Advanced Tools to Improve Your Thinking

The ability to think distinguishes humans from other sentient beings, giving us unparalleled power over our destiny. Having devoted his entire career as a college professor to understanding thinking, Michael Shermer, PhD, the award-winning author of Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, draws on his forty years of research and teaching to distill the fundamentals of critical thinking, propelling your truth-seeking quest to a deeper level of wisdom and reasoning. Following these fifteen lessons, you’ll learn how to test claims, beliefs and propositions with proven tools that enrich your understanding of the world. you’ll discover how to distinguish between correlation and causality and determine causality under uncertainty, teasing out multiple variables to help identify the most important causes not just the most obvious. Learn the value of adjusting your default setting to skepticism but proportion your belief to the evidence to guide you to better conclusions. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to muse more knowledgeably about some of the world’s most impenetrable and insoluble mysteries.