7 ms·

The patch to gullibility is critical thinking. Rudimentary critical thinking in any field requires general knowledge of it. Citizens of democracies need to thin

by dmerks 6y ago

The patch to gullibility is critical thinking. Rudimentary critical thinking in any field requires general knowledge of it. Citizens of democracies need to think critically on many topics, hence they need to know a lot in many fields, and to learn ongoingly throughout their lives. Education becomes important. But Education costs a lot... Maybe the solution is to gradually make learning as accessible, inexpensive and beneficial as possible.

notduncansmith 6y ago
I think you’re spot-on with making learning as accessible as possible to have a more informed populace, but making the information available is only half of getting people to take it in. Trauma blocks critical thinking and internal honesty, and we have a massive trauma and PTSD problem, to the point where poverty and food insecurity meaningfully reduces effective IQ. Thankfully MAPS is working on treating PTSD at scale. I have set up a recurring monthly donation and I encourage anyone who values intellectualism to do the same, so that we may swell our ranks with those who are currently too hurt to think clearly.
- spicybright 6y ago
  Can you be more specific with this "mass trauma" idea? Never heard of it before.
- jdietrich 6y ago
  >we have a massive trauma and PTSD problem Do we, or are the diagnostic criteria of PTSD so broad that the disorder is being massively over-diagnosed? https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/da.20586 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/da.20586 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.09.006 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.09.006 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/1745691613504115 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/1745691613504115
- pbronez 6y ago
  Can you provide some more information about MAPS?
  - notduncansmith 6y ago
    Sure, they are a non-profit organization doing research on some breakthrough treatment options for mental health issues like PTSD and depression. You can check out their website here: https://maps.org/ https://maps.org/
- varispeed 6y ago
  Government is also blocking research and treatment of PTSD using certain drugs to help pharmaceutical companies. For many years getting medical cannabis or other substances deemed illegal was next to impossible without becoming a criminal.
- dmerks 6y ago
  Helping those in need overcome their difficulties and become ready to learn is a part of accessibility to Education. It's a part of offering equal opportunity to all.
  - dmerks 6y ago
    Pro-democracy votes also go a long way, for your distantly involved citizen.
_qulr 6y ago
I'm not sure you can teach critical thinking. In my experience, people are mostly "born" with it... or not. I say this as a former academic philosopher who actually taught "critical thinking" classes at the university level. They amounted to a hodgepodge of subject-specific wisdom collected under a generic title. (I didn't design the courses but merely adopted the preexisting curriculum and textbooks.) In general, individual students vary widely in their receptiveness to education of any kind. A lot of them are just "seat fillers" who barely pay attention and are only there out of fear of the negative consequences of nonattendance. It's incredibly difficult to get through to them. In this world where information is easily available everywhere, at your fingertips, ignorance is a deliberate choice.
- _qulr 6y ago
  In fairness, maybe we just start way too late? I mean, I'm all in favor of debates over the existence of God for example in elementary school, at the same age kids start getting forced to go to Sunday school. But a lot of parents would have fits over that topic in public schools, which is why we can't do it until college, at which point it's unlikely to make much difference. The formative years of a child are almost completely under control of the parents. It's a chicken and egg problem, because it's difficult to change the public education policy without the consent of the parents who themselves were not raised to think critically. There's near universal agreement that math education is important, but "critical thinking" is controversial at best among parents. A lot of them would rather home school their kids than allow exposure to different ways of thinking.
  - dmerks 6y ago
    The contextual backdrop is never negligible, but it's the powers that be that change the course of the world. Secularization has been seen as the step forward. So has quality initial and ongoing Education for all. We trudge forward as individualistic pursuits erode those of the collective. It reminds me of a study: many groups undertake a turn-based team game in which the prize grows until a certain maximum. Make it to the end of the game: everyone takes an equal part of the prize home. At any point before the end, the entirety of the current prize can be claimed by one individual. Not in one single group was the prize shared. There was always at least one person who waited long enough to claim more than what would have been shared otherwise.
thu2111 6y ago
I think that's not enough. Our societies problem is not that learning (or information) is expensive and inaccessible. The internet has solved that problem already, with open access papers lagging behind general progress but that is now being resolved as well. The problem is deeper. Critical thinking requires you to be willing to engage in criticism. Or phrased another way, it's about skepticism. Skepticism is deeply unpopular. People who engage in critical thinking are shamed, censored, fired, sometimes punished by the police if their critical thinking leads to them to criticise the beliefs of those in power. There are a lot of people in the world, and especially in the sort of Hacker News reading social groups, who are deathly afraid of critical thinking of any form because they don't believe most people can really do it. They would much prefer blind, automatic belief and credulity. This article is a prime example of the genre, but you can see this in the way Wojcicki makes YouTube block anyone who doesn't "believe" in the pronouncements of the WHO, even though the WHO has constantly changed its own advice and thus anyone engaged in critical thinking could easily have disagreed with it at any point. LinkedIn has the same policy. However these people are usually the worst at critical thinking. The author himself is so poor at it that he's spreading misinformation and making loony claims, whilst railing against others he accuses of doing so. For instance, he provides a list of things Americans supposedly don't believe or believe. He says, "Millions don’t believe in vaccination". What does it mean to "believe" in vaccination? His citation for this is a Washington Post report on polling that actually asked people two rather specific questions: 1. Should vaccination be mandatory? (~33% said no) 2. Is the measles vaccine harmful? (in the west, ~90% said it's safe) The vast majority of people say no and no, which are the conventional answers. In fact the statement is useless - the population of the US is so large that for "millions" of Americans to believe something requires only 0.5% of the population to believe it, and in this case he isn't even precise about what he means by "believe". When you drill into the actual data it's hardly an issue. As for "45% of Americans believe in ghosts and demons", does he really believe people will take a poll like that seriously? Only someone incapable of critical thinking would take such a claim at face value. If half of Americans believed in ghosts and demons, there would be a thriving industry of anti-ghost and anti-demonic services. There'd be ghostbusting shops in every town. There aren't, but there sure are a lot of people who will troll pollsters and fools who blindly believe them for a laugh.

