Do You Think Like A Scientist?
Developing our critical thinking skills is vital to overcome nefarious actors
If you’re researching an issue, you might quickly find something that confirms how you think.
“Okay, cool—that’s enough information!”
Nuh-uh. You’re falling into the “makes sense stopping rule” trap.
Yes, the top result on your Google search confirmed your thinking, but Google knows how you think. It’s trying to play with you. Keep digging to expand your thinking.
Welcome to another essay where we’re improving our sensemaking and thinking skills. In our modern, uncertain world, we have a lot of information to process. Some of that information is accurate, and some plays to our cognitive biases.
Profit-seeking and nefarious sources are manipulating our cognitive biases, making it much harder to make sense of our complex world.
It’s hard, but it’s not impossible.
Sensemaking is crucial for us to be active participants in democracy. We’re in charge of this whole thing, so we need to improve our thinking skills.
Now, I bet you think that you already know how to think, and you’re probably pretty good at it. That said, critical thinking isn’t something that many of us are taught.
How can we get better at thinking?
Firstly, what do I mean by better in this case?
Let’s look at this in two parts: One is the search for truth as a vanishing point on the horizon. Truth is out there, and it’s a way to orient ourselves. While we’ll never get to perfection, we can definitely keep improving.
We need to travel on this journey together and orient ourselves toward truth. That’s where we’re trying to go to make sense of the world.
It’s also about having a clear, reasonable understanding of the world and recognizing that it’s a complex thing. Compare that to a less adequate way of thinking where we have a blurry, distorted vision that makes the world look nice and easy.
If we think everything’s straightforward, we’re probably falling foul of cognitive biases. I’ve written about those previously, and you can check them out here if you’re curious.
Wait, But Why?
We’re going to use Tim Urban’s stuff as a model, and all the cool graphics below are from his site. His creation regularly serves as a point of reference for me when I’m in conversation with someone. It makes me consider how I think and better understand how others think.
So, Tim Urban is the creator of the blog Wait, But Why? He started the whole thing by asking, “What’s the problem with the world? Why is everything so crazy?” Tim does deep investigations into things, so it’s a thorough and interesting look into what’s going on with the world.
If you like learning about new stuff, his posts are really cool. He talks about things like:
Artificial intelligence
Why procrastinators procrastinate
The Fermi paradox
How to pick a life partner
How to name your baby
Why you should stop caring about what others think
He has a series called The Story of Us, which has ten chapters. It’s one of my favorite pieces of literature in the world. We’re focusing on chapter seven, The Thinking Ladder. The ladder is on two spectrums: What you think and how you think.
What we think is the whole spectrum of belief systems. Any of us, whether on the left, right, or center, are susceptible to different qualities in our thinking.
Today, we’ll focus on the vertical axis: How you think. The little orange ball character is what he calls the primitive mind. The primitive mind focuses on core needs and feelings like survival, hunger, thirst, reproduction, pain, aggression, and fear.
The stick figure at the top is the higher mind. The higher mind is our reason, empathy, and imagination. We’re basically on a spectrum. Some people are controlled by their primitive mind, which is just trying to keep them alive and get what they want. Some people possess the higher mind, which is caring, thoughtful, and tries to make sense of the world.
Essentially, there are clear eyes at the top and foggy eyes at the bottom.
What are these four different levels?
The scientist
The sports fan
The attorney
The zealot
The scientist
The scientist wants to know the truth. They’re ready to be wrong and face dissent. The scientist is willing to be corrected on their understanding because they care about reality more than their feelings and convictions.
The sports fan
The sports fan has a strong preference for a certain outcome. They really want their team to be the best, but they follow the rules of the game. The sports fan accepts reality when they have to. In our thinking, that could be someone who really wants something to be true, but they recognize when it isn’t.
The attorney
The attorney only accepts and advocates for one outcome. While they follow the rules of thinking, they select the evidence that supports their perspective and will move others toward their outcome. So they follow the rules and have a coherent line of thinking, but they really try to push us in one direction.
The zealot
The last guy with the little hat is the zealot. The zealot is committed to a certain belief, and they don’t care about having evidence to support it. They’re not dissuaded by new information because they believe in the truth they want to believe.
Now, we’re going to try and think like a scientist.
What does it mean to think like a scientist?
Let’s talk a little about the scientific method with Tim’s approach. At point A, we begin with an idea, a question, or something we’re curious about. Then we want to develop a clear understanding of what’s going on to move us toward point B.
The scientific process is where we observe the world, ask questions about something we’re curious about, and gather information. We do some research and form a hypothesis that sets out what we think might be happening.
After that, we can test our hypothesis with experiments before analyzing the data. Do the results confirm the hypothesis? If not, we go back and form a new one. If the data confirms it, maybe our hypothesis is true.
Then we might seek out dissent and ask other people, “Hey, does this make sense? Can you prove it wrong?” If their data matches and no one can tell you why it’s not true, we might be able to arrive at a theory, belief, or point B.
Here’s how we can think about this process in a different way. This is Tim’s great graphic demonstrating how we can consider our minds:
There’s the outside world in the white, and we choose what we allow through our attention gate. Those are the things that we’re willing to pay attention to and consider. Then, we have a belief gate. If things can pass our belief gate, they become beliefs for us.
Again, I really appreciate the way Tim thinks. Look at this fantastic imagery of a bouncer at our gates! The bouncer’s job is to decide what we’ll allow through our attention gate and into our ways of thinking.
Of course, there’s a spectrum here. We may have a really wide open filter and take in all the information. We’re just going to keep on listening and listening, which may mean we’re a little more gullible. Alternatively, we may have a really tight trust filter, so we’re teetering on paranoid and skeptical.
We’re aiming for this sweet spot in the middle: We don’t want to be too gullible or too skeptical, but we need to find that rationally skeptical optimum.
The scientist’s way of thinking wants to take in a lot of information at the beginning. We don’t want to focus too much on what we’re considering to encourage us to be open and curious. As I talked about last time, ways to pique your curiosity include diversifying your information sources and media diet. But that’s not the only way.
In my next essay, we’ll check out more awesome tricks for thinking as a scientist, opening your mind, and defeating confirmation biases. Stay tuned to tap further into your scientist mind.
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