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.
- Explore or Exploit: The Hidden Decision that Guides Your Life
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:
Thinking about Thinking
- The World is a Hierarchy (Our Theories Aren’t)
- Life’s Wicked Problems (and How to Get Past Them)
- Choose Your Signal Wisely
- Why Do Engineers Think They’ll Be Good at Picking Stocks?
- Most Books Won’t Change Your Life (But You Should Read Them Anyways)
- Is Ultimate Truth a Superstimulus?
- How to Think Better
- Building Up Your Intellectual Immune System
- Does Choice Exist?
- Discovering the Meta
- Gri-Gri, Money and Bootstrapped Truths
- Simplicity Beats Nuance: Why The Wrong Answer Can Often Beat the Correct One
- Advice Reversals
- 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?
- 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?
- Keep a Journal to Solve Tough Problems
- Thinkers vs Doers: Who Gives Better Advice?
- Are You Stepping Over $100 Bills Lying on the Sidewalk?
- Information Overload is a Fake Problem