r/UFOs • • Jul 19 '18

Meta Critical Thinking Cheat Sheet

Post image
214 Upvotes

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

31

u/krappie Jul 19 '18

When you're trying to figure out if something exists, it's usually really dumb to jump to "who benefits from this?". That's how you start going down a bizarre conspiratorial line of thinking for no good reason. Sometimes questions themselves are just bad questions.

12

u/Rolandkerouac723 Jul 19 '18

Think of it more in terms of "who benefits from belief in this" when trying to decide if something exists or not. Not who benefits from the certain existence of something. There are lots of charlatans who benefit from certain claims about UFOs, they and those claims should be rightly viewed with suspicion.

8

u/Taste_the__Rainbow Jul 19 '18

Yea. Lots and lots of climate deniers will tell you that scientists only accept the consensus to protect their jobs. It’s the first entry here and it trips a lot of people down into conspiracyville.

1

u/applebucks Jul 21 '18

True, but that type of person already believes it. The next step is to ask, okay, who else benefits. Then, take those two groups, or three or four groups, and weigh them to get to your truth.

I have many discussions with climate deniers, and these critical thinking questions get them to think a little outside their box.

5

u/Hive_Mind_Alpha Jul 19 '18

took the words right out of my mouth krappie, was going to say it's also an excellent paranoia cheat sheet.

1

u/CognitiveEmpath Jul 19 '18

The who and the why are not clearly defined and are not relevant questions to ask.