Thinking with as little bias as possible.

One of the skills which, as I've grown, I've seen as increasingly more important but also increasingly noticing how neglected it is in education is how to attempt to remove bias from your thoughts as decisions.

Almost every decision we make will be tinged with some amount of bias. We can't escape, it is literally part of how our brains evolved. It is a big part of the reason we have systemic racism, holocausts, rampant fear of immigrants and little to no fear of domestic terrorism, but largely unfounded fears of terrorists from foreign nations.

I don't think it was as critical in the past to have this skill. Before the internet, information spread much more slowly, was much more heavily regulated and it was harder to find like-minded individuals on any arbitrary subject.

These days, you can easily find a group who sympathizes with you and shares your ideas. It almost doesn't matter what they are. And we are creatures deeply flawed by confirmation bias; the tendency to more readily accept information which aligns with our beliefs or desires than we are to accept information which rubs us the wrong way.

Thus, the first step in fighting confirmation bias is to acknowledge your biases. And while this is just the first step, it can actually yield results right away. Often, simply by pointing out to myself that I'm reading an article I agreed with before I read causes me to be more critical. And reminding myself I'm biased against something I'm reading often leads me to try and look at it from a different angle.

These tactics aren't going to change my mind on their own. But, they will leave me more open to changing in my mind and less likely to accelerate down a rabbit hole.

The next step is to find information which both agrees and disagrees with those biases. And, the prefer to read more information on the dissenting side. If you know you're pre-disposed to agreeing with one side of an argument then simply giving each side of the debate the same amount of time still disadvantages the side you disagree with.

Again, I won't say it changes my mind often. But, this approach has on some occasions changed my mind. But, more often that, it has drawn attention to the fact that I need to modify my stance or retract certain points. And this has at least lead to tempering my stance and helping my better understand the other sides of things.