Purpose of Thinking; Positive and Negative Arguments; Clear Goals

Summary: Thinking is complicated but worth working on and improving. Positive arguments aren’t as good as negative arguments, because we care whether an idea is broken (and will fail) or not. One negative argument can imply an idea is broken; a dozen positive arguments cannot rule out the idea being broken. In order to improve at decisive criticism, we need to define goals more clearly. To remain flexible, we need to consider multiple goals instead of just one. It’s easy to give decisive, pass/fail judgments to candidate houses in terms of a clear goal like “at least 3 bedrooms, a pool, and costs under $300,000 (plus works for background context goals like having a roof)”.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://criticalfallibilism.com/purpose-of-thinking-positive-and-negative-arguments-clear-goals/

A post was merged into an existing topic: Typos Megathread