[Draft WIP] Evaluating clarity of thinking

This is my working document to think through how to more effectively evaluate clarity of thinking or epistemic quality. This resource is especially helpful in low contexts, when one has still little exposure on other person thinking, but some points are also relevant to longer.

You will find throughout to ratings Impact and optional Overrated (optional). But what’s the context here? Overrated for who? I think here quite broadly, think of somebody who Philip Tetlock names intellectually curious New York Times reader. And Impact on what? Impact as it relates to how impactful a thing is in relation to clarity of thinking.

I sorted this that the strongest signals are at the top.

Impact: 10/10 💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪

I see wisdom as amount of knowledge subtracted by amount of bias. I think most people underestimate how much knowledge is corrupted though. I think this amount of knowledge is therefore often a blindspot for evaluating how valuable is the knowledge the person is sharing.

I agree that having a strong grasp of the established facts, consensus science is crucial for developing genuine expertise on most topics. Experts need to have an extensive base of factual knowledge before they can engage in meaningful analysis, draw insightful connections, and contribute original ideas.

I am not gonna focus on how to define it. Beside in a couple of spots such as “Counter-arguments”, spotting knowledge that is clear, verifiable, logical (See more in “Simple”). This write-up will then mostly focus on the reverse, on problems with knowledge. I think people are more distorted than they think by

Essential to truth seeking, is having a solid grasp on all body of knowledge that is

Truth is the most accurate position / the most useful explanation out of gazillion others. There is a large probability that one is wrong yet by default we tend to believe what we have been already thinking is correct.

It’s crucaial to extensively engage with disproving own beliefs because we are largely driven by

Also one want to engage with antithesis because naturally this body of knowledge is much larger than the positive explanation one is thinking about. The “true” explanation one is just one path of explaining something in comparison with a lot larger area of all other answers.

It’s critical for a thinker to be able to explain the best version of counter-arguments and assign varying probabilities on different counter-arguments and then treating their own thesis not as truth but as the most probable answer.