Over time, I've come to realise that the most important gift we can give our children is formal training in critical thinking. I think STEM and such can wait.
The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties etc. is important not only to realise the truth at an abstract level, but also has practical implications on things such as successful investment strategies.
I'm becoming a broken record on HN about this, but the evidence is in and you can't divorce critical thinking from domain-specific knowledge.
> The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties
You just can't do this properly without a shitload of core domain knowledge in philosophy, politics, media, history and also whatever specific domain knowledge pertinent.
You can't "question narratives" you see in the newspaper if you don't have a good theory of media like what's provided in Manufacturing Consent and even with that you can't "question [the] narrative" of some specific economics thought-piece in the Financial Times if you don't have the relevant domain knowledge in economics.
If you think of the people you'd regard as excellent critical thinkers, wouldn't these all be people with deep knowledge of their domain(s)? Chomsky was never formally schooled in "critical thinking". He just went through normal, rigorous education, reading stacks of books and newspapers along the way.
If someone says "Interest rates are negatively correlated to GDP growth" then sure, I guess you need some knowledge of economics to asses the validity of such claim.
On the other hand, if someone makes a moral assessment such as "every human being should dedicate 40% of their time to helping other people, otherwise they're a horrible person" I think you can assess its moral validity from first principles. You only need to live on earth and understand the language in which the claim is made. If you apply logic correctly and have some fundamental moral axioms (which can be inducted by experience and logic), you'll arrive at a conclusion that respects your axioms.
Narratives put forth by the media, government, etc. are usually of the second kind, i.e. moral ideas. If there are facts, they're important only to the extent that they support the moral idea at hand. I think this "moral" critical thinking is much more important than domain knowledge.
> I think you can assess its moral validity from first principles. You only need to live on earth and understand the language in which the claim is made.
The only reason I think you think this is true is because your particular example is something you already think is wrong, because you constructed it to be wrong. Arbitrary moral claims are not easy to assess. Philosophy is highly complicated and knowledge-rich.
People don't assess moral claims from "first principles" in their day to day. Basically every Sociologist, Psychologist, and Philosopher would disagree with that idea.
> If you apply logic correctly and have some fundamental moral axioms (which can be inducted by experience and logic), you'll arrive at a conclusion that respects your axioms.
Let's take this piece by piece:
> If you apply logic correctly
and doing this is something that doesn't require knowledge of logic? As we are taking about knowledge-requiring critical thinking vs non-knowledge-requiring critical thinking.
> have some fundamental moral axioms (which can be inducted by experience and logic)
There's a lot going on here. One, it's disputable that moral axioms can be justified a posteriori by induction. Two, is "experience" here some thing that humans can gain without also gaining knowledge?
> Narratives put forth by the media, government, etc. are usually of the second kind, i.e. moral ideas.
I'd disagree with this unless you have some very wide definition of a "moral idea". Much of what comes out of the media and government is technocratic stuff, or entertainment, or gossip.
> People don't assess moral claims from "first principles" in their day to day. Basically every Sociologist, Psychologist, and Philosopher would disagree with that idea.
They do when they use critical thinking. But I also believe people don't use critical thinking in their day to day.
> and doing this is something that doesn't require knowledge of logic? As we are taking about knowledge-requiring critical thinking vs non-knowledge-requiring critical thinking.
I think logic is inducible from personal experience. The real discussion is about knowledge that one person can not (reasonably) discover by themselves (e.g. the fact that a hydrogen atom has one proton) vs knowledge that one person can discover by themselves (the fact that humans avoid pain and chase pleasure, the reason why killing other people is bad, etc).
> There's a lot going on here. One, it's disputable that moral axioms can be justified a posteriori by induction. Two, is "experience" here some thing that humans can gain without also gaining knowledge?
By experience I mean the fact of being a human being living on earth. Knowledge that we all have in common: how pain feels, how pleasure feels, etc. I said induction because that's how we create a mental model of reality, since we have no other starting point than our senses and our senses are not formal proofs of anything.
I'm sorry if my wording is not exactly the one a philosopher would use. I have no formal training in this, but I think a lot about it and hope that my point comes across.
> I'd disagree with this unless you have some very wide definition of a "moral idea". Much of what comes out of the media and government is technocratic stuff, or entertainment, or gossip.
Ok, I'll give some examples of the narratives I've seen being pushed by the media and some governments:
- People against open borders are inherently xenophobic.
- People from {list of countries} should not enter the country, because they have a higher chance of being terrorists.
- People should not have the freedom to send messages to each other without the state being able to snoop on them.
- The main cause of the pay gap between men and women is prejudice and misogyny, therefore, we should reduce the gap by any means possible.
I'm not necessarily saying that those true, false or anything, but I think they are "moral ideas" and these moral ideas will shape the world view of many people. I also think that an ignorant but insightful person can think critically about these claims and arrive at a conclusion that respects their axioms. Obviously, most of what comes of the media is not moral ideas, but moral ideas are so important that it's worth to think about them, because they are what gets presidents elected and laws passed.
As someone who has majored in English, I strongly disagree. You don’t need to understand the subject matter to make rudimentary assessments of validity. People who study the humanities learn to ask questions like, does the author seem to have a bias? Are some obvious questions not being raised by the text? Does the author contradict themselves?
You might not be able to definitively state that the author is being disingenuous, or is a shill, but you can learn to explicitly state where certain narratives are weakly supported. Most people can’t do this. They tend to accept all texts as authoritative.
As someone who has read a fair bit of "critical"ly read texts - I strongly disagree. English majors often don't understand enough to even be able to pick out contradictions properly, and all they end up doing is (quite ironically) act as spin doctors spinning webs for the ideological sugar daddies.
> You don’t need to understand the subject matter to make rudimentary assessments of validity.
Possibly for really rudimentary assessments, but do you have any evidence for this? The book source in my original comment is package with peer-reviewed research on this. One study in the book is about college-educated participants that aren't baseball fans scoring worse on a reading comprehension test than non-college educated labourers who were baseball fans when the subject matter is baseball.
Really, each of the questions you list all require knowledge to answer. The latter you could say just requires literacy but that is knowledge it's not some skill you can divorce from domain-specific concepts.
> Are some obvious questions not being raised by the text?
How could doing this be some generalisable ability divorced from knowledge about the content of the text and the domain(s) of concern in the text? Without even looking at the scientific research it seems pretty implausible that you could train a human being to pick out "obvious questions" of import to some text about the 2nd World War if you ensured to keep them ignorant of knowledge about France, Nazi Germany, Nationalism, War, etc. etc.
I agree that you can't reliably reveal things as false, contradictory, or misleading without knowledge of the domain - but I think you absolutely can 'question', doubt, and maintain a healthy scepticism.
To use the economics example, you can think things like 'well hang on, how did they measure that'; 'is that really related to or indicative of that'; 'this author has a lot of similar things to say on this topic, some other motive perhaps'.
Answering those questions may require more reading, acquiring some domain knowledge, but you don't need already to have domain knowledge on every subject that you want to read about thoughtfully.
Agreed. Epistemology in the abstract without concrete examples of how it has gone right/wrong is a dubiously useful tool.
I've found history to be hepful for better understanding what makes good and bad ways of knowing things.
Unfortunately our public school system wastes its history curriculum on spinning fairy tales. It took years of reading serious history books to deprogram myself. I see the same thing being done to my kid.
Dee Brown's book is fantastic. And I've instantly added Sundown Towns to my reading list. In that genre I'd highly recommend "Devil in the Grove" by Gilbert King.
You can question if you don’t have domain knowledge, you just look sort of stupid. Lyric Irving, an NBA basketball player, is known for this. His comments are what I imagine a world of critical, but uniformed people would look like.
> You just can't do this properly without a shitload of core domain knowledge in philosophy, politics, media, history and also whatever specific domain knowledge pertinent.
I don't think I'm disagreeing with you, but does epistemology not cover like 90% of it? We're told so many things, if people could learn to just say "oh, let's see the proof and then I'll decide", rather than the pure narrative nature of the news today, wouldn't that go a long way to freeing us from this quagmire?
Unless you know how to assess the "proof" then you'd just be stuck in a state of permanent but useless skepticism. Also, many times a "proof" is inappropriate or just fundamentally unproduceable, but we are still required to engage with the content and that content could still be valuable and 'true'.
I've studied epistemology in some undergraduate philosophy classes and I've generally found it much less useful than say the reasonably complete theory of media provided by Manufacturing Consent (though my study of epistemology likely helped me understand that book).
When I'm reading AI articles in newspapers, my background in software engineering is far far far far more useful in assessing the validity of the content that merely being able to ask "oh, let's see the proof and then I'll decide". If I wasn't knowledgeable about AI at all, what would I do with a "proof" if it was given to me?
> Unless you know how to assess the "proof" then you'd just be stuck in a state of permanent but useless skepticism.
Agreed, but I'd suggest that that state would (at least often) be better than the current state of affairs, where most people outsource the formation of opinions to various third parties. This is how we get things like the Iraq war, or anti-vaxxers.
> Also, many times a "proof" is inappropriate or just fundamentally unproduceable, but we are still required to engage with the content and that content could still be valuable and 'true'.
100% agree. And yet, look how many genuinely intelligent people on HN hold very strong conclusions on topics that are unprovable, with no sense of uncertainty.
> I've studied epistemology in some undergraduate philosophy classes and I've generally found it much less useful than say the reasonably complete theory of media provided by Manufacturing Consent (though my study of epistemology likely helped me understand that book).
Expressing ideas in narrative form is often an easier way to communicate as it's easier to conceptualize when it's put in relatable examples. One of the most useful ideas I think could improve the world is that there aren't only two two states of knowledge, True or False, but also (at least) one additional: Unknown. Of course, everyone will gladly admit this in a thread about philosophy, but move to a thread on politics, and watch that knowledge vanish.
> If I wasn't knowledgeable about AI at all, what would I do with a "proof" if it was given to me?
Two (there are others) options are: outsource your opinion to a third party, or remain undecided. Which one is preferable depends on the situation.
I attended (and still hang around at, sometimes teaching a class at) a small college embedded in the University of California Santa Barbara called the College of Creative Studies (organizationally next to the College of Letters and Sciences and the College of Engineering, each of which have ten thousand students: CCS has less than 400).
People at times erroneously try to liken us to an "honors program", but that's very wrong: in an honors program, you are given special sections and harder challenges (maybe replacement assignments), but the structure is largely the same; with CCS, the structure is removed: you are given an advisor who works with you to figure out the extent to which you might just skip years of prerequisites you might not need (or can quickly learn yourself with a book). Sometimes, we are considered "a graduate program for undergraduates" (which is quite true of a lot of the paperwork structure and respect afforded students, but I think is a description that misses a lot of the fundamental differences between graduate and undergraduate education with respect to failure modes; that is, however, a digression).
This program was created at the very end of the 60s, and had only seven majors--Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Literature, Art, and Music Composition (later, Computer Science and some kind of BioChem major were added)--chosen to be majors where an undergraduate could "push the state of the art" by the time they left. Students are treated as "peers in the educational process", and were essentially encouraged to teach their own class in an area where they had become an expert by the time they graduated (at least this used to be the case; there were some unfortunate policy decisions that happened a decade ago that have never really been fixed, as it damaged a culture).
The person who created this institution--Marvin Mudrick--became the first Provost, and largely ran the major of Literature; notably, he was somewhat despised by the L&S English department (for occasionally quite good reason). My understanding (which might be wrong) is that he reveled in the idea that students might get to learn from people who had very different opinions, and was happy to have people teach classes with whom he disagreed strongly (though, probably not from L&S English ;P).
And now, the reason I provide this context for the point I want to make: students at CCS have to choose a major, and are expected to go super deep; you can't come in "undeclared", nor is the program really "interdisciplinary" (though we are so small we definitely have classes that sometimes make it feel that way, and sometimes people are so motivated that they double major). In fact, as part of the paperwork and prerequisite reduction mechanisms, a lot of the "general education" work that people are usually expected to take--structured work in various programs from lists of requirements--is just scrapped and replaced by a "breadth requirement" to take "eight courses, widely distributed, outside of your major, and another two that are different, but related".
Marvin Mudrick, who got to do all of this because he was a friend of the Chancellor at the time, had an idea for a different college called the College of General Studies, which would be the epitome of a "liberal arts" education, focussing on nothing and attempting to learn everything. It was never created. Now, I know it was also his idea, and it has been a long time since I read works by and about him, but I also remember something very key he described about the College of Creative Studies, and which might be what led him to decide to not continue to pursue his other idea.
In the book I had once read about Marvin Mudrick, a quote--which I am going to paraphrase and butcher from memory--that stood out the most to me was "it doesn't matter what someone learns, as long as they learn it deeply, as then the student can appreciate what it really means to know something and will never henceforth believe that they know something when they actually know almost nothing". I truly believe that, and I thereby not only agree that it seems almost impossible for someone to have "critical thinking skills" if they never really studied any topics to have any depth, but will say that you have to go further: we need to take each student (whether through a structure like college or just by working within society so people have the free time and public resources to study their own interests), help them find their passion and enable them to push the boundaries of their knowledge into a topic far enough to be forced to apply critical thinking deeply enough that they can appreciate the limits of their own, and thereby others', knowledge.
You probably could have left out all but the last paragraph and made your point haha... but thanks for that quote. It’s almost like you need to climb the Dunning-Kruger curve at least once in a specific domain before you can realize when you’re on the wrong side of the curve in any other domain.
The problem is that critical thinking is essentially a negative activity. It's a means of defending oneself against potentially harmful ideas or ideas that one simply doesn't like. It's also rather abstract. One can't learn to think critically until one has learnt to think. One can't learn to think at all until he has first learnt some ideas to think about.
To engage the human mind (and the human heart) one needs something positive to aim for. That's why I think that the best approach is not to pick and choose among ideas and then make certain subjects compulsory (as in a curriculum). Rather find something that interests a child and then figure out how to do more of it. But this is best pursued outside the school system.
>The problem is that critical thinking is essentially a negative activity. It's a means of defending oneself against potentially harmful ideas or ideas that one simply doesn't like. It's also rather abstract. One can't learn to think critically until one has learnt to think. One can't learn to think at all until he has first learnt some ideas to think about.
