Happy New Year! The past year has been our busiest yet at ClearerThinking, with lots of new, valuable programs for you to use. In case you missed any of it, we’ve compiled a quick summary of the free tests and tools we released this year. They are designed to help you better understand yourself, become happier, improve your critical thinking, and better detect misleading information. Keep reading to try out the newest programs that might hav...

Chances are that you have a few positive habits you’d like to form. Maybe you’d like to start  exercising daily. Or, perhaps you want to spend a little time each day learning something new and useful. While our lives can improve if we form positive habits like these, it can be hard to make them stick.

There are plenty of techniques out there that may improve your chances for having a habit stick. But it’s not clear which of these work, if any...

News organizations, companies, and politicians are constantly making arguments about what they think you should or shouldn't believe. But can you tell which of these arguments are strong, and which arguments are worth ignoring? To find out, try our new "Can You Detect Weak Arguments?" quiz that we've just launched. It checks your ability to cut through misleading rhetoric and combat your own biases.

Do you properly vet arguments you’re presen...

Are you deciding on a new career path, or reflecting on your current career and where it's headed? Sometimes we make career decisions based on guesses or gut feeling, and we’re actually lacking important information about whether a specific career path or job opportunity is right for us. With that in mind, we’ve combed through 80,000 Hours' new career guide to pull out some of the information that’s most valuable when making decisions about...

Are there simple, quick, and easy-to-learn habits that you can incorporate into your life to make yourself meaningfully happier? The ClearerThinking.org team recently explored this question by means of a longitudinal study. Our research led to the creation of Building Happiness Habits, a tool for improving daily mood with minimal effort. (If you've come here from the tool itself, welcome!)

In this post, we’ll go over the details of our study,...

Every day each of us makes judgments about the future in the face of uncertainty. These judgments can have a huge impact on our lives, so it’s really important that we make them as accurately as possible. But what can you do if you have limited information about the future? Well, the Open Philanthropy Project commissioned us to create a new web app that helps you practice making predictions, with the goal of honing your ability to make accur...

Truth and existence are surprisingly complex concepts. The closer you examine them, the more complex they reveal themselves to be. What do we really mean when we make a claim like “this painting is not art” or “everything is subjective”? What exactly do we mean when we say “the color red” exists or that numbers exist? Philosophical questions like these are notoriously difficult to pin down precisely. We want to make it easier.

With that in m...

Some people say you should "trust in your gut", while other people argue that analytic thinking is better. Who is right? To answer this question, ClearerThinking founder Spencer Greenberg recently gave a TEDx talk on the role of intuition in decision-making. If you want to find out when you should rely on instinct instead of reflection, check out the instructive video here!

The talk presents a new decision-making framework that can easil...

How much do you value credentials when judging the opinions of others? Do you give them too much deference – or too little? Measure the value you place on diplomas and degrees with this quick new quiz!

Whether a person has formal expert status in a field can be an important factor in how much we trust them, and what kinds of opinions we think it is appropriate for them to express. It's important to know how much evidence formal credentials pr...

To what extent are you a “skeptic” of information, and a “seeker” of new ideas? You can take our newly-launched mini-test to find out! Skeptical Seekers measures two personality traits which we think are really important for discovering true things about the world: “skepticism” and “seekingness”. Click here to take the test!

Having accurate beliefs requires a combination of skepticism in the face of new information, and seeking new perspectiv...

Enhancing your critical thinking can have a lot of benefits, including developing a clearer picture of reality, becoming a more informed citizen, and making better life decisions. We often hear about "critical thinking", but what is it, really, and how do you know if you’re practising it? This post will cover some of the key components of critical thinking for anyone who wants to improve their reasoning. 

We're also excited to announce that t...

Could the act of answering open-ended questions about yourself give you new, important insights? It turns out the answer is "yes", if those questions are selected in just the right way! See for yourself by trying Life-Changing Questions, our newly-launched free tool.

After running a series of five scientific studies, we've discovered a specific set of practical, yet rarely-asked questions that 83% of people reported were valuable for them to...

Do progressives and conservatives really have different intrinsic values? If so, in what ways? By surveying hundreds of people, we identified substantial differences between what each end of the political spectrum considers important in life – and detected some interesting patterns in what types of values each group tends to hold.

The ClearerThinking.org team is in the final stages of producing a test designed to help you identify your most i...

We just launched the Overconfidence Analyzer, a brand-new tool for evaluating your relative confidence at any skill! It was recently featured in the New York Times, and more than 6,000 users have already learned about overconfidence with its help. Click here to try it out!

Is your faith in your ability to write, play soccer, start a company, or manage money justified relative to others? Or are you comparatively overconfident in your capabilit...

Today we’re sharing with you what we think is one of the most fun ways to learn quickly about important topics like nuclear power, organic farming and drug legalization. Kurzgesagt, German for “In a Nutshell”, is a Munich-based YouTube channel that presents animated, educational content in an easy-to-digest and entertaining format. Their videos cover scientific concepts, philosophical theories, and topics of political debate. If you’re looki...