8 ms·

Over time, I've come to realise that the most important gift we can give our children is formal training in critical thinking. I think STEM and such can wait.

by sn41 7y ago

Over time, I've come to realise that the most important gift we can give our children is formal training in critical thinking. I think STEM and such can wait. The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties etc. is important not only to realise the truth at an abstract level, but also has practical implications on things such as successful investment strategies.

chongli 7y ago
Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. Going beyond what Scott discussed, I found this study [2] which seems to show that critical thinking skills are mostly correlated with verbal intelligence and trait openness. It's only one study though, so take it with a grain of salt. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-thinking/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-t... [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1073191104263250 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107319110426325...
- StanislavPetrov 7y ago
  >Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Can't say I agree, Socrates figured it out thousands of years ago! >Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. I'd argue that these courses are, at best, tangentially related to critical thinking. We need to teach the Socratic Method of learning to children from day 1, in all areas of study. Teaching children how to think and how to be intellectually curious is ultimately far more effective than our current methods if your desired result is an informed and intellectually capable populace.
  - chongli 7y ago
    Teaching children how to think and how to be intellectually curious is ultimately far more effective than our current methods if your desired result is an informed and intellectually capable populace. You're preaching to the choir here. I am studying pure mathematics and minoring in philosophy and astrophysics, with the eventual goal of becoming a teacher. I dream of teaching kids critical thinking and deep problem solving skills, not rote memorization. In the intro to mathematics education course, which I took as part of my program, we focused exclusively on teaching mathematics in the Socratic style. It was fantastic teaching my fellow classmates and a ton of fun to boot. Unfortunately, I have to add this again, in my experience volunteering as a tutor (2 hours a week for the past 4 years) for high school students, I've noticed them really struggle with critical thinking type problems. Show them any mathematical problem where the structure of the question is different from what they've learned in class and they can't do it. They don't really understand what they're doing, they only know how to repeat the procedure they were taught with cookie-cutter problems.
    - StanislavPetrov 7y ago
      >It was fantastic teaching my fellow classmates and a ton of fun to boot. I think this is as important a point as any. Children are naturally curious. The Socratic Method of learning is all about building on that curiosity to constantly ask (and answer) questions. Learning in this way allows children to exploit their natural curiosity and find their intellectual niche in a fun and fruitful way, rather than boring them to death with rote instruction that is little more than a memorization lesson.
      - chongli 7y ago
        It is awesome, but then my classmates for that course are all students who got admitted to my school (which admits around 7% of applicants to math) so I would expect them to be more engaged and to have better critical thinking skills than the average high school student. I think the other issue we have (speaking for teachers now) is that you don't get to teach students from K-12, you get them for one or two grades max. I think the reason kids of highly educated parents tend to be better off is because they get the benefit over their entire childhood, rather than teachers who vary a lot from year to year.
- vkou 7y ago
  > Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. That's because low-level philosophy courses are taught as history courses. Memorize what each great thinker who died hundreds of years ago thought, regurgitate it in essay format. Statistics is taught as an arithmetic course. You are given four numbers, figure out which formula you should use to transform them into an answer. Unsurprisingly, neither of them develops critical thinking skills.
  - chongli 7y ago
    Memorize what each great thinker who died hundreds of years ago thought, regurgitate it in essay format I've taken 3 undergrad philosophy courses so far, all at second year level, and none of them were as you described. If you did that on your essays, you'd get a very low grade. All of the essays I've had to write were critical essays. Believe me, it is NOT EASY to come up with a new counter-argument to a famous philosophical position that's already been poked at for centuries. Have I developed critical thinking skills from taking these courses? I don't know. I take the courses because they're fun and interesting. I love getting into intense discussions with my classmates.
    - mistermann 7y ago
      Were your fellow classmates at the same level as you though? There's philosophy as it should be, and then there's philosophy as it is.
- jackcosgrove 7y ago
  I think the best way to foster critical thinking skills is to personally encounter hypocrisy practiced by those who speak from authority.
  - chongli 7y ago
    Some people don't respond that way. Instead, they just become cynical and think "never trust politicians from party X."
wallace_f 7y ago
This will sound objectionable, but I do not believe most people value critical thinking. In fact, to many it can offend them. Objective analysis and the ability to question assumptions, groupthink, consensus offends people. And even if it didn't, it's nearly clear most people are not even capable of it. There's an Einstein quote about this: >Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
- ben509 7y ago
  > Objective analysis and the ability to question assumptions, groupthink, consensus offends people. I disagree. Assumptions, groupthink and consensus are more a consequence of a social hierarchy. Social offense is the feeling one experiences when that hierarchy is challenged. It's a feeling that probably evolved with our pack animal ancestors. And while social offense is something your brain invents like any other feeling, it's not something you can simply ignore; analogously, the feeling of cold is in your head, but ignoring it can lead to hypothermia. We're still social creatures, our careers and relationships are directly linked to our reputations. We can't simply ignore someone (potentially) assaulting our reputation because it has real world impacts. To make critical thinking work requires social mechanisms that protect the reputation of the person who is found to be wrong. That's a large part of the reason for the scientific method, for the scholarly tone in academic journals, for professionalism in business, etc.
grabbalacious 7y ago
