About the Countdown

Intellectual honesty

Each of these elements points to a crucial aspect of critical reasoning that empowers respectful communication without unjustified assumptions or unintended insults. It enables sympathetic and clear reception of unfamiliar or opposing viewpoints, a crucial skill in mediation, education, and personal growth.

The Guiding Principle

Intellectual honesty

Intellectual honesty can be encapsulated by the a yearning for truth. It is thus stridently opposed to the view that

winning is everything.

If you have to win, then you are unlikely to grow or learn, two things that mandate a recognition of ones current state of inadequate ability, knowledge, evidence, or skill.

The Steps to Knowledge

Before we can know anything, we need to learn it. And to learn it, we need to know what were talking about in the first place.

Hence, the first step in learning is to define terms.

Once we know what were talking about, we can then test our beliefs about it. But to do this, we need to see why we believe what we do. Sometimes we have inherited beliefs, with no evidence. Sometimes weve drawn erroneous conclusions or failed to revise when we have new evidence. 

Thus, our second step in learning is to analyze arguments.

The Laws of Logic

All of possibility is shaped by logic, much like all of physical possibility is shaped by physics. We cant exist without gravity (our particles would blow apart). And gravity cant exit without logic.

The three laws we need for clarity and wisdom are The Law of Excluded Middle (LEM), the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC), and Leibnizs Law.

The Kinds of Conclusions

We love to claim we know. But there are different kinds of knowing, and sometimes we cant know at all.

In brief, we can reasonably infer 

• CERTAINTY (deduction): I can know without exception
• PROBABILITY (induction): I can know with unlikely exceptions
• IMPOSSIBILITY (suspension): I cannot know, not yet
• INCOHERENCE (contradiction): the question itself is nonsense

The Rules of Discourse

The path to truth is defined. There are a number of approaches towards winning the grand nothingness, but truth is found with discipline and intellectual honesty. These rules enable one to gain knowledge, wisdom, and respect.

• Break issues down and treat their elements one at a time.
• Imagine & debate against an ideal opponent.
• Replace emotionally-charged language with neutral language.
• Never conclude more than your evidence allows.
• Admit weakness.