One technique is to look carefully for fallacies and/or gaps in the reasoning by summarizing the key theses of the argument and then considering what assumptions (and definitions) have to be made for the theses to be accepted and what has to be true for each to follow deductively from what has already been given. A book on “critical thinking” (e.g., this one) will have lots of exercises to develop this kind of skill. They typically have lots of examples drawn from politics just because political discussion is so frequently chock full of fallacies and bad arguments.
When you’re trying to be critical of your own arguments and to identify cognitive biases at work, there are many simple and practical techniques mentioned in The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. To give just one example, poor calibration can be improved and overconfidence can be attenuated by considering the reasons why what you believe isn’t so might actually be so. The mere act of trying to find reasons for the hypotheses you don’t believe will make you less overconfident in the hypothesis you do believe. In general, iterating through the biases discussed in that book (and many others), and considering how each bias might apply in the particular circumstance, is a widely applicable and very useful technique.
One technique is to look carefully for fallacies and/or gaps in the reasoning by summarizing the key theses of the argument and then considering what assumptions (and definitions) have to be made for the theses to be accepted and what has to be true for each to follow deductively from what has already been given. A book on “critical thinking” (e.g., this one) will have lots of exercises to develop this kind of skill. They typically have lots of examples drawn from politics just because political discussion is so frequently chock full of fallacies and bad arguments.
When you’re trying to be critical of your own arguments and to identify cognitive biases at work, there are many simple and practical techniques mentioned in The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. To give just one example, poor calibration can be improved and overconfidence can be attenuated by considering the reasons why what you believe isn’t so might actually be so. The mere act of trying to find reasons for the hypotheses you don’t believe will make you less overconfident in the hypothesis you do believe. In general, iterating through the biases discussed in that book (and many others), and considering how each bias might apply in the particular circumstance, is a widely applicable and very useful technique.