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 have passed you by, and to learn what you have to look forward to from us in 2020!
Here are the 7 interactive programs that we launched in 2019:
The Overconfidence Analyzer - accompanied by a comprehensive write-up in the New York Times, this tool evaluates your confidence at a given skill and gives an estimate on how overconfident (or underconfident!) others are at that skill.
Life-Changing Questions - this quiz gets right to the meaningful matters in life with open-ended questions designed to reveal important personal insights, and received shout-outs in both Inc.com and the Guardian. You can buy a physical deck of these cards to create deep connections with a group of friends or family members.
Skeptical Seekers - this mini-test measures to what extent you are a “skeptic” of information and a “seeker” of new ideas, traits which are essential if you value discovering true things about the world.
The Credentialist Test - learn how highly you rate formal credentials when reviewing the opinions of other people, and identify when exactly these credentials are relevant, with this quick test.
Calibrate Your Judgment - commissioned by the Open Philanthropy Project, this app contains thousands of questions (hours of calibration training!) to help you make better predictions.
Building Happiness Habits - try out the two shortcuts we identified for quickly improving your everyday happiness, and learn about the science behind these positive effects.
Can You Detect Weak Arguments? - this challenging quiz determines whether you’re able to spot misleading rhetoric or if your existing opinions sway your interpretation of controversial arguments.
Additionally, students at any level are now able to engage with our content in the classroom, as we introduced a mechanism for teachers to assign our programs and check students’ progress through email confirmations.
If you don’t read our newsletter or blog regularly, you might have missed some of our most popular posts on critical thinking: these include a new framework for thinking about truth and reality, a summary of a popular conflict resolution technique, and an analysis of the way language influences our beliefs.
2019 also saw the conclusion of several ongoing studies we were running, including investigations into the relationship between gender and personality, what people intrinsically value (and what this says about their political alignment), the most effective approaches to habit formation, and the best techniques for getting good sleep. Keep an eye out for the resulting interactive programs in 2020!
We want to thank you, our users, for your continued support and feedback as we conduct new research and develop tools with the aim of improving people’s lives.