12 ms·

That theory could be plausible, except Flynn used results from Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is just pattern recognition. There are no questions about ele

That theory could be plausible, except Flynn used results from Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is just pattern recognition. There are no questions about elephants or text-based questions that could introduce cultural bias. It's simply picking the shape that matches the pattern presented in a grid. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices

WalterBright 4y ago
I've often heard from humanities academics that STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  The irony of demonstrating a lack of critical thinking ability by claiming to be the great teachers of it has always been extremely amusing to me. Don’t correct them, it’s honestly better this way.
  - all2 4y ago
    Both the beauty and horror of non-stem courses is that they require a degree of abstract reasoning on par with computer science. What one does with that reasoning is up to them (and it is often twisted in laughable ways, see the portion of an abstract I posted up-thread). Often times the brightest thinkers have been from 'soft' sciences like history or sociology. I think it is because of the abstraction required to reasonable think about these subjects.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  Have you, or is this a very uncharitable gloss on what they actually were saying?
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Yes, many times, from many of them. Google "stem majors lack critical thinking skills". To drive the point home, google will autocomplete it for you.
    - tonyarkles 4y ago
      This is where The Algorithms have a fun hidden place in our daily lives. I tried a number of variations of that phrase and couldn't get Google to autocomplete it for me without getting to "stem majors lack crit". Before that it was suggesting math/calculus and chemistry skills without any mention of critical thinking.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      Google will autocomplete it for me but then pretty much all the results I see are STEM proponents refuting this supposedly common criticism.
      - stametseater 4y ago
        Completions for "stem majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue, critical thinking skills, creative Completions for "humanity majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue No humanity majors refuting the claim that they lack critical thinking skills, maybe because that is never claimed in the first place?
        emodendroket 4y ago
        A bit of a logical leap in my mind to infer from that that there a bunch of of people saying STEM majors "lack critical thinking skills."
        Natsu 4y ago
        Then who are said STEM majors refuting?
        4y ago
- FreakLegion 4y ago
  If we interpret the claim charitably as 'STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills to a greater degree than other majors', I don't think it's obviously unfair, with some caveats. Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.
  - throw0101c 4y ago
    > Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. It could also be that folks that dislike nuance and ambiguity self-select to go into STEM fields because the problems and answers/solutions are more clear-cut and 'concrete'. Also: * https://xkcd.com/451/ https://xkcd.com/451/
  - bawolff 4y ago
    > Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Its also very different from what STEM majors do. In life there are no specific right answers just ones that aren't wrong. STEM majors dont live in a world of binary right/wrong problems any more than anyone else does.
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      STE majors might not, but I am not sure I can go along with you on the M. ;)
      - bawolff 4y ago
        Math is all about making proofs. There are infinite ways to prove something, and proofs are often asscesed partially based on aesethetic value. If anything, i think it applies to the m more than the ste.
- snapplebobapple 4y ago
  As a humanities graduate i can confirm there is almost no critical thinking going on in that department outside economics. I wouldn't put too much stock in anything a contemporary humanities academic says.
  - zen_1 4y ago
    Maybe they're confusing critical thinking with critical theory? That's an unfortunate near collision of names if there ever was one
    - watwut 4y ago
      To make it worst, the majority of people who complain about critical theory have no idea what it is and never studied legal theory. They just react to moral panic they see around them.
      - snapplebobapple 4y ago
