 So this is the final episode of Think 101. Now it's been an amazing experience. We have covered an enormous amount of material over the last 11 episodes, but because we presented it bit by bit, I suspect that people are going to be really surprised at how much they've learned. In each of the episodes we tackled a different topic, ranging from illusions, rationality, learning to learn up to the scientific method, testing claims, and exploiting the situation in order to predict and shape human behaviour. Now there were a few themes that emerged throughout Think 101, and I think we should try to integrate them here and make them explicit. That's right. The first theme that we talked about was the fact that the world is complex and ambiguous. Now this is really apparent when you just look around the world and see the massive processing problem that we have when trying to integrate all of this information, virtually every object and event that we encounter can be interpreted in different ways. For example, we provided a bunch of simple examples like the Necker Cube or the spinning dancer that's either rotating counter-clockwise or clockwise, the image of the duck or the rabbit, the young woman or old woman, or maybe the ambiguous letter or the digit depending on how you're looking at that information, or the smiling or the smirking face depending on whether you like that person or not. When we traveled to the Mind Body Spirit Festival, we were completely immersed in ambiguity. If you remember the vague and generic Barnum statements that psychics were making, or the people at the horoscope booth, or the dozens of particular symptoms that you should watch out for when visiting the chiropractor, or after visiting the Japanese healing booth, what sort of health, ambiguous health claims you can expect to receive. Ambiguity is operating absolutely everywhere, especially when it comes to other types of evidence, whether it be formal evidence like forensic evidence, or evidence for or against climate change, or evidence as to whether your best friend is honest or adventurous or not. Ambiguity is operating all over the place. It's also important when we're considering the general types of decisions that we make all over the place. It'd be really nice if we had all of the information out in front of us and the luxury of having all the time in the world to make a decision, but that's rarely the case, isn't it? I mean, most of the time we have to make decisions fast, and even once when we do make a decision, we have no idea whether it was the right one or not. Feedback is terrible. Yet, we still have to make these decisions. And how do we deal with this complexity and ambiguity? Well, we have to use simplified models of the world. We use shortcuts, heuristics. We talked about the availability heuristic, representativeness, anchoring, the be fair to both sides, and it must be somewhere in the middle heuristic. We saw these operating when people were making and dealing with claims of the extraordinary. But it's more than that. We see patterns and relationships that just aren't there. We see what we expect to see. We preferentially seek out evidence that confirms our beliefs. We see what we want to see, and we develop all these superstitions like bad things happen in threes, and I have to wear my lucky socks. These are all examples of fast thinking, system one. That's right. Now, the goal of the course is to figure out how everyday thinking can be improved. So in order to improve everyday thinking, we need to be more analytic. Use system two, unpack issues. These are all incredibly important when trying to figure out how to get better at thinking. Other bunch of issues that we covered are like the intuitive scientist. Well, the intuitive scientist is important. In order to improve everyday thinking, you need to consider the scientific method. If you're deciding whether or not to take a drug or whether to change your diet or not, we talked about a lot of ways at looking at the evidence for that. We talked about the double blind, randomized controlled trials. Now if you're deciding whether to take a drug or not, if it hasn't been subjected to that, then maybe you better think twice about whether to take that or not. We also talked about testimonials or anecdotes. If somebody says that a particular diet or a drug is fantastic, that's only one cell. That's pretty much useless. What about the other three cells? I think learning those general problem-solving skills are really important, and that'll get us part of the way there, but we also need to learn how to learn, and we showed people some really clever techniques that they can use to learn better and remember that information for longer. And we said that focusing on factors of the situation rather than personalities will get us much closer to predicting and shaping human behavior. We also talked about opinion change. That is changing the minds of others or yourself. Now, opinion change is really hard. It's cognitively effortful. It's intellectually difficult. If you give someone information that contradicts their current belief, they're unlikely just to accept it on the spot at face value. What you have to do is show them what they can change their mind to, show them how they can accept your new evidence while also retaining a large part of their previous belief. Now, this goes for supernatural beliefs, whether it's stopping a hurricane with the power of prayer batteries or belief in climate change or belief in the costs and benefits of vaccinating a child or not. In order to improve everyday thinking, we need to be more analytic, as we said. Use system two. Read more, right? As the Mythbusters said, it's incredibly important to get past the headlines, right? It's really tempting when you're reading a newspaper or a web page to just kind of sit back and keep score of who's right and who's wrong. But it's rarely that simple, right? You need to go into the article and try to see things from a different perspective. You can also be wary of information that you've gained while you're only partly paying attention. But when we're trying to tackle a particular claim, look at the costs and benefits of the successes, of the two ways that you can be right. Look at the costs and benefits of the failures, of the two ways that you can be wrong. More generally, think more clearly. Seek out, look for evidence. Just because that's the way we've always done it doesn't make it right. Learn what people tell you and what you believe.