What are the "10 commandments" of critical thinking?

A practical checklist of debiasing habits — slow down, conserve mental energy, wait when unsure, know your limits, ignore sunk costs, judge strategies not outcomes, expect regression to the mean, seek refutation, mind your frame, and accept that every option might be wrong.

These ten rules turn critical thinking into concrete habits, most of them aimed at a specific bias:

1. Take things slowly — engage deliberate ("System 2") thinking rather than snap intuition.
2. Conserve mental energy — decision-making is finite; don't squander it on trivia so it's there for what matters.
3. When in doubt, wait — don't force a decision under uncertainty if you can defer it.
4. Know your limits — recognise where your competence ends (counters overconfidence).
5. Beware sunk costs — past, unrecoverable investment is no reason to continue; decide on future costs and benefits only.
6. Judge strategies, not outcomes — a good decision can have a bad outcome (and vice versa) due to luck; evaluate the process (counters hindsight bias).
7. Most things regress to the mean — extreme results tend to be followed by more average ones, so don't over-read a single high or low.
8. Seek refutation, not confirmation — actively try to disprove your belief (counters confirmation bias).
9. Mind your frame of reference — how a question is framed shapes the answer; watch for anchoring and framing effects.
10. Any option you face may be wrong — stay open to the possibility that none of the choices on the table is right.

Tip: Several map straight onto biases: #6 ↔ hindsight bias, #8 ↔ confirmation bias, #9 ↔ anchoring/framing, #4 ↔ overconfidence. The list is essentially "biases, turned into rules."