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 th

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.