@daniel_h_pink: Sentence one has a research pedigree. In 1979, Charles Lord, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper at Stanford gave people studies on capital punishment — some supporting it, some undercutting it. Everyone rated the study that agreed with them as rigorous and the other as sloppy. Both sides left more convinced than they arrived. Same evidence, wider gap. The follow-up found the fix, and it's oddly specific. Telling people to be objective and unbiased did nothing. Asking them one question worked: would I judge this the same way if it pointed the other direction? Researchers call it considering the opposite, and it remains one of the few debiasing techniques that reliably holds up. Sentence two belongs to Philip Tetlock at Penn, who spent decades scoring people's predictions. What separates the accurate forecasters isn't intelligence or access. It's that they treat their beliefs as hypotheses to be tested rather than treasures to be guarded. So try this today. Take the position you're surest of and write the strongest version of the opposing case. If you can't write it well enough that someone who holds it would nod, you don't understand your own view yet. Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984). Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(6), 1231–1243.

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Monday 24 August 2026 06:25:18 GMT