Think · Lesson 1 of 2

Separate facts from assumptions

Before you accept a conclusion, name what it is assuming.

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Every argument — yours, a friend's, or an AI's — rests on a few things taken as given. Most bad decisions are not caused by bad logic, but by an assumption nobody noticed.

A simple habit: when you read a conclusion, list what would have to be true for it to hold. Mark each one as known (you can check it), believed (probably true), or assumed (nobody knows).

AI answers are fluent, which makes their assumptions easy to miss. The more polished the paragraph, the more carefully you should ask: "What is this taking for granted?"

See it happen

A colleague says: "We should stop the Thursday session — attendance has dropped, people clearly are not interested."

The read that arrives on its own

Attendance is down, so interest is down, so stopping it sounds reasonable.

The same situation, with this idea

You separate the two halves. The fact is that attendance fell from twelve to four. The assumption is that the cause is interest. Other candidates: the time moved, two regulars left, the room changed. You ask three of the missing people before deciding anything.

What changed

One sentence carried an observation and an explanation fused together, and the explanation travelled on the credibility of the observation. Pulling them apart turned an obvious conclusion back into a question with a cheap way to answer it.

The takeaway

Before you accept a conclusion, name what it is assuming.

Easy to take the wrong way

Turning this into a habit of challenging other people. The version that pays is running it on the conclusions you already agree with — those are the ones nobody else is checking on your behalf.

Try this

Take the last piece of advice you received and write three assumptions hidden inside it.