Hacker News Reader

Comment by thundergolfer | Hacker News Reader

Rebuttal: There's good evidence that "thinking critically" is not a skill that can be divorced from domain-specific expertise. In order words, the capability to be a critical thinker is in direct relationship with one's competency in _specific domains_ and cannot be generalised.

Source: Why Knowledge Matters - E.D Hirsch

View on HN

Which is true but also leaves the interesting follow up question - do people understand how uncritical thinking works and can they recognise in themselves when & why they are doing it?

A lot of intelligent people seem to have skipped thinking about that one. I'd love to get it and a negotiation course into a high school curriculum.

It's difficult to accept this assertion at face value. After all for any given proposition p, regardless of the domain under which it ought to be considered, we can always choose not to immediately accept it without sufficient reason for doing so. We can always ask why p has been offered up to us, what the arguments for and against p are, and what the implications of accepting it would be.

I think what’s most important is not so much critical thinking skills as critical thinking discipline.

Don’t go round believing things just because you want them to be true, or disbelieving things just because you don’t want them to be true. Don’t rush to judgment just because something provokes a strong emotional reaction. Always be doubting, always be listening to points of view that differ from your own. That kind of thing.

Often what people need is just plain thinking about what they read/hear instead of having knee-jerk reaction to the topic.

although subject matter expertise and whatever goes under the rubric of "critical thinking" these days is highly correlated, there is still a common sense approach to logical, analytical thinking that might fit under the umbrella of critical thinking while not being domain-specific.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com