Solving Problems and Making Better Decisions With Critical Thinking

When the disruptive, innovative entrepreneur Elon Musk was thinking about the electric car, the most common reason he would hear why his idea was doomed was the price of batteries. Batteries have always been plagued by two problems — high price and the need to keep recharging. An affordable electricrca was impossible, Musk would be told, because batteries cost $600 per kilowatt-hour. “It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”

But Musk would not be Musk if he thought like other people. He applied the critical thinking principles he had learned while studying to be a physicist: he returned to the basics, and identified the assumptions behind the assumptions, until he was looking at the foundational principles.

What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the spot market value of the material constituents? Batteries typically are composed of carbon, nickel, aluminium, some polymers for separation and a steel can. Elon Musk wanted to know how much each of these would cost on a London Metal Exchange.

The answer stunned everyone — $80 per kilowatt-hour, all told. Not $600. All Musk’s team needed to do now was to innovate clever new designs for batteries using those materials, and voila — Musk was ready to produce the Tesla, the world’s first viable electric car.

Elon Musk is a vocal supporter and champion of something called critical thinking. This does not mean being critical of what you hear but rather to consciously avoid common and human biases in thinking while using special skills that improve analysis, understanding and decision making.

The world’s deepest thinkers have understood and emphasised the importance of critical thinking and overcoming some of the automatic but sometimes inefficient shortcuts our brains use to analyze and understand events and information and take decisions.

“You have a brain and mind of your own. Use it, and reach your own decisions,” said inspirational self-help guru Napoleon Hill. He understood that being able to think independently required work and effort but also brought amazing rewards.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Cognition experts claim the human mind experiences between 60,000 and 80,000 thoughts a day, or a few thousand every hour. Thinking critically allows you to identify important thoughts while discarding or ignoring others.

One of the world’s most consequential geniuses, Albert Einstein, said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” Inherent and endless curiosity defines some of the world’s most effective critical thinkers.

Critical thinkers are respectful. They listen to everyone’s points of view, and systematically evaluate what they hear before formulating their response in the argument in a dispassionate, unemotional way. South Africa’s revered Bishop Desmond Tutu said, “My father used to say ‘Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.’ ”

Picture this: one day you suddenly find your cherished views challenged by someone else’s logic or hard data. Since your views are important to you and partly define who you are, you get unsettled and emotional. You raise your voice and get agitated.

But this is not how critical thinkers work. They arrive armed with knowledge, experience and questions, listen attentively to others’ views to see it from their perspective, and try to reach an informed, reflective solution that takes all facts and opinions into account. Critical thinkers progress in an argument logically and with respect for an opposer. Conflicts become conversations.

This chapter is about a foundational thinking skill that can potentially transform and improve every dimension of your life from business and relationships to personal growth and success. In a world of fake news where one man’s factual truth can be another man’s propaganda, where knowledge and facts are often undifferentiated from opinions and beliefs, clear, critical thinking skills are more important than ever before.

The Source Code To Success would be incomplete without it.

What is critical thinking?

Everyone thinks. The quality of your life and your decisions, what you produce, make or build depends precisely on the quality of your thought. Shoddy thinking is costly, both in money and in quality of life. Excellence in thought, however, can exponentially accelerate your success. It is for this reason that I believe we all must systematically cultivate critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking is a specific way of thinking about any subject, content, or problem, in which the thinker tries to avoid the brain’s normal shortcuts, assumptions and prejudices — known as cognitive biases — and systematically and skilfully analyzes, assesses and understands knowledge to make better decisions and improve the quality of his business, personal and daily life.

Critical thinking has at least three features —

1. It is done so that one may make up one’s mind about what to believe and what to do.

2. It is disciplined, accurate and rigorous, and the thinker is not swayed by beliefs and expectations.

3. It is self-aware thinking that skilfully avoids cognitive biases.

What is not critical thinking? Jumping immediately to conclusions; ignoring strong facts and evidence in order to continue with a discredited belief; providing answers from unquestioning ideological or other perspectives; or routinely using some automatic method to answer questions or solve problems.

