Three Ways to Catch Your Own Wrong Beliefs

Thinking well goes beyond deep investigative work and reflection. Here are three ways to catch your own incorrect beliefs.

Your worst ideas can be caught early if you know what makes bad ideas subpar. Photo by Andrés Canchón on Unsplash

It’s easy to find someone else’s errors and castigate them for being wrong. However, it’s harder for us to see what we’re wrong about.

Self-criticism is difficult as a discipline. It doesn’t feel good to be wrong, especially in public. There are ways for us to dig out of our most unreasonable views and re-evaluate them. Three great ways to start doing that are:

• Disbelieve any thought that begins with “they say”

• Use personal experience to inform, not override

• Fight the temptation to believe anything could be true

These may not sound like magic solutions, but as Jonathan Rauch lays out in The Constitution of Knowledge, these three steps are small ways to make great leaps in your ability to confront hard topics.