A curated collection of articles, books, research papers, and other resources for thinking more clearly about evidence, science, and public debate.
Recommended Books
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef
An accessible guide to recognizing motivated reasoning and learning to see evidence as it is, rather than as we want it to be.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
A landmark exploration of intuitive and deliberate thinking, and the cognitive biases that can distort judgment.
How Minds Change by David McRaney
An engaging examination of how beliefs form, why facts alone rarely change minds, and how productive conversations can make reconsideration possible.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
A classic defense of scientific skepticism and a practical introduction to distinguishing credible evidence from pseudoscience.
Essential Papers
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by John P. A. Ioannidis
A landmark examination of how small studies, bias, selective reporting, and weak methods can produce unreliable findings.
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
The classic paper explaining how mental shortcuts can systematically distort our judgments.
Strong Inference by John R. Platt
A practical argument for testing competing explanations instead of searching only for evidence that supports one favored idea.
Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science by the Open Science Collaboration
A major attempt to repeat published experiments and measure how often their findings held up.
Publications and Resources
PubMed
Search more than 40 million citations from biomedical and life-science literature.
Cochrane Library
Independent systematic reviews that evaluate the total available evidence on healthcare questions.
Retraction Watch Database
Search for studies that have been retracted, corrected, or flagged by their publishers.
Our World in Data
Free research, charts, and source-linked data covering health, population, economics, education, and other major issues.
Selected Critical-Thinking Articles