Critical thinking is a learned skill and requires commitment, time and practice. But there is abundant evidence that critical thinking leads to solid, surprising, durable and viable success. Examples like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Mark Cuban are living proofs that success is closely linked with a person’s critical thinking ability. The planning and effort that you have put into planning your life’s Vision, Mission and Goals will bear amazing fruits if you approach each of the 11 areas of life armed with the tools of critical thinking.

Understanding cognitive bias

You are walking down a street when you feel a sudden gust of cold wind. You look up and see that the sky has become noticeably darker. You instinctively speed up your walking pace because your brain connects a cold wind and a dark sky with an imminent thundershower.

Your boss starts a sentence with “Having said that. . .” and you know in your gut that bad news is going to follow.

When faced with a problem, the human mind is great at creating shortcuts and workarounds. This is specially true when it comes to taking quick or important decisions based on scanty, fast-changing or unreliable information. While these can be greatly useful, at other times, automatic shortcuts can come in the way of clear thinking. Neurologists call these mental shortcuts cognitive biases.

For example, the brain is wired to believe that someone in a smart uniform and an authoritative manner is to be obeyed. Or that if everyone you know claims that something is true, it must be true. Similarly, if all your friends are investing their money in a certain fund, your brain is wired to trust their decision without questioning their premises.

These are called cognitive biases and the course of history has been shaped and re-shaped by some famous cognitive biases. For example, Germans unthinkingly accepted Hitler’s word that Jews were inferior human beings and were responsible for Germany’s problems because he was an authority figure. In the process, they stereotyped an entire race and watched a genocide of 6 million Jews.

For centuries, people believed the earth was flat. When Galileo asserted that it was actually round and not the centre of the universe, the cognitive bias was so deeply rooted that they imprisoned Galileo and punished him, calling him a heretic. Even today, that cognitive bias lives on within a movement called the Flat Earth Society which finds intricate and sometimes absurd ways to ‘prove’ that there is a worldwide conspiracy to deny that the earth is actually flat.

Many people in India sincerely believe that plastic surgery must have been invented in India because the god Ganesh has half an elephant body, which could only have been done with plastic surgery, according to some. A critical thinker would have argued that if a god needed a human surgeon to change his looks, he could not be much of a god at all. He might have argued that a surgeon who could change a god’s shape would have to be more powerful than that god. Finally, he would ask whether the elephant-faced god was a symbol of something or a real entity, and if real, why no one had such a being.

Critical thinking skills help the person to see beyond their own personal knowledge and belief systems to ask open-ended questions that help them, like Elon Musk, get to the bottom of the issue and look at issues in new, novel, innovative and original ways.

Why you need critical thinking

In the course of planning and moving towards your Vision, Mission and goals in life, dealing with information will be a constant task. You will be studying for exams, analyzing markets, evaluating employees, making investment decisions to reach financial independence, making health-related decisions, choosing holiday and travel options and so on. While you do all this, some of you may be dealing with unsolicited ads, messages, news, stories, WhatsApp chats, Facebooks posts and others throughout the waking day.

How does your brain deal with all this?

Curiously, instead of increasing knowledge and literacy, the flood of information seems to have shut down minds with a never-ending, bewildering stream of unnecessary or trivial information. This has created four major problems, each of which has a direct connection with your ability to live efficiently, effectively, achieve results and succeed in your life.

1. Too much information. We drown daily in a flood of information. In a digital world with internet speeds increasing exponentially, not only can we instantly retrieve information on almost anything, but the diversity of the information can be confusing. Google searches can flood you with contradictory and competing information without any way to know which is more reliable.

2. Lack of meaning. Flooded with too much information, many people are tuning off knowledge and learning, believing that they can always access whatever is needed through the Internet. But the result is an emptiness powered by a new kind of illiteracy. This leads to a growing sense that nothing has much meaning. Things are changing in a blur continuously, and people are reacting by making their worlds smaller and insular.

