Where can you find the best resources on critical thinking and rationality? If you’re reading this, you probably care deeply about seeing the world accurately and understanding your own mind. Or, you might be curious about the ideas behind Clearer Thinking’s educational tools and want to explore them in more depth.
Our new recommended resources page is for you. We have created an extensive list of books, podcasts, interactive tools, and websites to introduce you to the ideas, concepts, and thinkers that have (a) informed the creation of Clearer Thinking’s programs and that (b) we think you will find most valuable on your journey to thinking clearly. We have included some highlights from this list of recommended resources below.
If you want to find the full list of resources that we recommend, check out the page on our site here.
Highlights from the interactive, online tools that we recommend: these are some educational tools that provide valuable, clear advice on how to better understand and operate in the world.
Open Mind: An Interactive Guide to Navigating Difficult Conversations - a free mini-course that teaches you how to navigate interactions around sensitive or controversial topics so you can avoid damaging arguments or uncomfortable silences.
The Evolution of Trust - created by Nicky Case, this fun, interactive program explains the mechanics of interpersonal trust as originally theorized in Robert Axelrod's seminal 1984 book The Evolution Of Cooperation.
A Wizard’s Guide to Statistics - created by Cassandra Xia, this interactive story-telling game teaches the basics of statistics, including independence, joint and conditional probabilities, expected value, p-values, and Bayes Rule!
80,000 Hours’ career planning course - a free, 8-week course for those who want to have a career that is both fulfilling and impactful. This in-depth program includes weekly tasks grounded in years of research into career-planning and is designed to help people develop a robust, meaningful career plan regardless of where they are in their working life.
Highlights from the podcasts that we recommend: these are some of the podcasts that the Clearer Thinking team frequently listen to (and that our founder, Spencer, has previously been a guest on).
The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin - 80,000 Hours is dedicated to helping people use their careers to improve the world. Their podcast features conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them.
Rationally Speaking - hosted by Julia Galef for New York City Skeptics, this podcast features engaging and questioning conversations with experts in science, politics, economics, and technology.
By the Book - hosts Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer choose a different self-help book to live by for each episode of this podcast, following every rule down to the letter, to find out which advice might actually be life changing.
The Happiness Lab - join Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos to learn about the latest scientific research on happiness that will alter the way you think about your wellbeing.
Highlights from the books that we recommend: these are some of the books that best capture more details behind the ideas that many of Clearer Thinking’s tools are based on.
The Scout Mindset - written by Julia Galef (host of the Rationally Speaking podcast), this book explores two different modes of thinking that shape how we experience reality: the “soldier” mindset and the “scout” mindset.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction - Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s famous book draws on decades of research and the results of a huge public forecasting tournament (the Good Judgement Project) to explain the secrets behind successfully predicting the future.
Decisive - in this book, Chip and Dan Heath explore the psychology behind decision-making biases and introduce a four-step process for counteracting these biases based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature.
The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty - written by ethicist Peter Singer, this book uses thought-experiments and case studies to argue that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but ethically indefensible. It concludes with a seven-point plan to help readers solve this problem.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - a popular, entertaining Harry Potter fanfiction with the premise that Harry is an (almost) entirely rational eleven year old about to embark on life in the wizarding world.
Note: To help fund the free decision-making tools and programs that we provide, ClearerThinking.org is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com). If you buy these books you'll be supporting ClearerThinking.org in its mission to make free tools that help the world make better decisions.
We hope that you find these resources interesting and insightful!
Make sure to bookmark our recommended resources page or return to the page on our website for updates. Let us know if you think of anything else that we should add to our list!