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Critical thinking requires time and effort. Offloading critical thinking is something every single person does in order to make sense of the world and make dec

Critical thinking requires time and effort. Offloading critical thinking is something every single person does in order to make sense of the world and make decisions, it's basically what trust is and it's necessary for the world to function. The idea that we can just ignore this risk and allow critical thinking within individuals to handle it is not even wishful thinking, just shirking responsibility imo.

TuringTest 4y ago
Also, critical thinking is a social phenomenon. You make sense of the world based on the sources you trust, and that trust is created gregariously by learning to rely on what your peers are sharing as trustworthy. The time and effort needed is shared with the group, and the resulting wisdom of the crowds filters out the most outrageous messages from the outside, developing a 'groupthink' that establishes a consensus of what is "common sense" for the group. However, someone with the power to broadcast messages to the whole group can overcome that group processing, and sway the whole group to a different way of thinking.
Zurrrrr 4y ago
I've never seen anyone defend and make excuses for people not thinking critically. Sure, trust is one thing, and we relax critical thinking....but trust among people we know has nothing to do with failures as large as thinking, say 5G causes covid. Trust has nothing to do with that really. And I'm not ignoring the risk. I absolutely acknowledge it Trump almost got elected twice for chrissakes. I just don't see what can be done about it with a population resistant to thinking.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I am a big fan of critical thinking, but shouting "think harder people" is just not a solution to anything, and neither is giving up. We can and should change our system to support critical thinking, and we can change it to demand much less critical thinking to make effective decisions.
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago
    It's not so much I'm shouting "think harder people", more lamenting that I think it's too late. The shouting should have been done about 30 years ago. I'm cynical, but I don't really see a path forward for the US when half the population is so resistant to truth. But absolutely, I agree with should be improving education and changing things so not every single thing should have to be analyzed to make a decision.
- pixl97 4y ago
  You're looking at such a short time frame, that it's not a surprise that this all seems like a new phenomenon to you. Lets jump back to 90 years ago to Europe. Do you think the lead up to world war two was caused by a lack of critical thinking? Do you think if I sent you back to 1920 so you could howl into the wind about critical thinking if you believe you'd have made one iota of difference to the devastation that occurred? I would like you to give me a power, that is to make critical thinking an uninterruptable process in your mind, and also have the ability to spam the shit out of you with things that you should probably be thinking critically about anyway. You would be a wreck in days. The number of things you take for granted about the world around you, things society and the social contract take care of silently and with little notice would now be things you have to think about. You would have to back process that entire queue of completely dumb shit we don't think critically about but likely should. You wouldn't get anything else done. Instead you, me, and Mr McGhee push those things out of our mind because we have work do to, relationships to work on, food to eat, stress to relieve, new things to learn, etc. Humans require a lot of time doing a lot of illogical human crap to remain sane, and not set around being machines.
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago
    Where did I ver say anything that indicated I thought it was a new phenomenon or that I was limiting what I was describing to a short time frame? That aside, no idea what you are arguing here. It seems to be that because critical thinking won't solve every single problem it's worthless?
    - pixl97 4y ago
      You're very close to a breakthrough there... The first thing you have to accept is that 'critical thinking' is not a thing. There is only thinking. When you have that realization it is much easier to see when a person gets themselves in a situation that requires nonbiased, factual, information based processing to get out of they are exceptionally unlikely to do it as they lack the nonbiased factual data in the first place and likely have no realization it even exists. And that's not even the hard part. No, that's the easy part. The hard part is when there is a set of biased agents that keep feeding you bad information that keep you away from that thinking revolution that would allow you to escape the trap. Friends, politics, advertizing, these are all ever present agents that bias you to things like societal norms, to acceptable behaviors, that tell you what to think and not think about. And these are things that you also spread to other people. It's just part of being a society, a civilization.

TuringTest 4y ago

Also, critical thinking is a social phenomenon. You make sense of the world based on the sources you trust, and that trust is created gregariously by learning to rely on what your peers are sharing as trustworthy. The time and effort needed is shared with the group, and the resulting wisdom of the crowds filters out the most outrageous messages from the outside, developing a 'groupthink' that establishes a consensus of what is "common sense" for the group. However, someone with the power to broadcast messages to the whole group can overcome that group processing, and sway the whole group to a different way of thinking.

Zurrrrr 4y ago

I've never seen anyone defend and make excuses for people not thinking critically. Sure, trust is one thing, and we relax critical thinking....but trust among people we know has nothing to do with failures as large as thinking, say 5G causes covid. Trust has nothing to do with that really. And I'm not ignoring the risk. I absolutely acknowledge it Trump almost got elected twice for chrissakes. I just don't see what can be done about it with a population resistant to thinking.

wpietri 4y ago
I am a big fan of critical thinking, but shouting "think harder people" is just not a solution to anything, and neither is giving up. We can and should change our system to support critical thinking, and we can change it to demand much less critical thinking to make effective decisions.
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  It's not so much I'm shouting "think harder people", more lamenting that I think it's too late. The shouting should have been done about 30 years ago. I'm cynical, but I don't really see a path forward for the US when half the population is so resistant to truth. But absolutely, I agree with should be improving education and changing things so not every single thing should have to be analyzed to make a decision.
pixl97 4y ago
You're looking at such a short time frame, that it's not a surprise that this all seems like a new phenomenon to you. Lets jump back to 90 years ago to Europe. Do you think the lead up to world war two was caused by a lack of critical thinking? Do you think if I sent you back to 1920 so you could howl into the wind about critical thinking if you believe you'd have made one iota of difference to the devastation that occurred? I would like you to give me a power, that is to make critical thinking an uninterruptable process in your mind, and also have the ability to spam the shit out of you with things that you should probably be thinking critically about anyway. You would be a wreck in days. The number of things you take for granted about the world around you, things society and the social contract take care of silently and with little notice would now be things you have to think about. You would have to back process that entire queue of completely dumb shit we don't think critically about but likely should. You wouldn't get anything else done. Instead you, me, and Mr McGhee push those things out of our mind because we have work do to, relationships to work on, food to eat, stress to relieve, new things to learn, etc. Humans require a lot of time doing a lot of illogical human crap to remain sane, and not set around being machines.
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  Where did I ver say anything that indicated I thought it was a new phenomenon or that I was limiting what I was describing to a short time frame? That aside, no idea what you are arguing here. It seems to be that because critical thinking won't solve every single problem it's worthless?
  - pixl97 4y ago
    You're very close to a breakthrough there... The first thing you have to accept is that 'critical thinking' is not a thing. There is only thinking. When you have that realization it is much easier to see when a person gets themselves in a situation that requires nonbiased, factual, information based processing to get out of they are exceptionally unlikely to do it as they lack the nonbiased factual data in the first place and likely have no realization it even exists. And that's not even the hard part. No, that's the easy part. The hard part is when there is a set of biased agents that keep feeding you bad information that keep you away from that thinking revolution that would allow you to escape the trap. Friends, politics, advertizing, these are all ever present agents that bias you to things like societal norms, to acceptable behaviors, that tell you what to think and not think about. And these are things that you also spread to other people. It's just part of being a society, a civilization.