3. The need to act fast. Fast-changing information calls for fast-moving decisions. Stock market prices can change from bullish to bearish in a flash. People have to decide what to do next without enough time to study all the options and make the most informed decision. And yet, a person may not have all the data he needs for an informed decision. Pushed into a corner, he starts taking cognitive shortcuts. The results are seldom helpful.

4. Knowing what to remember. With so much information streaming at you, deciding what is worth retaining in your head and what to access through searching as needed becomes a key decision. For example, should you learn new languages when you can use Google Translate and get sentences translated as needed on the spot? Should you learn recipes when you can turn on an instructional cooking video on demand?

As you will see, we all have built in cognitive biases, and sometimes they take over automatically in certain situations. I want to take each of the four problems listed above, briefly discuss how the brain deals with it, and introduce you some of the associated cognitive biases.

1. Too much information

In a world with too much information the brain uses a few simple tricks to pick out the bits that are most likely to be useful.

Things that are repeated often, or in recent memory are more likely to be spotted first. Have you ever noticed that you see something unexpected and then not soon after, encounter the same thing many times again? The increased frequency is the result of your own mind’s increased selective attention to that object, not that it is occurring more often around you.

This cognitive bias has been named the Frequency Effect or the Baader-Meinhof Effect. For example, you might hear someone say that they got good luck after wearing a certain stone, and soon afterwards hear similar stories from others. You could become convinced that wearing stones is somehow going to increase your good fortune, but it might just be the Baader-Meinhof Effect at work.

Bizarre, funny, novel, visually striking things are seen and remembered more than ordinary, unsurprising or predictable things. Worse, our brains exaggerate the importance of unexpected or unusual things, while skipping over ordinary information. The Restorff Effect predicts that when a large number of similar things are presented, the mind will remember the one thing that stood out as different.

When provided with facts, science and ‘evidence’, we tend to pick up those things that confirm our own pre-existing beliefs, while ignoring any contradictory details. This is a big bias and it explains why it is so difficult to convince people about important, urgent matters like climate change or the power of vaccines using facts and science if they already hold opposing beliefs. Neurologists call this the Confirmation Bias.

Have you ever read an astrological or numerological forecast supposedly tailored for you and felt it was extremely accurate, though in fact it was vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people? This is called the Barnum-Forer Effect, and might explain why so many people believe in astrology, fortune telling, aura reading and certain personality tests.

We all have blind spots. We notice flaws in others more easily than flaws in ourselves. I want to sat this so that you and I, we all realize that cognitive biases are not just weaknesses in how other people think, but they affect us too. After all, we are only human.

2. Not enough meaning

Even when presented with scanty informations, our brain are skilled at joining even a few dots and managing to see some stories and patterns even in sparse data. This gives us the feeling of having figured out a lot using just a little information. In cognitive science, this is sometimes called pareidolia (seeing patterns in random stimulus) or anthropomorphism (attributing human traits or emotions to non-human entities, such as human emotions to pets and other animals).

When we meet something new which reminds us of something we know, we assume the new thing is like the thing we know. This is called using stereotypes and generalities, and can be wildly deceptive and dangerous. A flower may smell and look like another one and yet be deadly poisonous. If a person in a community commits an act of terrorism, it would be a Group Attribution Error to conclude that the rest of the group are terrorists too.

The Halo Effect makes us imagine that people and things we’re familiar with or admire are superior to unfamiliar things or people. For example, you would have difficulty believing that the friend you play tennis with every day followed by a beer is a violent man who beats his wife and children.

We are generally pretty bad with numbers. For example, many people just ignore decimals. A person considering buying a pen costing 400 rupees might walk three blocks to get the same pen at 300 rupees, saving 100 rupees. But if he were buying a Mercedes Benz at 35 lakhs, the same 100 rupee saving would seem trivial and not worth walking three blocks.

A person who might not buy something at $5 might not think twice if the price were $4.99. This works because we read from left to right, and tend to ignore the decimals, so the first digit of the price resonates with us the most. The item that starts with a 4 just seems like a better deal than the one that starts with 5.

We think we know what others are thinking. In some cases this means that we assume that they know what we know, in other cases we assume they’re thinking about us as much as we are thinking about ourselves. This is almost never true, and leads to innumerable misunderstandings. Cognitively, this is called the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight.

