1. Critical thinking

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and evaluate information, arguments, and evidence in order to make well-reasoned decisions. It is an important skill that can help you make better decisions, solve problems more effectively, and understand complex issues more deeply.

To improve your critical thinking skills, you can try the following strategies:

1. Practice evaluating the evidence and arguments presented in various sources, such as news articles, academic papers, or websites. Consider whether the evidence is sufficient, whether the arguments are logical, and whether the conclusions are well-supported.

2. Learn to ask good questions. Asking questions can help you clarify your understanding of an issue, identify gaps in your knowledge, and probe deeper into a problem or argument.

3. Seek out diverse viewpoints and perspectives. Exposure to different perspectives can help you develop a more nuanced understanding of an issue and challenge your assumptions.

4. Practice active listening and reading. This means paying close attention to what others are saying or writing, and trying to understand their perspective.

5. Learn to think critically about your own beliefs and assumptions. Ask yourself why you believe what you do, and consider whether your beliefs are supported by evidence and reason.

There are several different types of critical thinking, including analytical, interpretive, evaluative, and creative thinking. Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex problems or arguments into smaller parts and examining them in detail. Interpretive thinking involves understanding and explaining the meaning of texts, ideas, or situations. Evaluative thinking involves making judgments about the value or quality of something. Creative thinking involves generating new ideas or finding novel solutions to problems.

There are a few online tests that you can use to assess your critical thinking skills, such as the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal and the Cornell Critical Thinking Test. However, keep in mind that these tests may not be as reliable as professionally administered tests, and the results of these tests should be interpreted with caution.

There are a few resources that you might find helpful in learning more about critical thinking:

• "The Art of Reasoning" by David Kelley is a comprehensive introduction to critical thinking that covers a wide range of topics, including argumentation, logical fallacies, and problem-solving.

• "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman is a book that explores the psychological biases and heuristics that can lead us to make irrational decisions and judgments.

• "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren is a classic guide to critical reading that teaches you how to analyze and evaluate texts more effectively.

• The website of the Foundation for Critical Thinking (https://www.criticalthinking.org/) offers a wealth of resources on critical thinking, including articles, videos, and online courses.

2. Are you a cook or a chef?

In this article, Urban compares the approaches of two leaders, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, to innovation and problem-solving. Urban argues that Musk has a more "systematic" approach to innovation, which involves breaking down a problem into smaller parts and tackling each piece separately. In contrast, Jobs had a more "intuitive" approach, which involved following his gut instincts and trusting his creative vision.

Urban's article has been widely shared and has received a lot of attention online. It has been praised for its insights into the different leadership styles of Musk and Jobs, and for its entertaining and accessible writing style. If you are interested in innovation, leadership, or creative problem-solving, you may find this article to be a useful and thought-provoking read.

Key takeaways from Tim Urban's article "The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce":

1. Your entire life runs on the software in your head—why wouldn’t you obsess over optimizing it? Just play the why game and find the fundamentals. Cook follows receipe, chef create its own receipe based on personal first principles and numerous rounds of iterations. Musk is an impressive chef for sure, but what makes him such an extreme standout isn’t that he’s impressive—it’s that most of us aren’t chefs at all. The problem is, most of our heads are still running on some version of the 50,000-year-old survival software—which kind of wastes the good luck we have to be born now.

2. Elon Musk has a systematic approach to innovation, which involves breaking down problems into smaller pieces and tackling them one at a time. This allows him to find the underlying principles that govern a problem and come up with creative solutions.

3. Steve Jobs had a more intuitive approach to innovation, which involved trusting his gut instincts and following his creative vision. This approach can be effective when you have a clear sense of what you want to achieve, but it can also be risky if you don't have a solid foundation of knowledge and understanding.

4. Most of us are "cooks," following recipes and relying on our pre-existing knowledge and skills to solve problems. However, if we want to achieve truly innovative and creative solutions, we need to become "chefs" and develop our own first principles and iterative approach to problem-solving.

5. To become better problem-solvers and innovators, we need to constantly question and challenge our assumptions and beliefs, and seek out diverse perspectives and experiences.

6. It is important to optimize the "software" in our heads by learning new skills and knowledge, and by actively seeking out opportunities to practice and apply our critical thinking skills.

The idea is that reasoning from first principles is reasoning like a scientist. You take core facts and observations and use them to puzzle together a conclusion, kind of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of reasoning—reasoning by analogy—happens when you look at the way things are already done and you essentially copy it, with maybe a little personal tweak here and there—kind of like a cook following an already written recipe.

A pure verbatim recipe-copying cook and a pure independently inventive chef are the two extreme ends of what is, of course, a spectrum. But for any particular part of your life that involves reasoning and decision making, wherever you happen to be on the spectrum, your reasoning process can usually be boiled down to fundamentally chef-like or fundamentally cook-like. Creating vs. copying. Originality vs. conformity.

Being a chef takes a tremendous amount of time and energy—which makes sense, because you’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, you’re trying to invent it for the first time. Puzzling your way to a conclusion feels like navigating a mysterious forest while blindfolded and always involves a whole lot of failure, in the form of trial and error. Being a cook is far easier and more straightforward and less icky. In most situations, being a chef is a terrible waste of time, and comes with a high opportunity cost, since time on Earth is immensely scarce.

