Critical Thinking: A Necessary Skill in the Age of Spin | Hacker News Reader

Critical Thinking: A Necessary Skill in the Age of Spin

edutopia.org

61 pointstokenadult34 comments

To engage in some critical thinking about the article submitted here (which was recommended to me by a private message from a Facebook friend), I should point out that it is by no means clear that critical thinking is a coherent skill that is readily taught.[1] Perhaps the best way to learn critical thinking as a habit is to learn several traditional knowledge domains deeply through grappling with problems as well as through mere exercises.[2] There are some good textbooks on critical thinking for beginning university students, with miscellaneous lessons about various techniques of skeptical thinking.[3]

[1] "Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?" by Daniel T. Willingham

http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thin...

[2] "Word Problems in Russia and America" by Andrei Toom (which I think I first learned about from another Hacker News participant)

http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd...

[3] For example, How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn

http://www.amazon.com/How-Think-About-Weird-Things/dp/007803...

> it is by no means clear that critical thinking is a coherent skill that is readily taught.

I agree with this...in so much as its not teachable in a traditional classroom setting. I think public pressure on universities is why there are so many programs that require a crappy 1 Saturday = 1 Credit Hour critical thinking course -- most of which amount to "think carefully about things".

I think teaching/learning critical thinking requires constant slow exposure to it and a commitment from the "teacher" to ferret out bad thinking over long periods of time. It requires exposure to hundreds, if not thousands, of real world scenarios so that the application of this kind of rational thought can be learned.

The hardest part is not falling back into the kind of irrational thinking that came before learning critical thought...it's a discipline and it needs to be cultivated and practiced over long periods of time.

I would much rather the focus be on QUESTIONS than "thinking", which is an imprecise term. Isn't formulating and answering questions what "critical thinking" is all about?

"Once you have learned to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know." - Neil Postman

> I should point out that it is by no means clear that critical thinking is a coherent skill that is readily taught.[1]

Possibly not, but the Form 3 and 4 Social Studies modules I did on analysis of the language of politics and advertising were very useful. I was shocked to discover as an adult that while Social Studies was a mandatory high school class in New Zealand, those modules weren't.

Could you provide some textbook reference? I'd really appreciate it.

Probably not, since this was 1986. I'll have a look.

>I should point out that it is by no means clear that critical thinking is a coherent skill that is readily taught.[1]

Critical thinking is domain dependent. Just because someone is good at breaking down CS problems doesn't mean they will be able to generalize those analytical skills to their relationships, politics, nutrition, etc... It's not enough to teach people to think critically. They need to think critically in a way that is domain independent or in the domains that are important for them as individuals and society at large.

I teach high school math and science, and I often give students assignments that ask them to develop their own questions. I make a point of telling them we won't be answering all of these questions; some of the best questions would take a lifetime to answer. This helps break students out of the mindset that every question asked in school needs to be answered, and the answer needs to be evaluated as right or wrong.

Many students don't know how to craft a good question, but given the space and time to do so many of them can develop the skill. Classroom conversations change significantly when the guiding questions we're focusing on have been thoughtfully crafted by students.

Don't they feel sometimes defrauded because their long time worked question is left aside unanswered? Don't they feel that other student are being given full attention meanwhile they are not considered properly?, don't you think that asking and not answering my sound like not a fair game to play?

Education has many problems, and the majority of questions about it are unanswered or the real answer is today unknown.

Unanswered != not paid attention to. Some good questions may be equivalent to known unanswered (P = NP) or unanswerable (halting problem) questions.

Have you seen this?

http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park

(It's one of my favorite serious comic-works and is basically a telling of your exact point.)

Yes! Formulation of scientific questions is an essential skill which I think that every person should have. A scientific question is a request for evidence from the world in the context of what we already think is correct.

When I was in my teens I read "Straight and crooked thinking", it seems to be online here: https://www.divinetruth.com/www/en/pdf/People/Other/Robert%2...

I see learning how to program as being contingent for learning critical thinking, and may be why the demographic on HN are so well-off in this regard. When I think about why certain people around me are so well off in how they think, I believe it's because they view thinking as a /set of operations to perform/ rather than /a bunch of rules to follow/. The operations are usually discovered during their work and applied as heuristics. Programming against hard problems makes you discover your limits at how well you can think.

One particular operation I have is that "I always know something" and that even I don't see the big picture, starting from that one thing I know and continuing to reason with it just to see where it will go is sometimes fruitful, and sometimes not. If not, then I try again. It's an insight I had that was quite personal, and I find it unlikely that telling someone about this will automatically make them understand it.

When such heuristics are communicated to me, I apply them wherever I can, fishing for the insight that makes me get it.

I've found that the biggest problem preventing people from developing critical thinking skills is cognitive dissonance.

Even when they're smart people, who can read and write, and can comprehend pretty complex models, they all seem to have some kind of cognitive dissonance that prevents them from seeing literally what's in front of them.

Critical thinking, the existence of a rational faculty, is what separates humanity from animals.

Critical thinking is necessary in order for our race to reach and discover what it means to be human, and this has been true as long as there have been humans.

edit: Schopenhauer has a great essay "On Thinking for Yourself" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8915729

edit2: A quote from the above:

12-- When you consider how great and how immediate is the problem of existence, this ambiguous, tormented, fleeting, dream-like existence – so great and so immediate that as soon as you are aware of it it overshadows and obscures all other problems and aims; and when you then see how men, with a few rare exceptions, have no clear awareness of this problem, indeed seem not to be conscious of it at all, but concern themselves with anything rather than with this problem and live on taking thought only for the day and for the hardly longer span of their own individual future, either expressly refusing to consider this problem or contenting themselves with some system of popular metaphysics; when, I say, you consider this, you may come to the opinion that man can be called a thinking being only in a very broad sense of that term and no longer feel very much surprise at any thoughtlessness or silliness whatever, but will realize, rather, that while the intellectual horizon of the normal man is wider than that of the animal – whose whole existence is, as it were, one continual present, with no consciousness of past or future – it is not so immeasurably wider as is generally supposed.

I think critical thinking is not necessary, depending of your personal circumstances you can be better off with a great net of friends that can help you to find a good job. For example, my wife found a good job because she, besides being wonderful at work, has a really splendid net of friends who can speak wonders of her. I don't think that being critical or having critical thinking skills is going to help you in your career, sometimes is better to be quiet and let the powers be. I remember a story of a very good broker with wonderful ability that didn't follow the herb, he make very good predictions but he lost his clients, financial markets are not for critical thinking, is like a beauty contest (in due context by Samuelson).

I must confess that I didn't read the original post, and I am being down voted. Perhaps there is something interesting beyond the title, but I would be grateful people down-voting me could give a hint about what they are thinking about, what their argument is. I know that is easier to move your finger than to make a real or sound argument, also I am awared that you must not ask why the down voting (a question of etiquette it seems). But anyway, some feedback is always welcome.

Critical thinking is about using your brain in the same way that a woodworking course teaches you about how to use a chisel and a metalworking course will teach you how to use a file. Not knowing how to properly use the tools you have been given is a waste of time, effort and energy and not just your own and it leads to sloppy products.

The point is not that critical thinking is a useful tool, I agree here. The title is about being a necessary skill. Here I disagree, many people can learn the craft by accumulating a lot of experience. Is like machine learning, you only need to have a lot of data (experience). Human are good at learning by example. Creative people are necessary for our culture to progress, but is not something necessary. You can live your life doing a good job and contributing to the welfare of society without critical thinking. Many times the good ideas come from nowhere inside us. Many great mathematicians create ideas from insight not by reflexive critical thinking.

So would I be correct in characterizing your point as "critical thinking is one of several ways one can be successful"

I think you're being downvoted because people don't want to accept that what you are saying regarding critical thinking being anti-adaptive may be true. The followers of the hacker ethos are revolted by prospects that the less-skilled. less-disruptive, and less-smart can succeed by social optimization and conformity. It's a direct threat to the existence they've doubled down on.

It may simply have to do with him saying that he feels his wife found her job because of her friends, not because of her skills. She might disagree.

Naughty boy, indeed. In my post I say literally that she is wonderful at work and people that know her recognize so. A big net of friends and acquaintances provides plenty of opportunities of finding a good job. Her job don't require critical thinking skills.

> Her job don't require critical thinking skills.

So you say. Look I don't mean to say you don't know better but it's hard for me to come up with any profession that does not require critical thinking skills. No matter what 'simple' task I want to do - say one that normally would be someone's day job - I always find that it requires more knowledge, skill and more thinking than I anticipated.

I didn't get quite that much from the post, and I assume the downvotes are because it comes off as barely related.

I didn't down vote you. But the article talks about career choice, choosing political candidate, picking a diet, being target of advertisement and picking friends.

So you are talking about apples in the comment section of oranges.

If you're going to posit that individuals have no control of their own lives, then posit that. Otherwise, how does your wife maintain the relationships with her friends? How does she know their goals align with hers?

A necessary skill, but honestly, a college-level skill that most students/people will opt out of because it doesn't sound sexy and it certainly has no direct-skill applications in the work world. If you put critical thinking as an item on your resume, only a very small crowd would view it as information rather than noise.

I guess the other wrinkle is explaining to people that "critical thinking" encompasses a lot more than destroying opposing arguments and building secure arguments of your own; critical thinking is a necessary but not sufficient skill to engage in formal debate, but that's not what most people use it for anyway. Critical thinking is a modality for interacting with the world, and its dictum is active engagement of ideas rather than passive reception and acceptance. Actively engaging with the world involves abstractly de-greasing the gears of their mental machinery so that they seize up and require hands-on attention more often. Rather than allowing an advertisement to blare its claims unchallenged as is default, critical thinking will consider the motives of the advertisers, their most effective methods, the target audience, the angles of human nature it is attempting to leverage, and the explicit or insinuated claims of the advertisement. The author notes broadly that being a sucker is both the cause and result of passively accepting outside claims/advertisements and physically acting based on the assumption that those claims are true. We can not say, however, that learning critical thinking will undo suckerdom (this was discussed in depth in The Republic), but it may innoculate people against falling for some future timeshare sale.

I have long thought about assembling course materials to teach critical thinking, and dreamt about creating an institute for the teaching of critical thinking. Once again, the trouble is convincing people that critical thinking is essential, even though to some of us it may seem obvious. The problem with getting people to take critical thinking seriously is that critical thinking looks a lot like what you'd learn in a philosophy or English class, which people identify with being useless because they don't translate into jobs as a skill directly. Unfortunately people seem to forget that critical thinking is practiced at a high level as part of science, instead preferring to lump scientific cognition into its own category which is framed as inscrutable to the commoners. If I had to teach people to think critically, I'd probably use a blend of media/propaganda study, formal logic, scientific method, rhetoric, and literary deconstruction-- I imagine that's enough to scare away all but the most determined.

IMHO, starting to teach it in college would be waiting more than 15 years too late.

I think the trivium is what needs to be learned by most people. Many people, especially Americans, have never even heard of it, unless they went to a classical education school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium

Deviations from the Trivium are fashionable but I find that the more I deviate away from it the worse off I end up being in my education. I used to think that understanding was something that was solely axiomatically derived. Now I view skills like memorization as being essential for thought. In order to become fluent in a domain one must have plenty of data, which requires solid memories to maintain. These facts can be synthesized later, which is what the next two steps of the Trivium are for.

It does need to be updated for modern times, though. The basic principles are still worth enforcing. This is where I was introduced to it: http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html

It's always easier not to think for yourself. We want to assume we are surrounded and led by trustworthy people. Thinking is hard, and sometimes frightening; ignorance is bliss. To boot, cynics/pessimists get a bad name for raining on the parade. Whether it's your government or your boss... same thing.

Yes, indeed is critical thinking of importance; but unfortunately it is only as broad as the subjects tastes, culture and emotions allow for; very few use logic, reason, or history; and even if objective critical thinking is of the more reasonable, many go against the grain and follow a path of critical thinking that is paved by emotive language and bias.. .

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