We are terrible at estimating how long a particular task will take, called the Planning Fallacy. Students will be familiar with the Student Syndrome, a bias that makes them believe there is enough time left to prepare for their exams right till the last minute, when they start a mad all-night scramble to study.

3. Need to act fast

We favour the immediate and the recent over the delayed and distant. We relate more to stories of specific individuals than anonymous individuals or groups. A single photograph of a dead child washed up on the Mediterranean aroused more indignation about the treatment of homeless refugees than all the journalistic reportage of entire communities. This has been called the Identifiable Victim Effect in which individuals offer more aid when a specific, identifiable person is shown to be suffering or in need, as compared to a large, vaguely defined group with the same pain or need.

We’re more motivated to continue doing or complete things that we’ve already invested time and energy in. While this might help you to finish things, it might also keep you plodding endlessly down a road that leads to a dead end. This is known as the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Have you ever heard it said that actions speak louder than words? This is often used to shut up critics by telling them it’s easy to criticise but harder to demonstrate by doing something better. Not only is this not true, but it is also very common and extremely dangerous to progress, since critical thinking itself is what sometimes promotes review, rethinking and finally change? Scientists call this the Armchair Fallacy, and regard it as one that undermines and deprecates good thinking by giving greater value to actions.

4. What should we remember?

Faced with far too much information, we need to decide which bits are most likely to be useful and worth keeping around. What should you remember, what should you forget? For instance, should you bother to remember someone’s phone number when your phone contact book is always within reach?

We prefer generalizations over specifics because they take up less space. When there are lots of irreducible details, we pick out a few standout items to save and discard the rest. Implicit associations, stereotypes and prejudices result in some of the most worst consequences from our full set of cognitive biases. For instance, anyone wearing a certain shade of orange robes and sporting a long beard with ashes on his forehead is assumed to be a man of god and to be believed. Recent Indian history is full of stories of supposed godmen with large followings who turned out to be rapists and criminals and are now in jail.

We remember some details of memories more than others, and even reinforce certain memories by going over them again and again. During that process, memories can become stronger but various details can also get accidentally swapped. Sometimes we may accidentally inject a detail into a memory that wasn’t there before. This is called the Misattribution of Memory or False Memory Effect.

We reduce events and lists to their key elements because it’s difficult to reduce events and lists to generalities. This can lead to misinformation, misinterpretation and erroneous conclusion because those analysing it will be working with only a few key elements of the picture rather than all of it.

How critical thinking helps success

Bill Gates describes the favorite critical thinking exercise of his friend Warren Buffett, the billionaire philanthrope who believed you should always go to bed smarter than when you woke up. “He’ll choose a year – say, 1970 – and examine the 10 highest market-capitalisation companies from around then. Then he’ll go forward to 1990 and look at how those companies fared. His enthusiasm for the exercise was contagious.”

Buffett used this exercise to hone his critical thinking and analysis skills in spotting trends, understanding the drivers of business success, and the impact technological advances and cultural norms.  

As I mentioned earlier, critical thinking has applications in each of the 11 areas of life. Here I would like to just show a few examples of how it can bring success in business, relationships and personal growth, three important areas.

Critical thinking in business

Ancient Stoic philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius regularly used a critical thinking tool that they called a ‘premeditation of evils’, by envisioning every possible worst-case scenarios from losing a job to being hurt, falling sick, being a victim of a natural disaster or even dying. They believed this would help them plan more effectively to avoid them. Most people think that it is most important to visualize success and they are right. However learning how to manage failure is another important aspect few think about, let alone prepare for.

This critical thinking tool is called inversion and refers to giving consideration to the things that you want to avoid in life. Inversion is all about confronting some of life’s inevitable negatives even before they happen. Inversion catapults you into a new, more innovative way of thinking in which you consider and prepare for potential failures before they happen.

Critical thinking in relationships

Thinking critically allows you to think with your head and not just with your heart to make sounder decisions in your close relationships based on how things are, not just how you want them to be.

