Reasoning

September 2026

• Sep 7, 2026ConceptsOccam's Razor: When the Simplest Explanation WinsWilliam of Ockham never wrote the Latin sentence attached to his name; later writers coined it, and Aristotle had argued in the Posterior Analytics for the demonstration resting on fewer postulates. The razor earns its keep probabilistically, since each added assumption is another chance to be wrong, and statistically, since fewer parameters resist overfitting. Medicine keeps a counterweight: Hickam's dictum, that a patient can have as many diseases as they please.15 MIN833

April 2026

• Apr 15, 2026ConceptsOckham's, Hanlon's, and Chesterton's Razors ExplainedHanlon's Razor is not folk wisdom, it is a correction for a documented bias: the fundamental attribution error that Lee Ross named in 1977, our habit of blaming character when circumstance explains the behavior. The article pairs each heuristic with its real failure mode: Ockham oversimplifies genuinely complex domains, Hanlon excuses repeated harm that benefits the actor, and Chesterton's Fence can be used in bad faith to freeze any reform indefinitely.11 MIN4.1k
• Apr 15, 2026ConceptsWhen to Use First Principles vs Systems ThinkingTwo lenses for different classes of problem. First principles strips a question to verifiable constraints and rebuilds, as when Tesla compared roughly 600 dollars per kilowatt-hour battery packs against about 80 dollars of raw materials. Systems thinking maps stocks, flows, feedback and delays instead, and Meadows ranked 12 leverage points from the weakest, changing numbers, to the strongest, changing the paradigm the system rests on.11 MIN5.7k
• Apr 14, 2026ConceptsFirst Principles Thinking: Elon Musk's Approach ExplainedWhere the method came from and when it fails. Musk broke a battery pack into cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon and steel, priced each at commodity level, and found roughly 80 dollars per kilowatt-hour against an industry consensus of 600. The article is equally clear on the limits: reasoning up from wrong foundations produces confident errors, and in irreducibly complex domains statistical approaches beat it.16 MIN1.6k

February 2026

• Feb 19, 2026ConceptsFirst Principles Thinking ExplainedThe three-phase method, challenge assumptions, separate fundamental constraints from conventions, then reason up, illustrated by Musk pricing rocket materials at roughly two percent of a quoted launch price and by Falcon 9 reaching orbit at about $2,720 per kilogram against the Space Shuttle's $54,500. Equal space goes to the failure modes, including mistaking preferences for principles and dismissing domain expertise.16 MIN64.1k

November 2025

• Nov 4, 2025Work SkillsCritical Thinking: Enhancing Decision-Making SkillsKeith Stanovich spent three decades comparing intelligence with rational thinking and found the correlation runs only about r = 0.20 to 0.35, meaning IQ explains roughly 4 to 12 percent of the variance in critical thinking performance. He named the gap dysrationalia: smart people reasoning badly because they lack the dispositions, not the capacity. This covers the core skills, groupthink countermeasures, pre-mortems, steelmanning and red teaming.24 MIN24.5k

August 2025

• Aug 12, 2025IdeasLearning Projects for Critical ThinkingCritical thinking is a set of learnable habits, not a fixed trait, and these eight projects give each one something to practice on. Assumption mapping takes apart Marissa Mayer's 2013 Yahoo remote work memo. Comparative analysis uses the Reinhart-Rogoff debt paper, where a graduate student found spreadsheet errors in 2013 that weakened the original finding. Gary Klein's pre-mortem, from a 2007 Harvard Business Review piece, asks a team to imagine the project has failed.28 MIN13.3k

July 2025

• Jul 18, 2025ExplainersWhat Is Critical Thinking? Beginner ExplanationA plain-language introduction to critical thinking as five linked skills: questioning assumptions, judging evidence quality, spotting fallacies, generating alternative explanations, and catching your own bias. Keith Stanovich's work found IQ correlates roughly 0.2 with critical thinking performance, so raw intelligence does not supply it. The guide also covers lateral reading, the technique professional fact-checkers used to beat students and historians at judging sources.41 MIN30.6k

May 2025

• May 25, 2025CultureMoral Intuitions vs. Moral ReasoningHaidt's 2001 incest scenario produced what he named moral dumbfounding: participants stripped of every justification still insisted the act was wrong. His social intuitionist model casts reasoning as a press secretary for a verdict already reached, and the article reports moral evaluations arriving within 200 to 300 milliseconds. Singer and Greene push back, arguing reason can override and slowly reshape intuitions, which is where Rawls's reflective equilibrium fits.39 MIN53.0k

November 2024

• Nov 14, 2024ConceptsConfirmation Bias: Why We Find What We're Looking ForIn 1979, Lord, Ross and Lepper gave supporters and opponents of capital punishment the identical pair of studies, one favoring deterrence and one undercutting it. Both groups rated the study that agreed with them as better designed, and both left holding their original view more strongly than before. Balanced evidence deepened the disagreement. The article traces the pattern from Wason's 2-4-6 task to Iraq, N-rays and Theranos.26 MIN6.5k

October 2024

• Oct 15, 2024ConceptsCritical Thinking: A Guide to Clear ReasoningIn 2011 an investment bank published a meticulous 50-page strong-buy analysis: dozens of model tabs, sourced projections, authoritative prose. A year later the product had not sold, the stock had lost 40 percent, and the post-mortem found every major assumption traced back to management presentations. No base rates, no bear case. That is a failure of critical thinking, not intelligence: it distinguishes reasoning well from reasoning impressively.27 MIN4.2k

March 2024

• Mar 13, 2024CultureWhat Is Epistemology: How We Know What We KnowPlato's Theaetetus, written around 369 BCE, supplied the definition that held for two millennia: knowledge is justified true belief. Gettier's three-page 1963 paper broke it with cases where a belief is justified and true but true by accident, like taking a dog for a sheep while a real sheep stands hidden behind the hill. Sixty years of repairs, reliabilism, proper functionalism, virtue epistemology, have produced no consensus.13 MIN5.0k

December 2023

• Dec 16, 2023ConceptsThink Critically: Science and Practical Steps for ReasoningWhat cognitive science says about where reasoning fails. Asch found in 1951 that roughly 75 percent of participants gave a clearly wrong answer at least once when surrounded by confederates, and 32 percent of all answers in the pressure condition matched the group over the evidence. Many afterwards reported genuine uncertainty about their own perception rather than simply caving. Calibration is the practical defense.17 MIN12.0k

March 2023

• Mar 28, 2023Work SkillsCritical Thinking: Skills and Barriers to ImprovementWhat critical thinking is and why intelligence does not supply it. The skill requires two components present together: intellectual skills, meaning the ability to analyze arguments, identify assumptions and evaluate evidence, and intellectual dispositions, meaning genuine willingness to revise beliefs while staying humble, curious and fair-minded. Research finds many highly educated adults still reason poorly when evidence conflicts with what they already believe.22 MIN8.0k

December 2022

• Dec 8, 2022ConceptsWhat Is Deductive vs Inductive ReasoningHolmes reads a tan line and the soil on a boot and concludes a man served in Afghanistan. That is abduction, inference to the best explanation, formalized by Charles Sanders Peirce, not deduction at all. The distinction matters: deductive conclusions are guaranteed by their premises, inductive ones only supported, abductive ones merely the best fit so far. The article covers Hume's problem of induction, Popper's answer, and Wald's survivorship analysis of returning bombers.19 MIN10.5k