Mindware
Critical Thinking for the Information Age

What were the self-experiments that surprised you the most?

I am doing the Mindware course on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware/ and I stumbled upon this fragment:

"Does coffee make you more efficient or does it just make you more jittery?
You're probably not going to find out without AB testing.

People's response to caffeine by the way is very different.
It's actually a soporific for some people,
makes people more relaxed [LAUGH] put's them to sleep, that's not common, but
there are wide varieties of ways of responding to caffeine."

​

This underscores the importance of choosing the right things to measure. I don't have time or motivation to track everything about myself and conducting thousands of experiments. Thus, it would be interesting and inspiring to learn what experiments could actually be quite surprising/useful to perform, as opposed to "eating fiber makes you feel more satiated", which is a proven medical fact and will work for most people.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware

Some suggestions :

https://www.edx.org/course/critical-thinking-fundamentals-of-good-reasoning-2

https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/logical-and-critical-thinking

So Trump's not allowed to have any credit whatsoever for unemployment going down, just because it's kinda sorta maintaining a trend rate?

That's fucking retarded. You're just rigging the definition. If it keeps going down then it's only "following the trend", if it stays the same then Trump's failing, and if it goes up then Trump's failing.

Here's a few articles you might want to read first before you make arguments like this:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/understanding-arguments

https://www.coursera.org/learn/critical-reasoning

https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware

Yeah, there's a shadowy cabal whose job it is to keep the public ignorant on absolutely everything. Great detective work!

Let's blame conspiracy theories for your own laziness. Too lazy to research the topic at hand? It must be "only for appearances". What would we do without your genius.

If you'd like to actually learn how the world works instead of resorting to illuminati fairytales, here are a few scientific reasoning courses you can take online. They'll teach you how to vet information, how weigh the veracity of ideas, and how to present informative arguments.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware?trk_location=query-summary-list-link

https://www.classcentral.com/course/edx-the-science-of-everyday-thinking-1332

https://www.mooc-list.com/course/question-everything-scientific-thinking-real-life-edx

After seeing this article I went and looked to see if there are critical thinking courses online and I found a few:

Think Again

Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age

Critical Thinking Skills For University Success

Introduction to Critical Thinking (this one is paid but does seem to focus more directly on fake news).

I haven't actually tried any of them yet but I would love to know if anyone has.

I think every point you made was significantly misinformed. You might do better to study critical thinking a few months instead of politics.

For example:

It takes very little to see

>Puts unemployment down to 3.8%

does not describe reality even remotely accurately.

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some critical thinking courses:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/understanding-arguments

https://www.coursera.org/learn/critical-reasoning#

https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware