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The best way I have found is to ask if they want to bet on it. It usually gets them to back off of certainty to a place where they start examining possible gaps in their knowledge. "Wanna bet?" gets people to start interrogating their belief, asking themselves something like:

1) What does the person challenging me to the bet know that I don't know?

2) How sure am I of this belief?

3) What am I missing?

I've found this works really well!

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Don’t some (many?) people bet impulsively, though?

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Of course! Offering to bet will not work perfectly but it does get people at least thinking about what they do and do not know, more so than if they didn't think of it as a bet.

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Thank you! That probably was in Thinking in Bets; I may need to re-read it, I read it a couple of years ago and there are probably other oddments I have forgotten since as well as that one.

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