong More Often
Is It Better to Read Books You Disagree With?

and How to Read Books You Disagree With


Keep a Journal to Solve Tough Problems

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