It isn’t hard to learn how to think: practice increasingly complex levels of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools actually do a fair job of this, especiall

It isn’t hard to learn how to think: practice increasingly complex levels of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools actually do a fair job of this, especially at advanced stages. It’s trendy to criticize social media these days, and I’m not fully on that bandwagon, but there’s something to the criticism that social media and most of the internet is making us dumber with its relentless race to the bottom of reading/writing complexity. Most web content is now a cliff-note, at best. We used to learn most things by reading books. Now it’s too easy to gloss over understanding by googling the answers we need immediately. This is a generalization, and the pattern can be avoided by the disciplined, but we shouldn’t forget that tools dictate patterns of thought and behavior by what they make easy vs. what they make hard.