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Comment by nzach | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about critical thought in our society from another angle. In my opinion if you assume that every person employs it's critical thinking abilities to reason about the world you would expect to see a lot of different opinions about the world.

But with each passing day we see the opposite, more and more people are converging in one of a few opinions about each topic. This is great if you want to move the world in a specific direction, but I think it demonstrates that people are exercising less their critical thinking abilities.

AI definitely made this worse, but I think it started long before that.

Another factor that I think contributes negatively to this effect is that our society doesn't really like when someone is wrong, or changes ideas. If we want to encourage to use their critical thinking skills we also need to tell them that arriving at bad conclusions is ok, the important thing is to always keep improving.

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Why would you expect that more critical thought would lead to more visible opinions? Would be like expecting everyone to have a different route they take out of their neighborhood. Nothing wrong if someone does want to try a different way, to a large extent, but often nothing is gained from it, either.

The counter hope, of course, is that more critical thought will result in more people discovering some abstract truth out there. I don't think that is realistic, either.

The mundane landing spot, I think, is the likely one. For most things, critical thought is just not much of a benefit. Knowledge and understanding are far more beneficial. Is why we don't constantly reinvent how to drive a car. We have largely agreed that we have some mechanisms that work, and it is better to educate folks on how those work, than it is to get people to think critically about the controls.

Going further in that regard, understanding is far more immediately useful than critical deconstruction. Learning about affordances and how they guide you to what you are wanting to do is far more useful to someone's daily life.

Which is not to say that critical thought in designing said affordances is not good. Just, for most of us, we are not in a position to really impact any of that.

Democracy requires allies, so the overall position will tend to settle into two camps.

I'm not sure how well that reflects people's actual opinions. In many cases I think people don't care much about most topics. They simply accept the position of their allies. Occasionally they even find it abhorrent but necessary.

I think that mass communication has exacerbated that for decades, and AI at most optimizes it a bit further.

I don't really expect fine critical thinking. Most people aren't experts at most things.

But I am a bit surprised at the degree to which people have twisted themselves in knots to justify positions that do not withstand even the slightest scrutiny.

> you would expect to see a lot of different opinions about the world.

It is an age-old debate between know-that and know-how. Understanding the world around us is the point of education, and this means ways of looking at it, insights or theories, and how these insights and theories come about which is the critical thinking process. I would like to call it thinking from first assumptions since critical thinking as a term is overused and I would argue that AI is great at critical-thinking in the shallow definition of the term.

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