1. Your family: I believe that parents occupy a sacred place in life and that our debt to our parents can never be repaid. However, critical thinking keeps you aware that parents may not always know what’s best for their grown up children, since their own cognitive biases and belief are guiding their advice. While parents usually mean well, their outlook on life often differs from your own. This can lead to anything from recurring arguments to a serious family dispute. Critical Thinking can help you analyse difficult family situations more objectively and improve communication among all family members so that parents are respectfully heard and heeded when their advice is sound and relevant.

2. Your Friends: One of your friends fought with you and didn’t speak to you for a couple of months. Afterwards neither of you could remember what the fight had even been about. Critical thinking can help you be a better friend, and remain level-headed and prevent an argument from escalating.

3. Your Partner: Critical thinking can help you better understand your behaviour and your partner’s reactions. You can learn to better express your needs, improve your understanding of your partner’s point of view and develop emotional intimacy, without being influenced by your own pre-conceptions of what a married relationship should be like or how a woman and a man should behave within a marital relationship.

4. Your Teacher: Perhaps you’re taking a course but just don’t see eye to eye with your professor? Critical thinking can help you spot the fallacies in others’ arguments and improve your own reasoning. You can learn to become more persuasive in your presentations and convince your professor of your opinion.

5. Your Boss: Do you feel passed over or unjustly victimized by your boss. Critical thinking can help you find a way to change an unsatisfactory work situation and better communicate with your boss. You can learn how not to take work-related discussions personally.

Specially in the choice of a life partner, critical thinking asks that you use both your heart and your mind, and ask and seek answers to key questions, including —

Who am I getting involved with?

Why am I getting involved with them?

Why would i marry them?

Ask yourself What am I looking for? What do I want out of this relationship? If you’re thinking critically, ask yourself Why do i want the things I do? and Why am I expecting those things?

Critical thinking in personal development

Critical thinking can help you grow into a more balance, sane and original person by alerting you to prevalent thinking traps. Three cognitive biases have been identified as especially common on a daily basis in the Internet Age. See if you can think of any recent instances of any of these:

Authority Bias. The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to what they may be saying) and be more influenced by that opinion. We give authority to all kinds of people and organizations — presidents, film stars, godmen, millionaires, the United Nations, certain news channels and websites. Rarely, if ever, do we stop and ask what deep agenda or program they might be following. Entire populations can be misled into harmful or destructive actions by blindly following one misguided leader’s instructions.

Confirmation Bias. We mentioned this earlier as the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information that confirms one’s pre-existing beliefs and convictions. You can, with almost no effort, find a blog post, podcast, news article, or Medium post that will confirm exactly the point you’re trying to make. This has polarised entire countries on important topics such as climate change. The more scientific evidence and consensus is produced to prove climate change, the more the deniers are convinced of their rightness.

Bandwagon Effect. The tendency to do or believe things because many other people also do. Many people have said, Everybody knows it’s true that, I’ve talked to a lot of people who think — these are the warning signs of the Bandwagon Effect and we hear them far too often. Social media like Facebook in particular is intentionally designed to produce the Bandwagon Effect. Fear of missing out, or of being the last to know of something important, or some new trend put out by so-called ‘influencers’ occupies the thoughts of the average person more today than ever before in world history.

Just by helping you avoid these, critical thinking makes you a better person.

Develop your critical thinking skills step by step

Elon Musk attributes his business success to a method he calls First Principles, which he has used again and again through his life to defy predictions, displace the competition and come up with game-changing and disruptive ideas.

First Principles. First principles thinking is basically the practice of actively and objectively questioning whatever you think you ‘know’ about a given problem or scenario — and then creating new knowledge and solutions from scratch. Einstein once said that if he had an hour to think about a problem, he would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes on the solution. Musk’s 3-step method for First Principles thinking is —

1. Identify and define your assumptions. Some examples from daily life could be — Growing my business will cost a lot of money; I have to struggle and starve to become a successful artist; or I just can’t find enough time to workout and reach my weight loss goals.

2. Breakdown the problem into its fundamental principles. Interrogate the assumption to understand why, where and how it was made. This will expose underlying assumptions, which should then be questioned in the same way.

