Meta-Thinking

The practice of thinking about how you are thinking. It's stepping back from the content of your thoughts to examine the patterns, assumptions, biases, and frameworks shaping them. Meta-thinking involves asking: "What mental model am I using? What goal is driving this line of thought? What am I not considering?" It is the cognitive equivalent of looking at the source code of your own mind to debug flawed logic and upgrade your processing algorithms.

Example: During an argument, instead of just defending your point, you pause and engage in Meta-Thinking: "Why am I so emotionally invested in winning this? Is my goal to find truth or to protect my ego? Am I using a binary win/lose framework when a more nuanced one is needed?" This shifts the conflict from a battle to a collaborative debugging session.

by Dumu The Void February 4, 2026

Critical Bias (Critical Thinking Bias)

The paradoxical and self-defeating mindset where the tools of critical thinking—skepticism, demand for evidence, logical analysis—are applied selectively, rigorously, and almost exclusively to opposing viewpoints or unfamiliar information, while one's own deeply-held beliefs are protected by a shield of unexamined assumptions and motivated reasoning. It is the bias of believing you are bias-free because you are "critical," mistaking aggressive debunking of others for genuine intellectual rigor. This creates a sophisticated echo chamber where the thinker feels intellectually superior because they can tear down every external argument, never turning that same destructive gaze inward.

Critical Bias (Critical Thinking Bias) Example: A climate change "skeptic" meticulously picks apart every minor uncertainty in a complex climate model, demanding impossible levels of proof. Yet, they uncritically accept a blog post from an oil-funded think tank as definitive truth. This is Critical Bias—wielding the scalpel of scrutiny only on the other side's evidence, while performing surgery with a butter knife on their own. They believe their skepticism makes them objective, when it's just a weaponized filter for confirmation.

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal February 4, 2026