        I think the more accurate description is that the people pushing critical theory purposefully make it as obtuse and confusing as possible because if they say plainly that a critical theory is distinguished from a regular theory by being activist in nature seeking emancipation from some poorly defined slavery/injustice people will point out that activism by definition has a result in mind and is inherently not rational in the face of observation, as the conclusion has already been decided so it is, at best, an abuse of words to call this crap a theory. The collision of names is likely on purpose because there is no validity to the "solutions" proposed by the "theory" (although there is some validity to some of the observations of injustice, as with any good lie there is a kernel of truth) This isn't made any better by the two semi distinct historical roots of the modern schools of this crap bringing in either marxism by way of the frankfurt school or postmodernism (or increasingly some combination of the two). In general it becomes pretty obvious that it is a self contradicting mess that has no place in society, let alone at institutions of higher learning.
- stametseater 4y ago
  Maybe that's true, but seems reasonable to retort that humanities majors do not confer empirical investigation skills.
- worrycue 4y ago
  I really wonder what do the people in humanities consider “critical thinking”. Mathematics and formal proofs are the epitome of logical thought IMHO - while arguments in the humanities often don’t have the same level of rigor; nor are their p-tests as stringent as in the physical sciences. So what exactly is it that’s they think is missing from STEM? Edit: Don’t just downvote. Explain. That’s what we are here for.
  - all2 4y ago
    Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: This article utilises feminist technoscience studies' notions of bodily 'materialisation' and 'ontological choreographies', offering a cyborg feminist account... And it goes on. Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on. I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time. Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine. But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others. And now we're here.
    - skissane 4y ago
      > Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease. Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
- analog31 4y ago
  Every subject claims to teach critical thinking. If I learned it anywhere, it was from my parents, both scientists. Observing my kids, the high school classes that seemed to teach the most about critical thinking were in English and social studies. Unfortunately, STEM was heavily burdened by test prep.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > STEM was heavily burdened by test prep That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school. Sadly, I know some highly educated STEM professionals who rigorously use the scientific method to separate truth from crap in their field. Outside their field, the scientific method goes right out the window and they rely on emotional arguments and wishful thinking.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      In a rapidly overcomplicated world where people are forced into hyper-specialization, everyone compartmentalizes.
    - analog31 4y ago
      >>> That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school. Indeed, but I would say the high school "system" as a whole, burdened by pressure from parents. And pressure from the state, which was rewarding and punishing schools for test scores and other metrics. Middle class parents were just gaa-gaa over pushing their kids into STEM programs at top colleges, to the point where it was kind of overbearing. I might have been one of those parents, but my neighbor, a high school math and physics teacher, talked me out of it when my kids were younger. At the same time, some of the non-STEM classes were pretty hard nosed, like the one were they took apart media and advertising. Fortunately my kids learned the scientific method at home, same place they learned to read. But it was for the love of knowledge and learning, not to get ahead. That's also how I learned it.
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
- antisthenes 4y ago
  If anything, it's the exact opposite, although either proposition seems dubious at best. Critical thinking skills are conferred to children in a much earlier age than the decision whether to pursue humanities/STEM or even go to college at all. I've certainly met people for whom having a PhD would be like putting lipstick on a pig.
ramblenode 4y ago
Good point about the Raven's Progressive Matrices, but I still think the parent's hypothesis that we have improved at test taking is relevant. Outside of verbal reasoning there are a lot of soft factors that influence test taking ability. People who haven't taken a timed test before would probably perform worse than expected simply because it is an unfamiliar context, and unfamiliarity tends to create higher stress/anxiety which is known to be bad for cognitive performance in novices. A group that has taken hundreds of tests will probably score better on a test in an unfamiliar subject than another unprepared group that isn't used to taking tests simply because they have some meta-knowledge about test taking.
- aeternum 4y ago
  Yes, I think unfamiliarity might actually be the main explanation here. IQ tests in general were popular 20 years ago and have since fallen out of fashion quite significantly: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IQ%20test https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IQ%20tes... The lower performance may simply be due to people being less familiar/trained on the type of questions that IQ tests tend to ask.

