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