Bubble
Peek outside your bubble by exposing yourself to ideas you’re going to disagree with.
if you want to do Your Own Thinking, look at ideas from as many perspectives as you can, but be aware that you live in a world where there are many people trying to tell you what to think.
We all have a built-in cognitive bias toward ideas that we already agree with, so we tend to create a bubble around ourselves that keeps out dissenting ideas. Add to that an increasingly biased media landscape, and our bubble is only reinforced. But that bubble distorts reality, and we need an accurate understanding of reality to create lasting change.
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Bias exists in all of us. There is no such thing as an unbiased news source on either side of the political spectrum.
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Bubbles take many forms. Where you live can reinforce your bubble if there isn’t much diversity of ideas in your area. The media channels you read, watch or listen to, if they all have a similar bias, can create the illusion of cross-referenced information (verifying information across multiple sources) when they may all be using the same sources. Even your search results are likely filtered to show you what you want to see rather than dissenting views.
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Actively seek new ideas from sources with different biases than your own: sign up to get emails or tweets or facebook posts from people at all extremes of the conversation, and read books and magazines you may not agree with.
Therefore:
Peek outside your bubble, by making sure you’re exposed to ideas that you’re probably going to disagree with or even hate.
As you encounter contradicting ideas, use Logic as well as Intuition to help you decide what argument is more compelling; keep your thinking flexible—Uncertain Knowing—so you are able to adjust to paradigm-shifting ideas you might encounter; and remember that many dichotomies are false, so look for the Higher Order Idea that integrates them