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Why do you think they don’t teach critical thinking?

by galoisscobi 1y ago

flanked-evergl 1y ago
We have all met college graduates.
- galoisscobi 1y ago
  I don’t understand, can you elaborate? I’m trying to understand your perspective. New college grads I generally meet and work with are bright, hard working, curious and have a deep desire to learn. I don’t think we’re having the same experiences so I want to know more about yours.
  - flanked-evergl 1y ago
    Most fresh college graduates I have worked with are anxiety ridden wrecks incapable of developing skills on their own and lack fundamental knowledge of industry practices.
    - galoisscobi 1y ago
      Makes sense. I think they're lucky to be around you. Since you're hanging out on HN, I'd imagine you care about tech, doing things well and have a natural curiosity. Back when I started out, I was deep in debt, insecure about my skills and being around highly skilled people who had many more years of experience only deepened those insecurities. Luckily, people were kind and patient with me and gave me the apprenticeship I needed. They deeply cared about technical expertise and doing things well, probably like you if I am guessing right. I have my dream job today, and I am in a position to mentor new grads. I continue to pay it forward as the senior engineers did when I started out. Not all my colleagues do this, but I see so much potential around me and I try to grow it. It's one of the most satisfying when I get a note from a new grad/junior engineer on how they've grown after our work together. Thank you for caring! On a side note, I can't imagine the anxiety they must go through now between the economy being what it is and AI exacerbating the gaps in technical skills. Seems like a scarier time than when I graduated. It's harder to mentor in this environment, but it's a fun challenge to learn how to mentor in this environment.
- anon84873628 1y ago
  Some of us are even college grads ourselves!
mike_hearn 1y ago
Because whilst universities claim they do that, there is no evidence to suggest it is true. People genuinely trained in critical thinking would be highly skeptical of this claim. For example, - What exactly is the definition of critical thinking they are using? - Which part of a {computer science, art history, etc} course teaches this? - How is it assessed? - If it's a teachable skill, why are there no qualifications in it or researchers studying it specifically? - If it's something universities teach, why are there so many bad papers full of logical fallacies and obvious fraud? I know some like to argue philosophy is such a course but very few people do philosophy degrees, so even if that were true it could hardly be generalized to all of university teaching.
- galoisscobi 1y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing. If you had free rein of an engineering school in a university system, how would you re-design curriculum to address your concerns and establish proof of teaching critical thinking?
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    I don't know, I never thought about it much. I think engineering schools already do better than most others at this because requirements validation and weighing tradeoffs is such a big part of engineering as a discipline. Validating requirements often boils down to critical thinking, e.g. "but do you really mean that" and "is there a better way?". The issues with critical thinking really show up in the other areas of academia, the humanities and natural sciences. But it's hard to get people to do it because often there are strong incentives not to think critically, or to be outright misleading deliberately. I guess a curriculum focused around finding subtle flaws in arguments would be a reasonable place to start. It could be a lot of work to compile teaching materials that are tough enough. You could take papers that you know contain logic errors and ask students to find them. For instance, a lot of COVID papers work like this: 1. A COVID case is defined as anyone who gets a positive PCR test. 2. A positive PCR test is defined as detecting a COVID case. When you see it spelled out so simply the problem is obvious but the whole field of public health managed to not see it (there were a few papers that timidly pointed out the circular logic, but it never reached public awareness). Of course maybe it was deliberate. But you could assign students a few relevant papers and ask them to analyze them critically.

Why do you think they don’t teach critical thinking?

flanked-evergl 1y ago

We have all met college graduates.

galoisscobi 1y ago
I don’t understand, can you elaborate? I’m trying to understand your perspective. New college grads I generally meet and work with are bright, hard working, curious and have a deep desire to learn. I don’t think we’re having the same experiences so I want to know more about yours.
- flanked-evergl 1y ago
  Most fresh college graduates I have worked with are anxiety ridden wrecks incapable of developing skills on their own and lack fundamental knowledge of industry practices.
  - galoisscobi 1y ago
    Makes sense. I think they're lucky to be around you. Since you're hanging out on HN, I'd imagine you care about tech, doing things well and have a natural curiosity. Back when I started out, I was deep in debt, insecure about my skills and being around highly skilled people who had many more years of experience only deepened those insecurities. Luckily, people were kind and patient with me and gave me the apprenticeship I needed. They deeply cared about technical expertise and doing things well, probably like you if I am guessing right. I have my dream job today, and I am in a position to mentor new grads. I continue to pay it forward as the senior engineers did when I started out. Not all my colleagues do this, but I see so much potential around me and I try to grow it. It's one of the most satisfying when I get a note from a new grad/junior engineer on how they've grown after our work together. Thank you for caring! On a side note, I can't imagine the anxiety they must go through now between the economy being what it is and AI exacerbating the gaps in technical skills. Seems like a scarier time than when I graduated. It's harder to mentor in this environment, but it's a fun challenge to learn how to mentor in this environment.
anon84873628 1y ago
Some of us are even college grads ourselves!

mike_hearn 1y ago

Because whilst universities claim they do that, there is no evidence to suggest it is true. People genuinely trained in critical thinking would be highly skeptical of this claim. For example, - What exactly is the definition of critical thinking they are using? - Which part of a {computer science, art history, etc} course teaches this? - How is it assessed? - If it's a teachable skill, why are there no qualifications in it or researchers studying it specifically? - If it's something universities teach, why are there so many bad papers full of logical fallacies and obvious fraud? I know some like to argue philosophy is such a course but very few people do philosophy degrees, so even if that were true it could hardly be generalized to all of university teaching.

galoisscobi 1y ago
That's an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing. If you had free rein of an engineering school in a university system, how would you re-design curriculum to address your concerns and establish proof of teaching critical thinking?
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  I don't know, I never thought about it much. I think engineering schools already do better than most others at this because requirements validation and weighing tradeoffs is such a big part of engineering as a discipline. Validating requirements often boils down to critical thinking, e.g. "but do you really mean that" and "is there a better way?". The issues with critical thinking really show up in the other areas of academia, the humanities and natural sciences. But it's hard to get people to do it because often there are strong incentives not to think critically, or to be outright misleading deliberately. I guess a curriculum focused around finding subtle flaws in arguments would be a reasonable place to start. It could be a lot of work to compile teaching materials that are tough enough. You could take papers that you know contain logic errors and ask students to find them. For instance, a lot of COVID papers work like this: 1. A COVID case is defined as anyone who gets a positive PCR test. 2. A positive PCR test is defined as detecting a COVID case. When you see it spelled out so simply the problem is obvious but the whole field of public health managed to not see it (there were a few papers that timidly pointed out the circular logic, but it never reached public awareness). Of course maybe it was deliberate. But you could assign students a few relevant papers and ask them to analyze them critically.