by dmerks 6y ago

notduncansmith 6y ago

I think you’re spot-on with making learning as accessible as possible to have a more informed populace, but making the information available is only half of getting people to take it in. Trauma blocks critical thinking and internal honesty, and we have a massive trauma and PTSD problem, to the point where poverty and food insecurity meaningfully reduces effective IQ. Thankfully MAPS is working on treating PTSD at scale. I have set up a recurring monthly donation and I encourage anyone who values intellectualism to do the same, so that we may swell our ranks with those who are currently too hurt to think clearly.

spicybright 6y ago
Can you be more specific with this "mass trauma" idea? Never heard of it before.
jdietrich 6y ago
>we have a massive trauma and PTSD problem Do we, or are the diagnostic criteria of PTSD so broad that the disorder is being massively over-diagnosed? https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/da.20586 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/da.20586 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.09.006 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.09.006 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/1745691613504115 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/1745691613504115
pbronez 6y ago
Can you provide some more information about MAPS?
- notduncansmith 6y ago
  Sure, they are a non-profit organization doing research on some breakthrough treatment options for mental health issues like PTSD and depression. You can check out their website here: https://maps.org/ https://maps.org/
varispeed 6y ago
Government is also blocking research and treatment of PTSD using certain drugs to help pharmaceutical companies. For many years getting medical cannabis or other substances deemed illegal was next to impossible without becoming a criminal.
dmerks 6y ago
Helping those in need overcome their difficulties and become ready to learn is a part of accessibility to Education. It's a part of offering equal opportunity to all.
- dmerks 6y ago
  Pro-democracy votes also go a long way, for your distantly involved citizen.

_qulr 6y ago

I'm not sure you can teach critical thinking. In my experience, people are mostly "born" with it... or not. I say this as a former academic philosopher who actually taught "critical thinking" classes at the university level. They amounted to a hodgepodge of subject-specific wisdom collected under a generic title. (I didn't design the courses but merely adopted the preexisting curriculum and textbooks.) In general, individual students vary widely in their receptiveness to education of any kind. A lot of them are just "seat fillers" who barely pay attention and are only there out of fear of the negative consequences of nonattendance. It's incredibly difficult to get through to them. In this world where information is easily available everywhere, at your fingertips, ignorance is a deliberate choice.

_qulr 6y ago
In fairness, maybe we just start way too late? I mean, I'm all in favor of debates over the existence of God for example in elementary school, at the same age kids start getting forced to go to Sunday school. But a lot of parents would have fits over that topic in public schools, which is why we can't do it until college, at which point it's unlikely to make much difference. The formative years of a child are almost completely under control of the parents. It's a chicken and egg problem, because it's difficult to change the public education policy without the consent of the parents who themselves were not raised to think critically. There's near universal agreement that math education is important, but "critical thinking" is controversial at best among parents. A lot of them would rather home school their kids than allow exposure to different ways of thinking.
- dmerks 6y ago
  The contextual backdrop is never negligible, but it's the powers that be that change the course of the world. Secularization has been seen as the step forward. So has quality initial and ongoing Education for all. We trudge forward as individualistic pursuits erode those of the collective. It reminds me of a study: many groups undertake a turn-based team game in which the prize grows until a certain maximum. Make it to the end of the game: everyone takes an equal part of the prize home. At any point before the end, the entirety of the current prize can be claimed by one individual. Not in one single group was the prize shared. There was always at least one person who waited long enough to claim more than what would have been shared otherwise.

thu2111 6y ago

I think that's not enough. Our societies problem is not that learning (or information) is expensive and inaccessible. The internet has solved that problem already, with open access papers lagging behind general progress but that is now being resolved as well. The problem is deeper. Critical thinking requires you to be willing to engage in criticism. Or phrased another way, it's about skepticism. Skepticism is deeply unpopular. People who engage in critical thinking are shamed, censored, fired, sometimes punished by the police if their critical thinking leads to them to criticise the beliefs of those in power. There are a lot of people in the world, and especially in the sort of Hacker News reading social groups, who are deathly afraid of critical thinking of any form because they don't believe most people can really do it. They would much prefer blind, automatic belief and credulity. This article is a prime example of the genre, but you can see this in the way Wojcicki makes YouTube block anyone who doesn't "believe" in the pronouncements of the WHO, even though the WHO has constantly changed its own advice and thus anyone engaged in critical thinking could easily have disagreed with it at any point. LinkedIn has the same policy. However these people are usually the worst at critical thinking. The author himself is so poor at it that he's spreading misinformation and making loony claims, whilst railing against others he accuses of doing so. For instance, he provides a list of things Americans supposedly don't believe or believe. He says, "Millions don’t believe in vaccination". What does it mean to "believe" in vaccination? His citation for this is a Washington Post report on polling that actually asked people two rather specific questions: 1. Should vaccination be mandatory? (~33% said no) 2. Is the measles vaccine harmful? (in the west, ~90% said it's safe) The vast majority of people say no and no, which are the conventional answers. In fact the statement is useless - the population of the US is so large that for "millions" of Americans to believe something requires only 0.5% of the population to believe it, and in this case he isn't even precise about what he means by "believe". When you drill into the actual data it's hardly an issue. As for "45% of Americans believe in ghosts and demons", does he really believe people will take a poll like that seriously? Only someone incapable of critical thinking would take such a claim at face value. If half of Americans believed in ghosts and demons, there would be a thriving industry of anti-ghost and anti-demonic services. There'd be ghostbusting shops in every town. There aren't, but there sure are a lot of people who will troll pollsters and fools who blindly believe them for a laugh.