 Probably this is one of the most important skill sets to have in your life. And that is critical thinking. If you miss my last video, I did a full length podcast with Dr. for the Carlo, Christopher D. Carlo, uh, highly recommend you go check it out. You know, honestly, when it comes to critical thinking and understanding its processes, he's one of the best in my mind, you know, one of the best intellectuals, I had the pleasure of meeting and having, uh, a chance to talk and discuss, you know, how can we progress as a, as a society? How can create better tools and systems so we can think better? You know, at the end of the day, listen, uh, O and E Wilson said at the best, we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God like technologies. And so basically we're still, we are still Cape people. We're still apes, uh, however surrounded by amazing technologies are piggybacking off of our ancient, ancient emotions. And so the biggest misconception people have is they believe two people are talking to each other when in reality they're just not listening to each other. Uh, and there's also good saying when two enemies are talking to each other, that means they're not fighting each other. And so Christopher, he created this PDF in 2015. So about five years ago now, well, almost five years ago now, and, uh, highly recommend get his books. I'm going to leave a link below this video. However, I want to go through his six step processes, created a heuristics of from A, B, C, D, E, F, I'm going to go through each of them and kind of give you the general scope of the, of the systems that he's created. Anyone can use this. What's great about this is the analogy or the abbreviation that you remember, A, B, C, D, E, F. And once you remember any time you are in an argument or you're in, uh, a conflict or you're communicating with somebody, you can bring this up. You can use it. Listen, man, this is the most important skill to have. All right. So let's begin number one, which is a, a for argument. Listen, at the end of the day, when people are arguing with somebody right away, we have a negative connotation. We think arguing is a negative versus a positive. In reality, it's not an argument is just your position. There is no good or bad with your position. It's your biases, which we'll get into number two. It's your biases that get you towards that position you're in. So the first question when it comes to an argument is when you bring up the letter A is what is that person's position? So Chris has a great, uh, metaphor or analogy or a visualization. He likes to use as a house. I'm not too sure if you can see this, but he uses a house as, uh, a general 3D map when you're talking to somebody. So A as an argument or assumption is the foundation. So have you ever been in a situation where talking to somebody or you're arguing with somebody or you're trying to communicate with somebody and you're like, what the fuck is that person talking about? Like really, like I have no idea what that person's talking about. I don't know that person's arguments. I don't know his policies. I don't know what he or she is even stating. They're just screaming and screaming. So the first thing when it comes to an argument, this applies to you. This applies to the person you're talking to is address what that person's arguments are like crystal clear what they are. What is your opinions and put it down? So that's A for argument B is for biases. Listen, at the end of the day, we all have biases. And I think this is not really taken into consideration when addressing any form of communication or an argument or a debate. Uh, number one, as Chris states, where you have biological biases, your genetics, neuropsychology, your emotions, your gender, your age, your health, this all plays a role on how you view the world. Number two, cultural biases, right? Your ethnicity, your family, your religion, friends, media, education, and all these biases. They act like computer filters. This is how machine learning works. It all filtration systems. If this then that same thing when it comes to biases. So it's one thing for a person to have an argument. It's second, and this is a superpower for you. It's second for you to identify how that person come towards that conclusion. Obviously, for the most part, most people come to conclusion not on their own accord. They've have years and years, which we'll call this Biasy pressure through, as I mentioned, biological and cultural biases. And it's up to you to take these biases as a lens and put these lens in front of you. And it's not going to be an easy task, but at least having these tools and understanding that people view different things based on these biases. Ethnicity, of course, is going to be biases. Social class, yes, there's going to be biases. Religion, yes, there's going to be biases. And so once you understand how a person can view somebody through their biases, you can better understand how that person came to their conclusion. So that's B for biases, A for argument, B for biases. C is for context. Once again, in today's day and age of social media and people having outreach culture and cancel culture and social justice warriors, people take everything out of context and context is important. You know, you can't just take a sentence out of a paragraph. You can't just take a paragraph out of a page. You just can't take a page out of a book and so forth and so forth. You have to understand the context of the argument. This is why it leads to strawman arguments and and pretty much fake arguments at the end of the day, because people are they're actually manufacturing arguments at the end of the day. They're nitpicking certain things or cherry picking, you should say, and taking everything out of context. So context is time, place and circumstances. And so remember, when you're dealing with anybody within an argument, within a we can call an argument. We can call it a formal, a formal process of understanding the person you're talking with communication. You know, at the end of the day, we need to we need better tools to communicate with our fellow human beings. And so understanding the context of like, OK, this person has an argument. This is position that person's biases. I can identify ABC. Now, what's the context? Is this person living in the Middle East? Is this person living in China? Is this person living in North America? Has this been has this person gone through certain things in their life? Like, context really fucking matters. So that's C for context, D for diagramming. So drawing the structure of the arguments. I mentioned earlier, Chris likes to have a house. So you have the foundation, which is the base, right? So we can go back over here. Actually, yeah, it's easy to go back here. So we can have the base, which is your assumptions. What is the assumptions of your position, the premise, right? What is