3 ms·

It might be simplistic, but I've always seen the main internal division between rational thinkers as the difference between: A) people who primarily get their

It might be simplistic, but I've always seen the main internal division between rational thinkers as the difference between: A) people who primarily get their history and philosophy from biographical material about people they admire (or that they have been told about by people they admire.) and B) people who primarily get their history and philosophy from wide-ranging surveys, and drill deeper when they find information that is interesting or troubling. It's the difference between people A) who see the world as a bunch of competing narratives, or B) as a bunch of facts (with different probabilities of accuracy) that could support any number of narratives. A) people are looking for the right narratives to sign-on to, and B) people are looking for facts that can exclude entire classes of possible narratives that depend on them. The major difference is that people who learn about the world from narratives have to be sold. They believe things because someone has drawn them into a narrative around that thing like a prosecuting attorney, and that narrative was smooth enough that it never lost them. Malcolm Gladwell is always selling; he's writing lean, effective ad copy for made-up products - narrative concepts chosen based on market fit, not on their reality. The market is self-improvement, which is why you could imagine most of his books and articles as advertisements for a new pill. A pill to prevent crime before it happens, a pill to harness your secret internal knowledge when seconds matter (and to ignore your initial impulse when it's most likely to be wrong), a pill to make you successful when other people with your same resources aren't...

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
One of the core tenets of learning "critical thinking", and this is especially true in higher-education where "suspicion" might be a more accurate way to describe the approach and what you are taught, is to see all written things as presenting an argument. Written content is expressive, it is useful. And understanding how written words are used tells you a lot about intention and the context for their use (their meaning, essentially). I don't want to say your binary is 100% wrong, but I will say it is dangerous to assert that one form of writing ("Just the facts please!") is somehow more divorced from the systems and contexts of its representation than another ("Give me a story!"). It's far more porous than a simple division might make it seem. While your distinction makes people in group A seem like "dupes" and people in group B seem more "level headed", one could just as rightly say that people B might be ignorant of the construction of what they are studying and so succumb in the very same way. It's very easy to see essence in tradition when you ignore the role of people and storytelling in the creation of tradition. There is a reason why the study of history is, in many ways, more like the study of writing and creating history.

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago

One of the core tenets of learning "critical thinking", and this is especially true in higher-education where "suspicion" might be a more accurate way to describe the approach and what you are taught, is to see all written things as presenting an argument. Written content is expressive, it is useful. And understanding how written words are used tells you a lot about intention and the context for their use (their meaning, essentially). I don't want to say your binary is 100% wrong, but I will say it is dangerous to assert that one form of writing ("Just the facts please!") is somehow more divorced from the systems and contexts of its representation than another ("Give me a story!"). It's far more porous than a simple division might make it seem. While your distinction makes people in group A seem like "dupes" and people in group B seem more "level headed", one could just as rightly say that people B might be ignorant of the construction of what they are studying and so succumb in the very same way. It's very easy to see essence in tradition when you ignore the role of people and storytelling in the creation of tradition. There is a reason why the study of history is, in many ways, more like the study of writing and creating history.