The problem is that critical thinking is essentially a negative activity. It's a means of defending oneself against potentially harmful ideas or ideas that one simply doesn't like. It's also rather abstract. One can't learn to think critically until one has learnt to think. One can't learn to think at all until he has first learnt some ideas to think about. To engage the human mind (and the human heart) one needs something positive to aim for. That's why I think that the best approach is not to pick and choose among ideas and then make certain subjects compulsory (as in a curriculum). Rather find something that interests a child and then figure out how to do more of it. But this is best pursued outside the school system.
- dennis_jeeves 7y ago
  >The problem is that critical thinking is essentially a negative activity. It's a means of defending oneself against potentially harmful ideas or ideas that one simply doesn't like. It's also rather abstract. One can't learn to think critically until one has learnt to think. One can't learn to think at all until he has first learnt some ideas to think about. Agreed...
thundergolfer 7y ago
I'm becoming a broken record on HN about this, but the evidence is in and you can't divorce critical thinking from domain-specific knowledge. > The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties You just can't do this properly without a shitload of core domain knowledge in philosophy, politics, media, history and also whatever specific domain knowledge pertinent. You can't "question narratives" you see in the newspaper if you don't have a good theory of media like what's provided in Manufacturing Consent and even with that you can't "question [the] narrative" of some specific economics thought-piece in the Financial Times if you don't have the relevant domain knowledge in economics. If you think of the people you'd regard as excellent critical thinkers, wouldn't these all be people with deep knowledge of their domain(s)? Chomsky was never formally schooled in "critical thinking". He just went through normal, rigorous education, reading stacks of books and newspapers along the way. source: Why Knowledge Matters, by E.D Hirsch
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  Agreed. Epistemology in the abstract without concrete examples of how it has gone right/wrong is a dubiously useful tool. I've found history to be hepful for better understanding what makes good and bad ways of knowing things. Unfortunately our public school system wastes its history curriculum on spinning fairy tales. It took years of reading serious history books to deprogram myself. I see the same thing being done to my kid.
  - technoplato 7y ago
    What are some things that you’ve deprogrammed yourself from and how did you find the stories that did so?
    - loosetypes 7y ago
      Not who you’re replying to, but two books that stood out to me in that regard, especially as an American, and left a lasting impression are: (1) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, and (2) Sundown Towns by James Loewen
buboard 7y ago
> formal training in critical thinking thats an oxymoron
shsidns 7y ago
“ I think STEM and such can wait.” This is so important. I couldn’t care less if my daughters learn about evolution of relativity in high school. What possible use do those have unless they become a biologist or physicist? (I’m the latter) Even programming is an edge case. I’d much rather they learn logic, more mathematics (more depth and breath) and philosophy.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Programming is logic.
Porthos9K 7y ago
Critical thinking as in teaching children to recognize bullshit when somebody serves it up?
- sn41 7y ago
  Yup. That's my definition.
WalterBright 7y ago
STEM is critical thinking. With the most ruthless judge there is - reality. If your airplane design won't fly, no amount of clever rhetoric will change that. You cannot design engineering marvels with mush for brains.
- watwut 7y ago
  Not really. Many people I know who studied stem for example have strong tendency to take texts literally and at face value - for example biographies and historical texts. They don't seem to pick on inconsistencies, obvious self-promotion and such. Or have trouble to understand differences in interpretations of history and how they affect texts. Another tendency is to insist on "either this or that" binary where in reality is a lot of complex nuance and middle ground. And lastly, practically, I work as programmer and I swear to got that good mouth and confidence and right look takes you really far away with other programmers. It wont save someone completely incapable, but many people in tech confuse arrogance and confidence with being super skilled.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    > many people in tech confuse arrogance and confidence with being super skilled. They will initially, but they'll recognize the crap code after a while and won't trust them anymore. The converse is true, too. In my jobs, initially I was not trusted until I developed a track record of getting good results. > have strong tendency to take texts literally and at face value People "on the spectrum" tend to do that. Most STEM people are not on the spectrum. However, a rhetorical device a lot of people use is to take what one writes excessively literally in order to refute it. They know perfectly well what they are doing, and I take it as a sign that they lost the point :-) I wouldn't confuse them with people on the spectrum.
    - watwut 7y ago
      > People "on the spectrum" tend to do that. Most STEM people are not on the spectrum. Non spectrum STEM people do that too quite a lot. It is not just personality thing. The classes they teach in technical schools require exactly that. You don't learn to doubt math book or physics book nor encounter another physics book that says something contradictory. Nor you have to take into account writers bias or reconcile multiple contradictory trends. (That is not criticism of stem classes, they simply have different goal.) Just because something is done by people on spectrum does not mean neurotypical cant do it. > They will initially, but they'll recognize the crap code after a while and won't trust them anymore. I did not said that the arrogance and confidence imply completely crap code. Again, there is false binary here. It just mean that such person is seen as more capable then he is and that his takedowns of more calm people are taken at face value too. Meaning that arrogant and confident person wins discussion where he is wrong and does not know what is talked about and is capable to harm reputation of competitors. It manifests mostly in unclear situations with unpredictable outcome, complicated situations, strategic decisions etc. It systematically manifests when there are differences of opinions.
dennis_jeeves 7y ago
>Over time, I've come to realise that the most important gift we can give our children is formal training in critical thinking. Assuming 'critical' thinking can be taught (I do not think so, though teachers/parents can be catalysts. There is an IQ barrier to contend with). What exactly do you propose for children of parents who themselves are not thinking 'critically' be taught? This constitutes the vast majority of deluded masses. I have put 'critical' thinking in quotes, because if you ask a person who is not a critical thinker (in your opinion) if he/she is a critical thinker, you are most likely to get a response that he/she is indeed one. I'm not saying that verifiable truths do not exist but people disagree on what the truth is while each vehemently believing that their version of the truth is the right one. Rarely will they progress to a point where there empirically verify if the view they hold is correct.

