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Permalink Reply by Ronald on March 8, 2011 at 5:58pm

You should watch videos of The Atheist Experience. http://www.atheist-experience.com/archive/
Its a non profit show that has a lot of good archive videos. They touch on a lot of topics and give you tons of food for thought.

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Permalink Reply by Dallas the Phallus on March 8, 2011 at 6:50pm

Also, it's always good to examine your cognitive biases. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia.  - Dallas

 

List of Cognitive Biases

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable facts. The existence of some of these cognitive biases has been verified empirically in the field of psychology.

Cognitive biases are instances of evolved mental behavior. Some are presumably adaptive, for example, because they lead to more effective actions in given contexts or enable faster decisions when faster decisions are of greater value. Others presumably result from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms, or from the misapplication of a mechanism that is adaptive under different circumstances.

Cognitive bias is a general term that is used to describe many distortions in the human mind that are difficult to eliminate and that lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, or illogical interpretation.^[1]

Many of these biases are studied for how they affect belief formation, business decisions, and scientific research.

• Anchoring – the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
• Attentional Bias – implicit cognitive bias defined as the tendency of emotionally salient stimuli in one's environment to preferentially draw and hold attention.
• Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
• Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people.^[2]
• Choice-supportive bias – the tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
• Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.^[3]
• Congruence bias – the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, in contrast to tests of possible alternative hypotheses.
• Contrast effect – the enhancement or diminishing of a weight or other measurement when compared with a recently observed contrasting object.^[4]
• Denomination effect – the tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g. coins) rather than large amounts (e.g. bills).^[5]
• Distinction bias – the tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.^[6]
• Endowment effect – "the fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it".^[7]
• Experimenter's or Expectation bias – the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.^[8]
• Extraordinarity bias – the tendency to value an object more than others in the same category as a result of an extraordinarity of that object that does not, in itself, change the value.^{[citation needed]}
• Focusing effect – the tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.^[9]
• Framing effect – drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.
• Hostile media effect - the tendency to see a media report as being biased due to one's own strong partisan views.
• Hyperbolic discounting – the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are.^[10]
• Illusion of control – the tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.^[11]
• Impact bias – the tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.^[12]
• Information bias – the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.^[13]
• Interloper effect – the tendency to value third party consultation as objective, confirming, and without motive. Also consultation paradox, the conclusion that solutions proposed by existing personnel within an organization are less likely to receive support than from those recruited for that purpose.
• Irrational escalation – the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.

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Permalink Reply by Laura Jones on March 9, 2011 at 4:03am

Lots of great suggestions here. Kevin LaPlante is the Chair of the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Iowa State U and he has a great website/podcast for those looking to develop critical thinking skills.

http://www.criticalthinkeracademy.com/

The material is easy enough for the beginner, but still offers enough for the more advanced to hone their arguments.

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Permalink Reply by Tor Hershman on March 9, 2011 at 4:37am

Bertrand Russell for the right brain (check YouTube)

Alan Watts for the left brain (avoid the South Park YouTubes)

&

for the cerebral cortex...Popeye

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Permalink Reply by Heather Spoonheim on March 9, 2011 at 8:53pm

I would like to suggest that you write as well as read.  At times I am presented with a lot of information and it can be a bit more than I can fully absorb and process on the fly, so I start writing down the things I've heard and what I think about them.  This gives me the opportunity to research these things a bit (google/wiki) and further evaluate/develop my thoughts.  Anyway, just a suggestion.

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on March 9, 2011 at 8:55pm

i agree. often that gets left out with people talking only about reading. but these are heady concepts and it can help to order your thoughts and better absorb what you've read to write it down in your own words. good tip i think Heather.

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