7 min read
Near | Death Note Part 2 Panel
Introduction
Being analytical means making informed decisions and being able to deduct details from information that you may not have previously been able to perform.
Luckily, it’s a trained skill that can be harnessed by anyone and improved by anyone because it’s main requirement is practice, not intelligence. You don’t need to be smart to be analytical. But you do need to be analytical to be smart.
1. Ask Better Questions
The next time you hear someone tell you something important, or an important piece of information mentioned in the news, don’t take it for the truth. Not yet at least.
Most people accept information passively. By that I mean: they accept information without really giving it much thought.
A Really Good Example
Recently, in the past 9 months or so, probably even for the last year, there’s been a lot of craze with respect to peptides. Or, basically just research chemicals that you inject into your bloodstream that offers crazy benefits like better sleep, improved muscle growth, recovery, bone growth, you name it. Although it sounds like steroids, which enhance physical traits, it isn’t. Technically.
It doesn’t create something that doesn’t exist, but rather just creates more of what already exists.
Of course, the obvious problem with it lies literally in the line itself. Peptides are research chemicals and are a risk in and of itself. Whether a person chooses to take it or not depends entirely on their own choice.
By all means, I’m not offering health advice, but just some context and additional thought.
And… this is exactly what I’m talking about!
For matters like these, that can notably change your life either positively or negatively, it’s absolutely worth putting in the research and time for thought. And even if you’re not a “research” kind of person, then ideally you should take the time to speculate.
Research Evidence
What separates a casual thinker and an analytical thinker is speculation and curiosity. Why is this true? How do we know? What evidence supports X? What might change my mind?
None of these are tricks or hard at all. They’re just the bare basics of reasoning. Anyone can do it.
Research on metacognition (thinking about thinking) shows, consistently, that people who pause to question their own understanding learn more intricately and are capable of retaining information for longer periods.
A landmark study in 1994 by Kind found that students who were trained to ask conceptually advanced questions, not just “what” but “why” and connections from X and Y. The result was a significant jump (relative to peers) on reasoning tasks. This is known as the Socratic method, a 2400-year-old method validated by modern research as one of the most effective ways to build a strong base for critical thinking.
Try This
Pick any belief that you firmly hold close to you. I want you to let go of any biases that you have (this is known as confirmation bias) and just utilize your own critical thinking for the moment.
Ask these questions:
- What evidence made me believe this?
- What would have to be true for me to be wrong?
- Who disagrees, and why?
2. Break Problems Into Parts
When a problem feels overwhelming, the brain tends to oversimplify it or just freeze altogether.
This is a common piece of advice commonly given to students, and for good reason.
By breaking a problem, or question into parts, variables, constraints, unknowns, dependencies, makes it comprehendible. This is known as “problem decomposition”, and is a crucial part to engineering and scientific thinking.
Who Would Use This?
If you’re a student in AP, and took a course in the humanities, this is absolutely a concept that I’m sure you’ve learned.
By breaking down the components of a question, and what they scorers are looking for, you can notably (not significantly) decrease the mental pressure when answering it. For timed tasks, like the final may exam, this is a tip that could absolutely help with overthinking and “stress thinking” (just thinking under stress, so poor thinking).
Research Evidence
Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 1988) explains why this works:
- Our working memory can only hold about 4-7 chunks of information at one time. When a problem requires higher-level thinking, it exceeds that capacity and thinking degrades. By breaking down a problem, you simultaneously reduce the mental load per step and make each piece of information processable.
- Studies on expert vs noobie problem-solving (Chi et al., 1981) discovered that experts naturally chunk and categorize information before attempting to find a solution. The secondary group tended to jump in immediately.
Try This
Next time you’re in a difficult position, write out a list of sub-questions:
For example, if you’re thinking about if “should I take this job?”, ask
- What do I know?
- What do I need to know?
- Which matter most?
- What are the variables?
3. What’s The Counterargument?
Strong opinions, with strong evidence and back-up should survive despite the strongest opposition.
This means actively trying to disprove your belief or side. Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out information that confirms what we already believe. It’s one of the most document cognitive biases in psychology.
Yet, it’s especially easier to pierce through it. That being the collection of contradicting evidence and obtaining strongly opposing arguments. Good scientists and lawyers do this on the regular, and for very good (and obvious) reason.
Research Evidence
Confirmation bias was studied by Peter Wason in 1960 with his well-known “2-4-6” task, where subjects consistently sought to confirm evidence rather than attempt to disprove it. However, research by Stanovich and West shows that actively considering alternative possibilities (forming counterarguments) notably reduces the bias. Just being told to think of one reason why your belief might be wrong is sufficient to reduce bias.
Try This
Before coming to a conclusion, write down the strongest reason why you might be wrong. Even if it isn’t inherently strong, at least not the way you see it, write it down. Give it time and even some thought if your up for it. If there was someone out there that made it there goal to rely on this point alone to disprove you, how might they do it?
4. Structured Thinking Tools
First Principles – Reasoning from the ground up
First-principles thinking basically means identifying the foundational truths to a problem, or facts that you know are definitively certain, and building a base of reason based off it. It prevents mixed-up, innaccurate thinking.
Pre-Mortem – Imagining failure in advance
The pre-mortem technique, developed by psychologist Gary Klein, is working backwards to find the why to why a plan of attack failed. In other words, it’s finding the reason for the failure behind a plan by essentially “retracing your steps”. Research by Klein found that it improves the identification of risks by up to 30% compared to standard risk analysis methods.
Steel-Manning – The opposite of a strawman
Before attacking an opposing view, repeat it to yourself in its most articulate and favorable form. This gives you an understanding of how the other side thinks, even considering bias, and making room for more precise rebuttals and even making room for opposition acceptance. (basically just proving that they’re right occasionally)
5. Slow Down Conclusions
Separate what happened from what it means. There’s two primary kinds of thinking, the first being fast, automatic, and intuitive, and the second being slow, deliberate, and effortful. The first system is strong but tends to jump to conclusions. Naturally, we’re good at reaching quick but weak conclusions. The second system solves this error (careful analysis) in exchange for more time. The skill is knowing when to engage with system 2 in particular situations.
Research Evidence
Daniel Kahneman’s dual-process theory (systems 1 and 2) shows that most of our errors in reasoning stem from system 1 generating a plausible answer and system 2 failing to back it up. An important lesson from his nobel-prize-winning work is that people can be taught to stop and ask “is this a case where my intuition might be misleading me?”
Studies, decades of research, show that this intervention alone reduce predictable errors in judgment.
Realistic Example
Say you’re playing a game of chess or blackjack against a player who you’ve never previously played against before. Initially, you have no idea if they’re better than you, at your level, or worse than you. Instead of being clever or giving it your all in the beginning, you start small, testing them to see how they play.
You make room for dumb plays, careless mistakes, and even illogical steps. After all, there’s a chance that playing intelligently from the start will only give your opponent more time to catch up to you and maybe analyze your methods. Besides, in some cases, it might just be a waste of effort.
Therefore, you initiate with system 1 thinking. Only when you see your opponent make a smart move or even deceive you do you actually activate system 2 and starting taking it more seriously.
Now, instead of making impulsive and rapid decisions, you make more careful ones, with the goal of countering your opponent.
Try This
When you form an opinion in conversation, pause before saying it. Ask:
- What am I assuming here?
- Is there another interpretation of what just happened?
This makes just a few seconds yet still meaningfully changes output.