3. Create new solutions from scratch. Following this approach Musk had innovated and built three revolutionary multibillion dollar companies in completely different fields by the time he was 46 — Paypal (Financial Services), Tesla Motors (Automotive) and SpaceX (Aerospace). The list now includes a fourth, Solar City (Energy), which he helped build and acquired for $2.6 billion recently.

6 tips towards critical thinking

Here are some broad and general tips for acquiring critical thinking skills in your life —

1. Question consciously. Conscious Questioning is regarded as the bedrock of critical thinking. Some guiding template questions that can be applied go any knowledge are

What do we know…?

How do we know…?

Why do we accept or believe…?

What is the evidence for…?

2. Look for and acknowledge gaps in information. For example, a 2018 book called DNA: How genetics makes us who we are claims that genetics is the main influence in most people’s lives and that nature and nurture take second place. However, the book admits that even genetics accounts for only 50% of the formative influences in a person’s life. The remaining 50% is simply a giant, embarrassing and unacknowledged gap. Looking for the gaps is easy. Acknowledging them, not so much.

3. Understand the differences between observation and inference. Every morning, the cock crows and at roughly the same time, the sun also rises in the east. Both of these are observations. However, if you concluded that the sun rose because the cock was crowing, or the other way around, you would be wrong. A cock will crow at different times of the day.

4. Understand that words are symbols for ideas, not the ideas themselves. A critical thinker would probe for the underlying meanings of the words. For example, many people are thought to be freedom fighters and patriots in their own country because they fight for its freedom have been regarded as terrorists by the colonial or occupying rulers.

5. Look for the reasons behind the assumptions. A person may say the suburban trains are always crowded, but upon closer examination, you may learn that he has always travelled only at peak hours. This will help you study different time slots and realise when the train is actually mostly not crowded.

6. Develop intellectual self-reliance. Don’t borrow opinions or facts from others. Verify everything yourself, and arrive at your own conclusions. Tell yourself that new facts could emerge and situations could evolve and change, requiring you to revisit your opinions. Humility is the best trait of a critical thinker.

6. The One Habit

Whenever faced with new knowledge, new evidence, unexpected events, and Learn to ask these four questions —

– What assumptions am I making about evidence I haven’t actually seen

– What evidence would convince me I’m wrong?

– It’s not good enough to show that the other side is wrong. If I’m making a positive claim (something is true), I must show I’m right.

– Whether I like something or not has nothing to do with whether it is truer not.

One last thing

Don’t be a believer, be a seeker. We all carry our inner beliefs and dogma, but a critical thinker main strength comes from his questions. He knows that everything evolves, that there is always something more to learn, and that today’s conviction could be tomorrow’s controversy. So I hope that in your life you will find your strength in being a seeker, not a blind believer.

References

Elon Musk’s ancient critical thinking strategy http://tinyurl.com/y3qq4mfp

Elon Musk’s 3-step thinking https://mayooshin.com/first-principles-thinking/

How to be a critical thinker http://tinyurl.com/y5y6ugfg

First principles: How to think like Elon Musk http://tinyurl.com/y5yofgk8

Elon Musk uses Aristotle’s First Principles philosophy http://tinyurl.com/y6pxn8ed

The ultimate cheat sheet of cognitive biases https://conversion-rate-experts.com/cognitive-biases/

Mark Cuban on critical thinking http://tinyurl.com/y5vwekns

5 powerful critical thinking quotes https://www.wabisabilearning.com/blog/powerful-critical-thinking-quotes

Foundation for Critical Thinking https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-conception-of-critical-thinking/411

Common failures of critical thinking http://tinyurl.com/y65uohqd

This critical thinking skill can change your business http://tinyurl.com/yxfv9fpq

How to get better at critical thinking http://tinyurl.com/y3gejw6v

5 ways to use critical thinking in personal relationships http://tinyurl.com/yxjq96ch

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-thinking/#DeweThreMainExam

Warren Buffet’s favourite critical thinking exercise http://tinyurl.com/y269hetc

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