The Work Required to Have an Opinion

Remember that believable opinions are most likely to come from people 1) who have successfully accomplished the thing in question at least three times, and 2) who have great explanations of the cause-effect relationships that lead them to their conclusions.

Mental horsepower doesn’t guarantee mental dexterity. No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.

why you believe what you do and whether those beliefs stand up to scrutiny. Stay attuned to your own thought processes. Being self-aware can prevent bias and ensure clarity. Take the time to dissect the relevance and applicability of certain arguments and ideas. This helps determine their real-world implications. Strive to identify, develop, and as

one of the ways to access the predictions that underlie your opinions is to ask yourself a simple question: what evidence would convince you that you were wrong?

A final micro-process is to ask those with strong opinions to articulate them in detail. Having to explain something precisely can make people realize they don’t know it as well as they thought, opening them up to different views. Yale psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil demonstrated this with a study.13 They took topics such as how a toi

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.”