This is a slight revision of an idea I blogged about here.
Here’s something they don’t teach at school: the simplest way to become a better thinker is to take whatever you think is right and ask if it could be wrong.
Put another way, if you’d like to be a better thinker form a habit of asking, “if this might be true, what would make it wrong?” Entertaining this question as often as you can will make you a more critical and better thinker.
Here are 3 simple examples of this technique.
On Success
Consensus: You need lots of success to be happy.
Critical view: Can you be happy without lots of success?
On Choice
Consensus: More choice is good.
Critical view: Can less choice be better?
On Hard work
Consensus: The more hours you put in, the better you’ll do.
Critical view: Can working smarter beat working harder?
Here are more debatable examples:
On Technology:
Consensus: Technology progress is accelerating.
Critical view: Could technology progress be slowing down? For example what recent technology has automated away many hours of laborious work for everyone? A washing machine did this over 100 years ago by cutting 4 hours of manual work down to a few minutes. What recent examples are just as impactful?
On the Economy
Consensus: Governments must cut public spending and increase taxes to help their economies recover from a recession.
Critical view: Can more public debt be worth it if it’s used to invest in technology and education that will help the economy recover faster? Is it possible that increasing taxes makes people spend less thereby actually limiting the growth of the overall economy?
This type of thinking takes a bit more work but with a simple question–“if this might be true, what would make it wrong?”–you open up branches of thinking that you would have missed otherwise. I also find this process quite fun, especially if taken lightly and without much ego.
That said, thinking more critically in this fashion doesn’t mean you should always reject what is thought to be true. In fact if many people believe something is true, there’s usually a number of valid reasons why that is the case.
However, to be a better thinker you should always be able to entertain the idea that what you think is obviously right could be non-obviously wrong.