Are You Actually a Critical Thinker, or Are You Just Lying to Yourself?

I think of myself as a pretty good critical thinker.

You probably do too.

Most people do.

There is a built-in problem with that assessment, and I will get to it in a minute.

I was watching a YouTube channel recently.

Not one of my martial arts channels, though if you are looking for those, Chewjitsu and the BJJ Project are two of my favorites. Chewie is a modern-day Renaissance man and Chris Burns has a snarky, no-BS street jutsu approach to BJJ that I appreciate.

But this time I was watching Stephen Petro, a guy who makes videos about thinking itself.

​He mentioned a test.​

The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, you can take a free practice test here.​

Two psychologists developed it at Columbia University in 1925.

It has been refined and revalidated for nearly a century.

Elite law firms use it.

Major corporations use it.

Government agencies use it.

It is the primary tool for identifying the sharpest analytical minds in a room full of people who all think they are the sharpest analytical mind in the room.

I took a free practice version of it.

And while I was not bad, I was also not as good as I thought I was.

That is not false humility.

That is data.

And data is the whole point.

The Inference Problem

Here is a scenario from the video.

The disciplined answer is that there is insufficient data to draw that conclusion.

All you have are two things that happened in the same three-month window.

A competitor may have launched an aggressive offer.

There may have been a service outage.

It may be a seasonal pattern that hits every Q3.

Entire strategies get reversed, prices get rolled back, careers get derailed because someone treated a probably-true inference as a hard fact and nobody in the room had the skills or the courage to say otherwise.

The Watson-Glaser test measures your ability to resist that collapse.

To rate a claim honestly on a gradient from certainly true to certainly false, rather than reaching for the most convenient conclusion and calling it settled.

Most people cannot do this.

Not because they are stupid.

Because they have never been trained.

And because their ego is invested in being right the first time.

How I Learned to Stop Proving and Start Sharing

When I first started writing this newsletter, I approached it like an analyst.

I wanted to use journalistic practices.

​The six W’s.​

Research, studies, facts to support every claim.

Some of my early articles had references at the bottom like a term paper.

Then I realized something.

I was not writing for peer-reviewed academics.

I was writing for young men in their 20s and 30s who just wanted to know how to be more successful in life.

They were not going to check my citations.

They were going to check whether what I was saying lined up with what they had already lived.

So I shifted.

I stopped trying to prove things and started sharing things.

I approached it the way I approach the mat and the jobsite.

I do not tell people what is right or wrong.

I tell them what my experience was, what worked for me, where I screwed up, and what I would do differently now.

The reader can take it or leave it.

That shift was not a rejection of critical thinking.

It was a recognition that different contexts require different kinds of rigor.

A story that lands is worth more than a statistic that is cited correctly but ignored.

But here is the trap.

Leaning on experience alone can make you lazy.

You can tell yourself that because you are sharing what worked for you, you do not need to check whether it actually works for anyone else.

You can build an entire career on anecdotes and never once ask whether the pattern holds outside your own life.

That is where the test comes in.

The Belt Test Analogy

I have been through a lot of belt tests.

I have watched a lot more.

And I have learned that tests are never as objective as they pretend to be.

When a panel assesses you for a belt promotion, they are doing at least two things.

First, they are comparing you to the worst person they have already promoted.

If you are at least as good as that guy, you pass. That is the floor.

Second, at a good school, they are comparing you to the potential they see in you.

If you did well but they know you could have done better, they might fail you anyway.

Not because you were below the standard. Because you were below yourself.

I have seen people passed because they cleared the floor even though nobody was impressed.

I have seen people failed because they cleared the floor but the assessors felt they should have done more.

That is the thing about tests.

They are set up to be objective.

There will always be some subjectivity baked into them.

The Watson-Glaser test has a century of refinement behind it and it still measures you against a population of previous test takers, not against some absolute standard of perfect reasoning.

It tells you where you rank.

It does not tell you what you are capable of.

When I took the practice version and got a score that was fine but not exceptional, I had two options.

I could tell myself the test was flawed and my score did not reflect my true ability. That is the ego move.

Or I could accept the data, figure out which skills were weak, and train them.

I chose the second one.

Not because I am unusually humble.

Because I have been on the mat long enough to know that the person who argues with the feedback is the person who stays exactly where they are.

The Two Attitudes

Stephen Petro ended his video with something that landed harder than any of the specific techniques he taught.

He said that critical thinking is not a set of tools.

It is not even a skill.

It is an attitude.

Two attitudes, actually.

The first is humility.

Not the fake kind where you pretend to be small so people will compliment you.

The real kind where you accept that your brain is adapted to see only as much truth as it needs for survival and no more.

You cannot perceive ultraviolet light like a bee.

You cannot smell the world like a dog.

You cannot feel the emotions or understand the meaning of every individual who has ever lived.

Your view of reality is a narrow slice of what is actually there, and the person sitting across from you is seeing a different narrow slice, and neither of you has the whole picture.

Once you internalize that, you need the second attitude.

Courage.

The courage to embrace uncertainty.

Dogmatic minds project strength because they possess a deep-seated weakness.

They need reality to be orderly and predictable.

They need to be right.

Admitting you might be wrong feels like death to them, so they never do it.

The critical thinker does the opposite.

He says I might be wrong about this.

He says the data does not support that conclusion yet.

He says this is my experience, not a universal law, and your experience may be different.

That takes courage.

Not the courage of charging into a fight.

The quieter courage of being willing to revise your own beliefs in public.

Putting It On the Mental Mat

There is a free practice version of the Watson-Glaser test online.​

I am not going to pretend it will be fun.

It will probably tell you something you do not want to hear.

You will discover that you are not as good at drawing inferences as you assumed, or that your ability to evaluate arguments has some holes in it, or that you have been confusing confidence with accuracy for most of your adult life.

Take it anyway.

Then remember what the score actually means.

It tells you how you compare to other people who have taken the test.

It does not tell you where your ceiling is.

It does not tell you what you are capable of building with the skills you have.

It does not tell you whether your priorities are the right ones for the life you actually want.

A belt test only tells you whether you are at least as good as the worst person they already promoted.

It does not measure your potential.

It does not measure your grit.

It does not measure whether you are the kind of person who shows up on the days when showing up is the only thing you have left.

Same with the Watson-Glaser.

Same with any test.

The number is data.

Use it.

Train the weak spots.

Get better.

But do not let the number tell you who you are.

Critical thinking is not about being right.

It is about being willing to find out you are wrong.

That willingness is a muscle.

You can build it the same way you build anything else.

Daily reps.

Consistent load.

The humility to accept the feedback and the courage to do something with it.

Start by finding out where you actually stand.

The practice test is free.

Your ego might cost you more.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Reset Drill

If today has gone badly:

Stop.
Take three breaths.
Start again.

📚 Leader’s Library

Book I recommend this week:

​The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle​

Why?

Because even a science fiction book can teach important lessons, such as appearances can be deceiving and that some battles there will never have a winner so they are not worth fighting in the first place.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck