>The only solution to this is better education that teaches critical thinking
The underlying assumption here is that everybody is capable of anything if only they were given the right 'education'.
The underlying assumption here is that everybody is capable of anything if only they were given the right 'education'.
That is, I believe with better education we can have a substantially larger number of people who are capable of critical thinking and can navigate through trickery and misinformation at a basic level.
This is an unsolved problem, and a really important one in the modern cognitive economy, which is why theories about inherent cognitive capability have gained so much purchase recently. For my part, I think these theories are plausible, but also think that their implications are significant enough that I don't want to be too hasty and buy into them until I've been convinced that we've exhausted the possibility that thinking can be taught.
The people I’ve met who are least capable of critical thinking seem to have accepted some form of universal or protouniversal truth, usually an ideology that sort of explains all things away they don’t want to think about. Religion, strong societal rules and position, and lack of unwanted interference in your life can do that.
Some degree of oppression doesn’t seem to harm either as it seems to me it forces people to confront the fundamental sense of fairness they might want to believe in has no grounds in society. So it’s a mix of things.
Learning Socratic dialogue seems useful though.
Probably the least critical thought-inclined people I’ve met are students of economics who take the theories at face value though. Interestingly they are very often quite sheltered and privileged people, which goes into my point about oppression.
In fact I’d like to add that I said above - probably the best education for critical thinking I can imagine is teaching people about cognitive biases and heuristics.
Could you make a cup of tea if you didn't know? Probably, but you'd ruin a lot of tea bags...
Is probably more accurate. You can bring a horse to water but you can't make them drink. It's impossible to know but it may be that those who are willing to be educated already have been and those who are left are willfully ignorant or have low enough intelligence that education isn't possible.
As society becomes more complex, greater and greater numbers of people will be unable to successfully interact with it. What we do with them is a unsolved problem.