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"Everyone is capable of anything" is a bit of a stretch, but as general rule critical thinking is not improbable for majority of the people. That is, I believe
by omeid2 7y ago
"Everyone is capable of anything" is a bit of a stretch, but as general rule critical thinking is not improbable for majority of the people.
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.
- wutbrodo 7y agoEven under assumptions of universal inherent capability, the dirty truth is that we simply don't know how to reliably teach critical thinking en masse. That's nominally what college is for, but the universalization of college admissions has exposed the fact that the difference between a degreed and non-degreed worker had more to do with the input population to colleges than any direct effect of a college education. 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.
- sprafa 7y agoIMO critical thinking seems to appear when multiple conflicting hypothesis of truth are thrust upon the individual. 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.
- sprafa 7y agoI’ve also always had trouble meeting very uncritical students of history or philosophy. I think both sort of have a tendency to remove illusions from your mind, although philosophy in particular is not too useful I think beyond the fundamentals. 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.
- wutbrodo 7y agoI don't know what direction the causal arrow flows here though: it's just as plausible to me that those inclined towards or capable of critical thinking gravitate towards those degrees. Like I said, I have no idea what the reality is, but I don't think anyone does, and what I'm pushing back against is the notion held by so many that throwing arbitrary education at people magically grows critical thinking skills
- sprafa 7y agoI don’t think arbitrary education works. 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.
- wutbrodo 7y agoRight, I didn't mean to suggest that _you_ were falling into this trap in your comment. My second sentence isn't too tied to my first, it's just a clarification that I'm not completely fatalist about the issue (yet).