How to get answers to questions that confuse you (maybe)

I try to think about topics like desire, causation, and evidence and often find myself in puddles of confusion. I’ve recently wondered how, when someone can see various perspectives on a topic and can’t decide which has most merit, they can resolve these internal debates. I also wondered if this ever played out on a longer timescale with many people; whether people used to find things confusing that are now pretty clear, and whether we can learn anything from the process of coming to clarity. I’m still not really sure on this second point, though, I didn’t look that hard. My guess is that, even when ideas are vague or contradictory, most people don’t think of them that way, instead feeling confident that their ideas are whole and true. I’m biased to think that human overconfidence transcends culture and time. In this piece, I try to summarize what I’ve learned as I’ve looked into the question. Because my goal was really to find ideas that might help me gain clarity and think through complex ideas faster, I frame these insights as self-help-esque advice. I will warn, though, that although these ideas are interesting and perhaps important, the advice I turned them into is probably on average not helpful at all. I say this because when large studies make people try out interventions that seem obviously helpful, they often have no effect, and the effects that are there are surprisingly small. Take this study comparing gym attendance across 10’s of interventions. Besides controls…