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I am sure you can find lots of uncritical middle-aged folks, but media savviness strikes me as a ways from critical thinking mastery. Partly I don't think there
by blacksmith_tb 5y ago
I am sure you can find lots of uncritical middle-aged folks, but media savviness strikes me as a ways from critical thinking mastery. Partly I don't think there's much institutional enthusiasm for introducing a principle like "cui bono?" or the Hegelian dialectic to high schoolers, so if they absorb them it happens in college (but it'd be great if it was sooner!)
- criddell 5y agoThe term cui bono may not be known, but follow the money is. I know nothing about Hegelian dialectic but from reading Wikipedia it sounds like the opposite of a good faith argument.
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago'Follow the money' is a good starting point for sure, though obviously we know that lots of people young and old are happy to 'pay' for 'free' products like FB / IG / gmail etc. by being surveilled (and I think it's fair to say that's fairly uncritical of them, or at least fatalistic). I like Cui Bono a little more, since there can be other kinds of motivations besides purely monetary ones. As for Hegel, I don't know that anyone really uses the dialectic 'out of the box' but the practice of trying to formulate the antithesis of your naive argument, and then incorporate it in an improved version is potentially very useful (and counter intuitive).