6. Analytical Content Diet
An “analytical diet” is deliberate exposure to structured reasoning. This means reading logic, philosophy, statistics, and science. All of these subjects expose you to the forms of good arguments. Puzzles and strategy games also help train logic and with pattern recognition – a trait naturally associated with higher-iq individuals. Code trains casual thinking (this input specifically –> this output specifically). All of these build transferable mental habits
Research Evidence
Whether skills learned in domain transfer to another, or the concept of “cognitive transfer”, is heavily debated but research suggests that learning formal logic and studying argumentation does result in measurable gains in general reasoning (Lehman & Nisbett, 1990).
Chess training in children has shown to improve mathematical problem-solving in several studies, with the explanation likely surrounding around pattern recognition and comfort with structured uncertainty.
Realistic Example
For quite a while now, it’s been debated if puzzle games or such “mentally intensive” games actually train your brain and raise an individual’s IQ.
In truth, it’s not that simple. Just playing a game everyday and getting better at it doesn’t make you smarter in the sense that it raises your IQ. You might get better at playing it with practice, but it doesn’t make you smarter. At least, not on the surface and if you play it simply.
However, if you took these games, and took the skills that you learned from playing them, and applied them to other scenarios, and learned to adapt and analyze on-the-spot, then maybe you could propose a different argument.
By “applying” I mean: taking the technical and analysis skills you learned from whatever game you played, and using those exact skills in another, completely unrelated scenario. If playing puzzle games taught you to take your time with your decisions, analyze a sequence of numbers, and do it progressively faster to catch up with a timer, apply the process of making rapid-fire conclusions when a classmate asks you an interesting political question.
Point here is to creative with it. Don’t limit a skill to just one sector. Expand it.
Starting Points
- “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (Kahneman)
- “The Art of Thinking Clearly” (Dobelli)
- Khan Academy’s statistics course
- Logic puzzles, chess, strategy games like Go or Starcraft
- Programming (even basic Python)
7. Write Out Your Thinking
When you write down your reasoning, read it back. Gaps and unspoken assumptions become visible all of a sudden in a way that your brain can’t usually keep. This doesn’t apply to everyone of course; some people can naturally catch errors and these gaps by just breaking down the reasoning in their head. Explaining something to someone else also forces the same result, and it’s often why teachers learn more than students.
Research Evidence
The “protege effect” (Nestojko et al., 2014) describes how preparing to teach someone something improves your own learning and comprehension more than studying for it. Writing is a form of this (a means of self-explanation that forces organization). Research on expressive writing (Pennebaker, 1997) shows it improves cognitive clarity. Studies on “writing-to-learn” in STEM contexts show, consistently, improved conceptual understanding over passive reading.
Try This
After making any significant decision, write one paragraph explaining why X, as if you were writing to someone who will naturally retaliate against it. You’ll often notice you can’t actually justify step 2 or that your reason for step 3 just runs in loops without stable predictable logic.
8. Know Your Biases
Knowing your biases also means learning to catch them in real time. Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that affect everyone, regardless of IQ or education. The ones that stand out are: confirmation bias, availability heuristic (overweighting vivid examples), sunk cost fallacy (letting past investment drive future decisions), and anchoring (over-relying on the first number you see).
Although everyone has biases, some are naturally better are recognizing and rejecting their biases and incorporating it in their thinking.
Research Evidence
Research by Morewedge et al. (2015) found that a one-time training intervention that teaches people about specific cognitive biases reduces those biases by 29% immediately and by another 19-27% several weeks later. This result heavily suggests that bias awareness genuinely works, not just in the moment but over time too. Kahneman’s framing is: you can’t eliminate biases, but labeling them creates a “bias whisperer” (a pause before error continues).
Core List To Learn
- Confirmation bias
- Availability heuristic
- Sunk cost fallacy
- Anchroing
- Dunning-Kruger effect
- Fundamental attribution error
- Survivorship bias
- In-group bias
Conclusion
Being analytical is not always about who has the highest IQ or who tried the hardest in school or has a P.H.D., but about who pays more attention to detail and willing to take their time. Hard work doesn’t win the race, consciousness, awareness, and precision does.