by sn41 7y ago

chongli 7y ago

Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. Going beyond what Scott discussed, I found this study [2] which seems to show that critical thinking skills are mostly correlated with verbal intelligence and trait openness. It's only one study though, so take it with a grain of salt. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-thinking/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-t... [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1073191104263250 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107319110426325...

StanislavPetrov 7y ago
>Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Can't say I agree, Socrates figured it out thousands of years ago! >Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. I'd argue that these courses are, at best, tangentially related to critical thinking. We need to teach the Socratic Method of learning to children from day 1, in all areas of study. Teaching children how to think and how to be intellectually curious is ultimately far more effective than our current methods if your desired result is an informed and intellectually capable populace.
- chongli 7y ago
  Teaching children how to think and how to be intellectually curious is ultimately far more effective than our current methods if your desired result is an informed and intellectually capable populace. You're preaching to the choir here. I am studying pure mathematics and minoring in philosophy and astrophysics, with the eventual goal of becoming a teacher. I dream of teaching kids critical thinking and deep problem solving skills, not rote memorization. In the intro to mathematics education course, which I took as part of my program, we focused exclusively on teaching mathematics in the Socratic style. It was fantastic teaching my fellow classmates and a ton of fun to boot. Unfortunately, I have to add this again, in my experience volunteering as a tutor (2 hours a week for the past 4 years) for high school students, I've noticed them really struggle with critical thinking type problems. Show them any mathematical problem where the structure of the question is different from what they've learned in class and they can't do it. They don't really understand what they're doing, they only know how to repeat the procedure they were taught with cookie-cutter problems.
  - StanislavPetrov 7y ago
    >It was fantastic teaching my fellow classmates and a ton of fun to boot. I think this is as important a point as any. Children are naturally curious. The Socratic Method of learning is all about building on that curiosity to constantly ask (and answer) questions. Learning in this way allows children to exploit their natural curiosity and find their intellectual niche in a fun and fruitful way, rather than boring them to death with rote instruction that is little more than a memorization lesson.
    - chongli 7y ago
      It is awesome, but then my classmates for that course are all students who got admitted to my school (which admits around 7% of applicants to math) so I would expect them to be more engaged and to have better critical thinking skills than the average high school student. I think the other issue we have (speaking for teachers now) is that you don't get to teach students from K-12, you get them for one or two grades max. I think the reason kids of highly educated parents tend to be better off is because they get the benefit over their entire childhood, rather than teachers who vary a lot from year to year.
vkou 7y ago
> Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. That's because low-level philosophy courses are taught as history courses. Memorize what each great thinker who died hundreds of years ago thought, regurgitate it in essay format. Statistics is taught as an arithmetic course. You are given four numbers, figure out which formula you should use to transform them into an answer. Unsurprisingly, neither of them develops critical thinking skills.
- chongli 7y ago
  Memorize what each great thinker who died hundreds of years ago thought, regurgitate it in essay format I've taken 3 undergrad philosophy courses so far, all at second year level, and none of them were as you described. If you did that on your essays, you'd get a very low grade. All of the essays I've had to write were critical essays. Believe me, it is NOT EASY to come up with a new counter-argument to a famous philosophical position that's already been poked at for centuries. Have I developed critical thinking skills from taking these courses? I don't know. I take the courses because they're fun and interesting. I love getting into intense discussions with my classmates.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    Were your fellow classmates at the same level as you though? There's philosophy as it should be, and then there's philosophy as it is.
jackcosgrove 7y ago
I think the best way to foster critical thinking skills is to personally encounter hypocrisy practiced by those who speak from authority.
- chongli 7y ago
  Some people don't respond that way. Instead, they just become cynical and think "never trust politicians from party X."

