Thinking & Decisions6 min
Critical Thinking: How to Evaluate Claims and Evidence
A practical method for separating claims, evidence, assumptions, inference, and uncertainty before deciding what to believe or do.
GuideRead
Reason under uncertainty
Thinking & Decisions
Tools for evaluating claims, framing problems, seeing systems, generating options, and making better decisions.
Topic map
What this domain contains
01Critical Thinking
02Problem Framing & Solving
03Uncertainty & Decisions
04Biases & Debiasing
05Systems Thinking
06Creativity & Invention
07Models & Sensemaking
Starting sequence
Read, test, connect.
Start with the first article, then choose by goal—not by whatever is newest.
Thinking & Decisions5 min
First Principles vs Analogy: When to Use Each
First-principles reasoning rebuilds from constraints; analogy transfers patterns from prior cases. Strong problem solvers alternate between them.
ComparisonRead
Thinking & Decisions6 min
Systems Thinking: Feedback Loops and Second-Order Effects
See behavior as the result of relationships, stocks, flows, delays, and feedback—not isolated events—and design safer interventions.
MethodRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
How to Make Decisions Under Uncertainty
Make better uncertain decisions by defining options, using base rates and ranges, separating value from information, and favoring reversible tests.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Facts, Inferences, and Judgments: The Three Layers Every AI-Assisted Decision Needs
Separate what was observed, what the evidence implies, and what should be done. AI can assist each layer, but it must not silently collapse them.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Correlation, Causation, and Mechanism: How to Judge Explanations
Association describes a pattern; causation asks what an intervention would change. Judge explanations with counterfactuals, diagrams, and rival mechanisms.
ExplainerRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
What Would Change Your Mind? Falsifiability, Counterevidence, and Honest Updating
A belief becomes accountable when you state what would lower confidence, distinguish it from rivals, and trigger a changed decision.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
How to Read a Chart Without Being Misled
Read the claim, denominator, scale, uncertainty, and missing comparison before trusting a chart. Then reconstruct the decision it invites.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Are You Solving the Right Problem? Symptoms, Constraints, and Decision Questions
Reframe a vague complaint into a decision question by separating symptoms, mechanisms, constraints, stakeholders, and evidence that could change the frame.
FrameworkRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions: Match Deliberation to the Stakes
Decide faster without becoming careless by separating reversible experiments from choices that create durable harm, lock-in, or lost option value.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Opportunity Cost: The Decision Hidden Inside Every Yes
Make opportunity cost concrete by naming the best displaced alternative, testing scarcity, and comparing portfolios instead of isolated benefits.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Base Rates vs Stories: Why the Outside View Beats Intuition
Start forecasts with a relevant reference class, then update for case-specific evidence instead of letting a coherent story erase historical frequencies.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Expected Value: How to Compare Risky Options Without False Precision
Use expected value as a transparent comparison, then stress-test probability, utility, tail risk, dependence, uncertainty, and the value of more information.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Confidence Is Not Probability: How to Calibrate Judgment
Turn verbal certainty into testable forecasts, score repeated predictions, inspect calibration by category, and improve without confusing confidence with truth.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Scenario Planning vs Forecasting: When Each Clarifies the Future
Use forecasts for resolvable uncertainty and scenarios for structurally different futures, then connect both to decisions, signposts, and invalidation.
ComparisonRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Confirmation Bias: Why More Research Can Make You More Wrong
Prevent research volume from hardening a preferred belief by separating discovery from testing, budgeting disconfirmation, and scoring rival explanations.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Why Knowing Your Biases Is Not Enough
Bias literacy becomes useful only when it changes the decision environment: records, defaults, independent estimates, feedback, incentives, and accountability.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Second-Order Effects: Why Good Ideas Produce Bad Outcomes
Trace reactions, feedback, delays, substitution, and displaced costs before a promising intervention turns its first success into a later failure.
FrameworkRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Divergent vs Convergent Thinking: How Better Options Are Made
Separate option generation from evaluation without romanticizing creativity: use purposeful constraints, independent variation, criteria, tests, and reopening rules.
GuideRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Mental Models: When They Clarify—and When They Distort
Treat every mental model as a purpose-built compression: expose its entities, assumptions, omissions, scale, predictions, rivals, and failure boundary.
FrameworkRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Epistemic Monoculture: What Happens When Everyone Thinks With the Same AI
Distinguish observed AI convergence from broader systemic risk, then preserve source, model, prompt, reviewer, and non-AI diversity at consequential bottlenecks.
Research MapRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Pre-Mortem Method: Surface Failure Before Commitment
Imagine a committed plan has failed, generate independent causes, convert them into evidence and controls, and define stop conditions before launch.
MethodRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Decision Journal Method: Calibrate Judgment Over Time
Record the decision state before outcomes arrive, then score predictions, separate process from luck, and update recurring judgment patterns.
MethodRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Steelman–Red-Team Protocol: Improve an Argument Before Rejecting It
Reconstruct the strongest supportable argument, secure fidelity, then test its premises, evidence, alternatives, and reversal conditions adversarially.
MethodRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Ladder of Inference: Slow Down Fast Conclusions
Trace a conclusion back through selected data, meaning, assumptions, and beliefs, then seek missing observations and test a rival interpretation.
MethodRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Five Whys, With Evidence: Root-Cause Analysis Without Storytelling
Branch each why into evidence-backed causal hypotheses, test interventions, and stop before a neat single-root story replaces a complex system.
MethodRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Hypothesis Ledger: Track Beliefs, Evidence, and Revisions
Keep hypotheses append-only, define rival predictions before searching, and update confidence from dated evidence without rewriting intellectual history.
MethodRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Constitution of Knowledge: Can Institutions Outperform Individual Intelligence?
Test Jonathan Rauch’s institutional account of truth against reproducibility, exclusion, concentrated power, platform incentives, and AI-mediated disagreement.
Book AnalysisRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Scout Mindset: Is Better Reasoning a Skill, a Culture, or Both?
Test Julia Galef’s truth-seeking ideal against motivated reasoning, incentives, identity, power, debiasing transfer, and the institutional conditions for honest updating.
Book AnalysisRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Thinking in Systems: Where the Framework Clarifies—and Where It Hides Power
Test Donella Meadows’s systems framework against contested boundaries, institutional power, strategic actors, unequal harms, and the politics of intervention.
Book AnalysisRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Beginning of Infinity: Are Better Explanations the Engine of Progress?
Test David Deutsch’s optimism about explanatory knowledge against social institutions, measurement, tacit skill, power, implementation, and irreversible harm.
Book AnalysisRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Seeing Like a State in the AI Era: Why Legibility Creates Blindness
Use James C. Scott’s critique of high-modernist planning to examine AI classification, metrics, local knowledge, administrative scale, and coercive simplification.
Book AnalysisRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Sources of Power: What Expert Intuition Knows—and When It Fails
Test Gary Klein’s recognition-primed decision model against low-validity environments, feedback quality, automation, overconfidence, and the need for analysis.
Book AnalysisRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Development as Freedom: Why Capability Matters More Than Output
Test Amartya Sen’s capability approach against GDP, preference, measurement, paternalism, inequality, conversion factors, and the difference between resources and freedom.
Book AnalysisRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
Nexus: Do Information Networks Produce Truth—or Merely Coordination?
Test Yuval Noah Harari’s history of information networks against information theory, institutional epistemology, propaganda, bureaucracy, power, and AI-generated scale.
Book AnalysisRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The Cost of Intelligence Is Falling. The Cost of Judgment Is Not
Why cheaper generation can move cost into verification, choice, accountability, and correction—and how to distinguish abundance from value.
WindowRead
Thinking & Decisions5 min
The AI-Era Signpost Ledger: What to Watch Through 2027
A falsifiable ledger of capability, adoption, work, trust, learning, multilingual access, and infrastructure signals—without pretending to forecast.
WindowRead
Thinking & Decisions7 min
What Makes a Scenario Signpost Useful? An 80-Indicator Test
Which combinations of observability, direction, threshold, time window, and scenario exclusivity make an indicator discriminating rather than decorative? Executed on frozen inputs
Field LabRead
Thinking & Decisions8 min
Where Does a Checklist End and Judgment Begin? A 100-Case Test
Across one hundred quality decisions in five knowledge-work domains, which decisions reduce to declared observables and which require contextual interpretation? Executed on frozen
Field LabRead