But then there are those parts of life that are really really deeply important—like where you choose to live, or the kinds of friends you choose to make, or whether you want to get married and to whom, or whether you want to have kids and how you want to raise them, or how you set your lifestyle priorities.

The circles of growth

For each of these areas, the box represents the current hypothesis and the circle represents the source of new information that can be used to adjust the hypothesis. It’s our duty to remember that the circles are the boss, not the boxes—the boxes are only trying their best to do the circles proud. And if we fall out of touch with what’s happening in the circles, the info in the boxes becomes obsolete and a less effective source for our decision-making.

Thinking about the software as a whole, let’s take a step back. What we see is a goal formation mechanism below and a goal attainment mechanism above. One thing goal attainment often requires is laser focus. To get the results we want, we zoom in on the micro picture, sinking our teeth into our goal and honing in on it with our strategy loop.

But as time passes, the Want box and Reality box adjust contents and morph shape, and eventually, something else can happen—the Goal Pool changes.

1. Want box: Getting started

   Step 1 for Elon was filling in the contents of the Want box. Doing this from first principles is a huge challenge—you have to dig deep into concepts like right and wrong, good and bad, important and trivial, valuable and frivolous. You have to figure out what you respect, what you disdain, what fascinates you, what bores you, and what excites you deep in your inner child. Of course, there’s no way for anyone of any age to have a clear cut answer to these questions, but Elon did the best thing he could by ignoring others and independently pondering.

   He has said many times that he cares deeply about the future well-being of the human species

2. So he did what many young people do—he focused his early goals not around achieving his Wants, but expanding the Reality box and its list of “things that are possible.”

How to Be a Chef

1. Accept: Epiphany 1) You don’t know shit. -→ Stephen Hawking meant when he said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”

   Here’s Isaac Newton: To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.

   And Richard Feynman: I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

   And Niels Bohr: Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

   Musk has said his own version: You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.[footnote2]https://youtu.be/NU7W7qe2R0A[/footnote2]

   The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what they know is that as scientists, they’re aware that unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding and the death of effective reasoning. They firmly believe that reasoning of all kinds should take place in a lab, not a church.

   With each of these questions, the challenge is to keep asking why until you hit the floor—and the floor is what will tell you whether you’re in a church or a lab for that particular part of your life. If a floor you hit is one or more first principles that represent the truth of reality or your inner self and the logic going upwards stays accurate to that foundation, you’re in the lab. If a Why? pathway hits a floor called “Because [authority] said so”—if you go down and down and realize at the bottom that the whole thing is just because you’re taking your parent’s or friend’s or religion’s or society’s word for it—then you’re in church there.

2. Epiphany 2) No one else knows shit either. This is a battle of two kinds of confidence—confidence in others vs. confidence in ourselves. For most cooks, confidence in others usually comes out the winner.

   To swing the balance, we need to figure out how to lose respect for the general public, your tribe’s dogma, and society’s conventional wisdom.

3. Epiphany 3) You’re playing Grand Theft Life

   But I think there’s more going on. In an emperor’s new clothes situation, there are four kinds of people:

   1. Proud Cook.

   2. Insecure Cook.

   3. Self-Loathing Cook

   4. The chef (Free of Self-Loathing Cook’s trepidation, the world’s chefs are liberated to put on their lab coats and start sciencing. To a chef, the world is one giant laboratory, and their life is one long lab session full of a million experiments. They spend their days puzzling, and society is their game board.) The chef treats his goals and undertakings as experiments whose purpose is as much to learn new information as it is to be ends in themselves.

What’s stopping the self-loathing Cook?

1. Misconception 1: Misplaced Fear

As for the F word…the word that makes our amygdalae quiver in the moonlight, the great chefs have something to say about that too:

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. —Henry Ford

Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. —Winston Churchill[footnote2]1987 July 22, New Castle News, Turning failure into success can make life bearable again by William D. Brown, Quote Page 12, Column 4, New Castle, Pennsylvania. (NewspaperArchive)[/footnote2]

I have not failed 700 times. I’ve succeeded in proving 700 ways how not to build a lightbulb. —Thomas Edison

There’s no more reliable corollary than super-successful people thinking failure is fucking awesome

1. Misconception 2: Misplaced Identity

We talked about why scientists welcome negative feedback about their experiments. But when you are the experiment, negative feedback isn’t a piece of new, helpful information—it’s an insult. And it hurts. And it makes you mad. And because changing feels impossible, there’s not much good that feedback can do anyway—it’s like giving parents negative feedback on the name of their one-month-old child.

Vital: don’t get trapped in your own history.”

Vital: The challenge with this last epiphany is to somehow figure out a way to lose respect for your own fear. That respect is in our wiring, and the only way to weaken it is by defying it and seeing, when nothing bad ends up happening, that most of the fear you’ve been feeling has just been a smoke and mirrors act. Doing something out of your comfort zone and having it turn out okay is an incredibly powerful experience, one that changes you—and each time you have that kind of experience, it chips away at your respect for your brain’s ingrained, irrational fears.