Critical Thinking · Week 9
Building a Comparison That Holds
A chatbot will give you a confident-sounding number in one message. Real rigor is slower: find reliable data, check whether the two things you're comparing are actually the same kind of thing, normalize them into matching units, state what still doesn't match — then make the claim. This lesson does that in front of you, on a real, published, deliberately uncomfortable comparison, mistakes and all.
The Recipe
Find data. Check compatibility. Normalize. State what's left over.
That's the whole method, and it's the same four steps whether the comparison is combat mortality and drug use, two ad campaigns, or two quarters of a project's burn rate. A chatbot asked the same question will hand you a number in one breath, because it doesn't know it hasn't checked the reference classes match. It isn't lying — it's doing exactly what a stateless regression does with an incomplete prompt: producing something fluent and confident that nobody has verified yet. The verification is the part that's actually yours to do.