The doubting

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The doubting and believing games have symmetrical weaknesses:

the doubting game is poor at helping us find hidden virtues; the believing

game is poor at helping us find hidden flaws. But many people don’t

realize that the doubting game is also poor at reaching one of its main

goals: helping us find hidden flaws in our own thinking.

The flaws in our own thinking usually come from our assumptions—our

ways of thinking that we accept without noticing. But it’s hard to doubt

what we can’t see because we unconsciously take it for granted. The

believing game comes to the rescue here. Our best hope for finding

invisible flaws in what we can’t see in our own thinking is to enter into

different ideas or points of view—ideas that carry different assumptions.

Only after we’ve managed to inhabit a different way of thinking will our

currently invisible assumptions become visible to us.

This blind spot in the doubting game shows up frequently in

classrooms and other meetings. When smart people are trained only in

critical thinking, they get better and better at doubting and criticizing

other people’s ideas. They use this skill particularly well when they feel a

threat to their own ideas or their unexamined assumptions. Yet they feel

justified in fending-off what they disagree with because they feel that this

doubting activity is “critical thinking.” They take refuge in the feeling that

they would be “unintellectual” if they said to an opponent what in fact

they ought to say: “Wow, your idea sounds really wrong to me. It must

be alien to how I think. Let me try to enter into it and see if there’s

something important that I’m missing. Let me see if I can get a better

perspective on my own thinking.” In short, if we want to be good at

finding flaws in our own thinking (a goal that doubters constantly

trumpet), we need the believing game.

The Believing Game is Not Actually New

If we look closely at the behavior of genuinely smart and productive

people, we will see that many of them have exactly this skill of entering

into views that conflict with their own. John Stuart Mill is a philosopher

associated with the doubting game, but he also advises good thinkers to

engage in the central act of the believing game:

[People who] have never thrown themselves into the mental

position of those who think differently from them . . . do not, in any