WalterBright 4y ago

I've often heard from humanities academics that STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills.

Godel_unicode 4y ago
The irony of demonstrating a lack of critical thinking ability by claiming to be the great teachers of it has always been extremely amusing to me. Don’t correct them, it’s honestly better this way.
- all2 4y ago
  Both the beauty and horror of non-stem courses is that they require a degree of abstract reasoning on par with computer science. What one does with that reasoning is up to them (and it is often twisted in laughable ways, see the portion of an abstract I posted up-thread). Often times the brightest thinkers have been from 'soft' sciences like history or sociology. I think it is because of the abstraction required to reasonable think about these subjects.
emodendroket 4y ago
Have you, or is this a very uncharitable gloss on what they actually were saying?
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Yes, many times, from many of them. Google "stem majors lack critical thinking skills". To drive the point home, google will autocomplete it for you.
  - tonyarkles 4y ago
    This is where The Algorithms have a fun hidden place in our daily lives. I tried a number of variations of that phrase and couldn't get Google to autocomplete it for me without getting to "stem majors lack crit". Before that it was suggesting math/calculus and chemistry skills without any mention of critical thinking.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    Google will autocomplete it for me but then pretty much all the results I see are STEM proponents refuting this supposedly common criticism.
    - stametseater 4y ago
      Completions for "stem majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue, critical thinking skills, creative Completions for "humanity majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue No humanity majors refuting the claim that they lack critical thinking skills, maybe because that is never claimed in the first place?
      - emodendroket 4y ago
        A bit of a logical leap in my mind to infer from that that there a bunch of of people saying STEM majors "lack critical thinking skills."
        Natsu 4y ago
        Then who are said STEM majors refuting?
        4y ago
FreakLegion 4y ago
If we interpret the claim charitably as 'STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills to a greater degree than other majors', I don't think it's obviously unfair, with some caveats. Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. It could also be that folks that dislike nuance and ambiguity self-select to go into STEM fields because the problems and answers/solutions are more clear-cut and 'concrete'. Also: * https://xkcd.com/451/ https://xkcd.com/451/
- bawolff 4y ago
  > Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Its also very different from what STEM majors do. In life there are no specific right answers just ones that aren't wrong. STEM majors dont live in a world of binary right/wrong problems any more than anyone else does.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    STE majors might not, but I am not sure I can go along with you on the M. ;)
    - bawolff 4y ago
      Math is all about making proofs. There are infinite ways to prove something, and proofs are often asscesed partially based on aesethetic value. If anything, i think it applies to the m more than the ste.
snapplebobapple 4y ago
As a humanities graduate i can confirm there is almost no critical thinking going on in that department outside economics. I wouldn't put too much stock in anything a contemporary humanities academic says.
- zen_1 4y ago
  Maybe they're confusing critical thinking with critical theory? That's an unfortunate near collision of names if there ever was one
  - watwut 4y ago
    To make it worst, the majority of people who complain about critical theory have no idea what it is and never studied legal theory. They just react to moral panic they see around them.
    - snapplebobapple 4y ago
      I think the more accurate description is that the people pushing critical theory purposefully make it as obtuse and confusing as possible because if they say plainly that a critical theory is distinguished from a regular theory by being activist in nature seeking emancipation from some poorly defined slavery/injustice people will point out that activism by definition has a result in mind and is inherently not rational in the face of observation, as the conclusion has already been decided so it is, at best, an abuse of words to call this crap a theory. The collision of names is likely on purpose because there is no validity to the "solutions" proposed by the "theory" (although there is some validity to some of the observations of injustice, as with any good lie there is a kernel of truth) This isn't made any better by the two semi distinct historical roots of the modern schools of this crap bringing in either marxism by way of the frankfurt school or postmodernism (or increasingly some combination of the two). In general it becomes pretty obvious that it is a self contradicting mess that has no place in society, let alone at institutions of higher learning.
stametseater 4y ago
Maybe that's true, but seems reasonable to retort that humanities majors do not confer empirical investigation skills.
worrycue 4y ago
I really wonder what do the people in humanities consider “critical thinking”. Mathematics and formal proofs are the epitome of logical thought IMHO - while arguments in the humanities often don’t have the same level of rigor; nor are their p-tests as stringent as in the physical sciences. So what exactly is it that’s they think is missing from STEM? Edit: Don’t just downvote. Explain. That’s what we are here for.
- all2 4y ago
  Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: This article utilises feminist technoscience studies' notions of bodily 'materialisation' and 'ontological choreographies', offering a cyborg feminist account... And it goes on. Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on. I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time. Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine. But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others. And now we're here.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease. Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
analog31 4y ago
Every subject claims to teach critical thinking. If I learned it anywhere, it was from my parents, both scientists. Observing my kids, the high school classes that seemed to teach the most about critical thinking were in English and social studies. Unfortunately, STEM was heavily burdened by test prep.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > STEM was heavily burdened by test prep That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school. Sadly, I know some highly educated STEM professionals who rigorously use the scientific method to separate truth from crap in their field. Outside their field, the scientific method goes right out the window and they rely on emotional arguments and wishful thinking.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    In a rapidly overcomplicated world where people are forced into hyper-specialization, everyone compartmentalizes.
  - analog31 4y ago
    >>> That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school. Indeed, but I would say the high school "system" as a whole, burdened by pressure from parents. And pressure from the state, which was rewarding and punishing schools for test scores and other metrics. Middle class parents were just gaa-gaa over pushing their kids into STEM programs at top colleges, to the point where it was kind of overbearing. I might have been one of those parents, but my neighbor, a high school math and physics teacher, talked me out of it when my kids were younger. At the same time, some of the non-STEM classes were pretty hard nosed, like the one were they took apart media and advertising. Fortunately my kids learned the scientific method at home, same place they learned to read. But it was for the love of knowledge and learning, not to get ahead. That's also how I learned it.
canadianfella 4y ago
[dead]
antisthenes 4y ago
If anything, it's the exact opposite, although either proposition seems dubious at best. Critical thinking skills are conferred to children in a much earlier age than the decision whether to pursue humanities/STEM or even go to college at all. I've certainly met people for whom having a PhD would be like putting lipstick on a pig.

ramblenode 4y ago

Good point about the Raven's Progressive Matrices, but I still think the parent's hypothesis that we have improved at test taking is relevant. Outside of verbal reasoning there are a lot of soft factors that influence test taking ability. People who haven't taken a timed test before would probably perform worse than expected simply because it is an unfamiliar context, and unfamiliarity tends to create higher stress/anxiety which is known to be bad for cognitive performance in novices. A group that has taken hundreds of tests will probably score better on a test in an unfamiliar subject than another unprepared group that isn't used to taking tests simply because they have some meta-knowledge about test taking.

aeternum 4y ago
Yes, I think unfamiliarity might actually be the main explanation here. IQ tests in general were popular 20 years ago and have since fallen out of fashion quite significantly: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IQ%20test https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IQ%20tes... The lower performance may simply be due to people being less familiar/trained on the type of questions that IQ tests tend to ask.