22 published lessons with this tag.
A claim and its supporting evidence are different objects that should be stored separately.
What you saw and what you concluded from it are distinct and must not be fused.
Evaluation has its place — after you have thoroughly observed.
Two things happening together does not mean one causes the other.
Not every recurring event is meaningful — some repetitions are coincidental.
Actively looking for evidence against your current belief is the fastest path to calibration.
Information separated from its context becomes ambiguous or misleading.
Assumptions you never write down are assumptions you never question. Every plan, decision, and belief rests on invisible premises — and the invisible ones are the ones that destroy you.
If no possible observation could prove your schema wrong it is not a useful model.
Looking for evidence that supports your schema is not the same as rigorously testing it.
Deliberately try to break your own mental model before relying on it.
Finding out your schema is wrong teaches you more than confirming it is right.
When two of your beliefs conflict, the contradiction itself tells you something important. It reveals that your knowledge has grown beyond the neat consistency of a closed system and is encountering the productive tensions that drive genuine understanding. The discomfort of holding conflicting beliefs is not a problem to eliminate — it is a signal to investigate.
What seems contradictory is often two statements true in different contexts.
Before resolving a contradiction make the strongest possible case for each side.
When experts disagree the disagreement itself contains information about the limits of current knowledge. Expert contradiction is not a failure of expertise — it is a map of where the evidence runs out, where hidden variables lurk, and where your own epistemic work must begin. The most dangerous response is not confusion but premature certainty: picking one expert and ignoring the other destroys the signal the disagreement was carrying.
Not resolving a contradiction but using its tension to generate energy is a valid strategy.
Resolving contradictions often requires updating one or both of the schemas involved. The contradiction is not a flaw in reality — it is a flaw in the model. And the resolution is not choosing a side. It is evolving the schema until the contradiction dissolves into a more accurate representation of how things actually work.
The willingness to look directly at your contradictions is the hallmark of serious thinking.
Forcing integration where it does not exist or oversimplifying to achieve coherence.
No external entity has more right to direct your thinking than you do. Self-authority is the recognition that you — not your culture, your employer, your algorithms, or your defaults — are the legitimate governing agent of your own cognitive infrastructure.
Others can influence your thinking — and should — but influence is an input, not a command. Authority over the final judgment remains yours.