Reasoning transparency
First skill: Reasoning transparency
Throughout this course, you’ll make claims, defend positions, and give feedback to others. To do this well, you need to make your thinking visible.
Reasoning transparency means showing how you reached your conclusions, not just what they are. When you’re transparent about your reasoning, others can:
Understand your position more accurately
Spot assumptions you might have missed
Offer evidence that could change your mind
Build on your thinking rather than talking past you
This is a skill, not just a principle. It takes practice. Here’s how to do it:
State your conclusion first. Don’t bury it. Lead with what you think, then explain why.
Show your working. Walk through the steps that led you there. What evidence did you consider? What reasoning connects that evidence to your conclusion?
Indicate your confidence. Are you highly confident or quite uncertain? What would change your mind? If you can, quantify: “I’d put this at 70%” is more useful than “I think this is probably true.” Most people are poorly calibrated: when they say 70%, they’re right closer to 50% of the time. Later in the course, we’ll practice calibration. For now, just notice when you’re uncertain and try to express that uncertainty in your reasoning.
Acknowledge your assumptions. What would need to be true for your reasoning to hold? What are you taking for granted? What would need to change for you to change your mind?
Make it checkable. When citing sources, be specific. Page numbers, quotes, links. Let others verify your interpretation.
Be honest about limitations. “This is based on ten minutes of googling” is more useful than pretending you did deep research. Admitting uncertainty isn’t weakness — it’s what lets you update when you learn more.
The 100x claim and scope insensitivity
To practice this skill, we’d like you to read an article and rate its reasoning transparency.
The whole project of effective altruism rests on an empirical claim: that some ways of doing good are much better than others. If all approaches were roughly equally effective, there’d be little point in careful analysis — you could just pick whatever resonated with you.
Read: How much do solutions differ in effectiveness? (20-25 mins)
This article argues that effectiveness varies enormously across interventions — not by small percentages, but by orders of magnitude. One reason this surprises us is scope insensitivity: a well-documented cognitive tendency to respond similarly to problems regardless of their scale. In studies, people offered roughly the same amount to save 2,000 birds from an oil spill as to save 200,000. Our emotional responses don’t scale with numbers. This matters because the problems you’ll evaluate in this course differ enormously in scope, and your intuitive reactions may not reflect those differences. Recognising scope insensitivity is the first step to correcting for it.
Before you rate it, however, we have a quiz for you.