wallace_f 7y ago

This will sound objectionable, but I do not believe most people value critical thinking. In fact, to many it can offend them. Objective analysis and the ability to question assumptions, groupthink, consensus offends people. And even if it didn't, it's nearly clear most people are not even capable of it. There's an Einstein quote about this: >Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

ben509 7y ago
> Objective analysis and the ability to question assumptions, groupthink, consensus offends people. I disagree. Assumptions, groupthink and consensus are more a consequence of a social hierarchy. Social offense is the feeling one experiences when that hierarchy is challenged. It's a feeling that probably evolved with our pack animal ancestors. And while social offense is something your brain invents like any other feeling, it's not something you can simply ignore; analogously, the feeling of cold is in your head, but ignoring it can lead to hypothermia. We're still social creatures, our careers and relationships are directly linked to our reputations. We can't simply ignore someone (potentially) assaulting our reputation because it has real world impacts. To make critical thinking work requires social mechanisms that protect the reputation of the person who is found to be wrong. That's a large part of the reason for the scientific method, for the scholarly tone in academic journals, for professionalism in business, etc.

grabbalacious 7y ago

The problem is that critical thinking is essentially a negative activity. It's a means of defending oneself against potentially harmful ideas or ideas that one simply doesn't like. It's also rather abstract. One can't learn to think critically until one has learnt to think. One can't learn to think at all until he has first learnt some ideas to think about. To engage the human mind (and the human heart) one needs something positive to aim for. That's why I think that the best approach is not to pick and choose among ideas and then make certain subjects compulsory (as in a curriculum). Rather find something that interests a child and then figure out how to do more of it. But this is best pursued outside the school system.

dennis_jeeves 7y ago
>The problem is that critical thinking is essentially a negative activity. It's a means of defending oneself against potentially harmful ideas or ideas that one simply doesn't like. It's also rather abstract. One can't learn to think critically until one has learnt to think. One can't learn to think at all until he has first learnt some ideas to think about. Agreed...

thundergolfer 7y ago

I'm becoming a broken record on HN about this, but the evidence is in and you can't divorce critical thinking from domain-specific knowledge. > The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties You just can't do this properly without a shitload of core domain knowledge in philosophy, politics, media, history and also whatever specific domain knowledge pertinent. You can't "question narratives" you see in the newspaper if you don't have a good theory of media like what's provided in Manufacturing Consent and even with that you can't "question [the] narrative" of some specific economics thought-piece in the Financial Times if you don't have the relevant domain knowledge in economics. If you think of the people you'd regard as excellent critical thinkers, wouldn't these all be people with deep knowledge of their domain(s)? Chomsky was never formally schooled in "critical thinking". He just went through normal, rigorous education, reading stacks of books and newspapers along the way. source: Why Knowledge Matters, by E.D Hirsch

DubiousPusher 7y ago
Agreed. Epistemology in the abstract without concrete examples of how it has gone right/wrong is a dubiously useful tool. I've found history to be hepful for better understanding what makes good and bad ways of knowing things. Unfortunately our public school system wastes its history curriculum on spinning fairy tales. It took years of reading serious history books to deprogram myself. I see the same thing being done to my kid.
- technoplato 7y ago
  What are some things that you’ve deprogrammed yourself from and how did you find the stories that did so?
  - loosetypes 7y ago
    Not who you’re replying to, but two books that stood out to me in that regard, especially as an American, and left a lasting impression are: (1) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, and (2) Sundown Towns by James Loewen

buboard 7y ago

> formal training in critical thinking thats an oxymoron

shsidns 7y ago

“ I think STEM and such can wait.” This is so important. I couldn’t care less if my daughters learn about evolution of relativity in high school. What possible use do those have unless they become a biologist or physicist? (I’m the latter) Even programming is an edge case. I’d much rather they learn logic, more mathematics (more depth and breath) and philosophy.

WalterBright 7y ago
Programming is logic.

Porthos9K 7y ago

Critical thinking as in teaching children to recognize bullshit when somebody serves it up?

sn41 7y ago
Yup. That's my definition.

WalterBright 7y ago

STEM is critical thinking. With the most ruthless judge there is - reality. If your airplane design won't fly, no amount of clever rhetoric will change that. You cannot design engineering marvels with mush for brains.

watwut 7y ago
Not really. Many people I know who studied stem for example have strong tendency to take texts literally and at face value - for example biographies and historical texts. They don't seem to pick on inconsistencies, obvious self-promotion and such. Or have trouble to understand differences in interpretations of history and how they affect texts. Another tendency is to insist on "either this or that" binary where in reality is a lot of complex nuance and middle ground. And lastly, practically, I work as programmer and I swear to got that good mouth and confidence and right look takes you really far away with other programmers. It wont save someone completely incapable, but many people in tech confuse arrogance and confidence with being super skilled.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > many people in tech confuse arrogance and confidence with being super skilled. They will initially, but they'll recognize the crap code after a while and won't trust them anymore. The converse is true, too. In my jobs, initially I was not trusted until I developed a track record of getting good results. > have strong tendency to take texts literally and at face value People "on the spectrum" tend to do that. Most STEM people are not on the spectrum. However, a rhetorical device a lot of people use is to take what one writes excessively literally in order to refute it. They know perfectly well what they are doing, and I take it as a sign that they lost the point :-) I wouldn't confuse them with people on the spectrum.
  - watwut 7y ago
    > People "on the spectrum" tend to do that. Most STEM people are not on the spectrum. Non spectrum STEM people do that too quite a lot. It is not just personality thing. The classes they teach in technical schools require exactly that. You don't learn to doubt math book or physics book nor encounter another physics book that says something contradictory. Nor you have to take into account writers bias or reconcile multiple contradictory trends. (That is not criticism of stem classes, they simply have different goal.) Just because something is done by people on spectrum does not mean neurotypical cant do it. > They will initially, but they'll recognize the crap code after a while and won't trust them anymore. I did not said that the arrogance and confidence imply completely crap code. Again, there is false binary here. It just mean that such person is seen as more capable then he is and that his takedowns of more calm people are taken at face value too. Meaning that arrogant and confident person wins discussion where he is wrong and does not know what is talked about and is capable to harm reputation of competitors. It manifests mostly in unclear situations with unpredictable outcome, complicated situations, strategic decisions etc. It systematically manifests when there are differences of opinions.

dennis_jeeves 7y ago

>Over time, I've come to realise that the most important gift we can give our children is formal training in critical thinking. Assuming 'critical' thinking can be taught (I do not think so, though teachers/parents can be catalysts. There is an IQ barrier to contend with). What exactly do you propose for children of parents who themselves are not thinking 'critically' be taught? This constitutes the vast majority of deluded masses. I have put 'critical' thinking in quotes, because if you ask a person who is not a critical thinker (in your opinion) if he/she is a critical thinker, you are most likely to get a response that he/she is indeed one. I'm not saying that verifiable truths do not exist but people disagree on what the truth is while each vehemently believing that their version of the truth is the right one. Rarely will they progress to a point where there empirically verify if the view they hold is correct.