the data that you have to support your assumption? What's the premise of the walls and the conclusion, which is the roof? Like, so basically how it works is in what's great about diagramming is you can visualize in 3D and actually create this house on a piece of paper and fill in the blank. So under assumptions is what is that person's assumptions? Fill it in. You know, what what is the thesis or hypothesis or viewpoint they stand on? Premises, what's the data points? OK, have they provided any data points? Now data without a conclusion, without an action plan is just garbage data. This is why data dumping doesn't work. Then the conclusion, based on their assumption, based on the data that provided you, what is that conclusion for their viewpoint? And I love this exercise. It's like so simple, you know, literally you just need a pen and paper and you can one, you can visualize and and have a better viewpoint of your stance that you have in your life and be it's a great way to kind of pause and reflect and talk with the person that you're trying to communicate with to like, hey, listen, I really don't understand exactly what you're trying to say. Let's kind of write this out within this 3D diagram. So that is the diagram. E for evidence. This one should be kind of like a no brainer, but at the end of the day, most people they will just throw out statistics or data or like it's mentioned in study or this person said that right verbatim. At the end of the day, we need evidence and depending on what we're talking about, you know, when it comes to politics, it's not really evidence. That's all subjective. But let's say we're talking about science. Let's say we're talking about, you know, data when it comes to performance or we're talking about, you know, KPIs and OKRs within a company. It's really important that on with your viewpoint or your stance that you have over the person trying to communicate to have data benchmarks because your data, which is your evidence, goes to your premise. Like you can't have a good foundation, a good argument, unless you have data to back that up, right? So you can just be spitballing anything you want out there. But if you don't have solid evidence and obviously peer reviewed evidence is probably the gold standard. But more evidence you have, the better. At the end of the day, it fills up your premise wall. So it helps you get a better conclusion, right? So E is for evidence. And finally, we got into F fallacies, right? Fallacies, fallacies, fallacies. And they're important because we all fall into them a lot. And there's a lot of fallacies. So anytime you catch yourself and I'm just going to lay out, well, Chris lays over here, anytime you catch yourself in an ad hominin attack, that's a fallacy ad hominin, meaning they attack you as a character. They're not attacking your argument, right? So you have your argument that represents, I don't know, let's say libertarian values versus, I don't know, conservative values or whatever. Like it doesn't really matter. They won't be attacking the argument itself as an as an entity. They attack you as a human being. That's number one. That's what you need to look out for ad hominins. Confirmation bias, right? I was all known as some cost bias, right? Confirmation bias is cherry picking. They only look at things that support their belief system. We're all we're all a fault of this. So it's really important that you go through a checklist and look at confirmation bias, false dichotomy, right? The proposal, the proposal that there are there are only two and only two possible outcomes. This, in my mind, is probably the most dangerous one because it's very simple. We as human beings, we like to think binary. It's just easier. It conserves energy, right? We're hunters and gatherers. And we have a sympathetic system versus a parasympathetic system. And it's fight or flight. And for us to conserve our bandwidth, both physical energy and mental energy, we make quick decisions. And so when we are in an argument or a conversation or we're trying to communicate with somebody, we're always looking at yes or no, black or white. When the answer is, we have the answer is A, B, C, D, E, F, G. You have a multitude of different ways of answering that argument. And so we fall into that as like, either this is wrong or this is right. With reality, it's not wrong or right. There is a fine mixture of in between. Language problems, it's kind of self-explanatory. This one, you know, strawman arguments. This one's really important. You deliberately misrepresent another person's argument and then attack the misrepresentation, right? So basically, a person say, hey, I stand for X. You take his stand for X and you twist the X and you say, hey, you know, this is what you're talking about. In reality, it just made everything up. But these fallacies, they all add up to each other. Listen, what Chris has laid out here at the A, B, C, D, E, F, it all goes to evolution psychology, evolutionary biology. You know, we've been here for millions of years on this planet and we have these emotions. We have these responses for survival at the end of the day. However, like I mentioned at the beginning, the O&E Wilson talks about the technologies are piggybacking off our ancient survival mechanisms and our emotions. And these are like really simple things you can use. Like literally carry a pen around, get a piece of paper. And this is a great way to start building up your own critical thinking. It's a great way to build up how you want to support your own theses, right, using the A, B, C, D, E, F. And it's a great way to approach any time you find yourself in a sticky situation or a situation where it's hard to communicate with the other person. In fact, show them this, show them this PDF. I love, honestly, the best takeaway for this is the house, diagramming the house and using a checklist. Like you put the house there with the assumptions, premise and conclusion. Then you have A, B, C, D. Then you have all the fallacies and the biases beside like a checklist and literally like any good machine learning program, you know, we're quantum computers, we're software up here. This is the hardware, this is the software. You go through the checklist like filter system and you see how it passes through that filter system. And so there you have it. These are really simple skills and tools that you can utilize for bettering yourself as a human when it comes to critical thinking, communicating and just utilizing them for better, man. Like this is super power, honestly. If you can do this better on a day-to-day basis, this is a fucking super power. So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have a question for me about this, leave a comment below this video and please go check out Dr. Christopher DeCarlo's books. I'll leave a link below this video and make sure to subscribe and leave a comment. Peace.