critical-thinkinglisted

Activate when: user says 'challenge my thinking', 'play devil's advocate', 'what's the strongest counter-argument', 'ACH', 'analysis of competing hypotheses'; user needs to evaluate a high-stakes claim or decision with multiple possible interpretations; user suspects motivated reasoning or a team is converging too fast on one answer. Do NOT activate when: the claim is trivial or already well-validated; the decision is about values rather than facts (use regret-minimization or first-principles instead). More: deciqai.com/s/critical-thinking
deciqAI/knowledge-skills · ★ 3 · AI & Automation · score 76

Install: claude install-skill deciqAI/knowledge-skills

# Critical Thinking ## Overview **Critical thinking** evaluates a conclusion by **explicitly testing it against alternative interpretations** — the conclusion that survives the most disconfirmation attempts is the one to act on, not the one with the most confirming examples. Operationalized by **Richards J. Heuer Jr.** (CIA, 1999) as **Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH)**: a matrix marking each evidence-hypothesis pair as Consistent / Inconsistent / N/A. The hypothesis with the **fewest Inconsistencies** wins. **Compose:** [first-principles](../first-principles/SKILL.md) (surface assumptions) · [probabilistic-thinking](../probabilistic-thinking/SKILL.md) (calibrate evidence) · [inversion](../inversion/SKILL.md) (generate alternatives). Critical thinking = *evaluation*; first-principles = *construction*; occams = *selection*; second-order = *projection*. ## When to Use - High-stakes claim (yours or someone else's) that needs evaluation - Multiple interpretations of the same evidence are possible - Motivated reasoning detected — conclusion shaped by what you want to be true - Team converging on a hypothesis too fast without seriously considering alternatives - Evaluating an AI capability or AI-hype claim (e.g. "this benchmark proves the model reasons") where the same evidence fits several explanations (contamination, cherry-picking, teaching-to-the-eval) **When NOT to use:** trivial/already-validated claim; only one hypothesis imaginable (use [first-principles](../fir