STEM is critical thinking. With the most ruthless judge there is - reality. If your airplane design won't fly, no amount of clever rhetoric will change that. You cannot design engineering marvels with mush for brains.
Not really. Many people I know who studied stem for example have strong tendency to take texts literally and at face value - for example biographies and historical texts. They don't seem to pick on inconsistencies, obvious self-promotion and such. Or have trouble to understand differences in interpretations of history and how they affect texts.
Another tendency is to insist on "either this or that" binary where in reality is a lot of complex nuance and middle ground.
And lastly, practically, I work as programmer and I swear to got that good mouth and confidence and right look takes you really far away with other programmers. It wont save someone completely incapable, but many people in tech confuse arrogance and confidence with being super skilled.
> many people in tech confuse arrogance and confidence with being super skilled.
They will initially, but they'll recognize the crap code after a while and won't trust them anymore. The converse is true, too. In my jobs, initially I was not trusted until I developed a track record of getting good results.
> have strong tendency to take texts literally and at face value
People "on the spectrum" tend to do that. Most STEM people are not on the spectrum.
However, a rhetorical device a lot of people use is to take what one writes excessively literally in order to refute it. They know perfectly well what they are doing, and I take it as a sign that they lost the point :-) I wouldn't confuse them with people on the spectrum.
> People "on the spectrum" tend to do that. Most STEM people are not on the spectrum.
Non spectrum STEM people do that too quite a lot. It is not just personality thing. The classes they teach in technical schools require exactly that. You don't learn to doubt math book or physics book nor encounter another physics book that says something contradictory. Nor you have to take into account writers bias or reconcile multiple contradictory trends. (That is not criticism of stem classes, they simply have different goal.)
Just because something is done by people on spectrum does not mean neurotypical cant do it.
> They will initially, but they'll recognize the crap code after a while and won't trust them anymore.
I did not said that the arrogance and confidence imply completely crap code. Again, there is false binary here.
It just mean that such person is seen as more capable then he is and that his takedowns of more calm people are taken at face value too. Meaning that arrogant and confident person wins discussion where he is wrong and does not know what is talked about and is capable to harm reputation of competitors. It manifests mostly in unclear situations with unpredictable outcome, complicated situations, strategic decisions etc. It systematically manifests when there are differences of opinions.
This will sound objectionable, but I do not believe most people value critical thinking. In fact, to many it can offend them. Objective analysis and the ability to question assumptions, groupthink, consensus offends people. And even if it didn't, it's nearly clear most people are not even capable of it. There's an Einstein quote about this:
>Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
> Objective analysis and the ability to question assumptions, groupthink, consensus offends people.
I disagree. Assumptions, groupthink and consensus are more a consequence of a social hierarchy. Social offense is the feeling one experiences when that hierarchy is challenged. It's a feeling that probably evolved with our pack animal ancestors.
And while social offense is something your brain invents like any other feeling, it's not something you can simply ignore; analogously, the feeling of cold is in your head, but ignoring it can lead to hypothermia. We're still social creatures, our careers and relationships are directly linked to our reputations. We can't simply ignore someone (potentially) assaulting our reputation because it has real world impacts.
To make critical thinking work requires social mechanisms that protect the reputation of the person who is found to be wrong. That's a large part of the reason for the scientific method, for the scholarly tone in academic journals, for professionalism in business, etc.
Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well.
Going beyond what Scott discussed, I found this study [2] which seems to show that critical thinking skills are mostly correlated with verbal intelligence and trait openness. It's only one study though, so take it with a grain of salt.
>Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this.
Can't say I agree, Socrates figured it out thousands of years ago!
>Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well.
I'd argue that these courses are, at best, tangentially related to critical thinking. We need to teach the Socratic Method of learning to children from day 1, in all areas of study. Teaching children how to think and how to be intellectually curious is ultimately far more effective than our current methods if your desired result is an informed and intellectually capable populace.
Teaching children how to think and how to be intellectually curious is ultimately far more effective than our current methods if your desired result is an informed and intellectually capable populace.
You're preaching to the choir here. I am studying pure mathematics and minoring in philosophy and astrophysics, with the eventual goal of becoming a teacher. I dream of teaching kids critical thinking and deep problem solving skills, not rote memorization.
In the intro to mathematics education course, which I took as part of my program, we focused exclusively on teaching mathematics in the Socratic style. It was fantastic teaching my fellow classmates and a ton of fun to boot.
Unfortunately, I have to add this again, in my experience volunteering as a tutor (2 hours a week for the past 4 years) for high school students, I've noticed them really struggle with critical thinking type problems. Show them any mathematical problem where the structure of the question is different from what they've learned in class and they can't do it.
They don't really understand what they're doing, they only know how to repeat the procedure they were taught with cookie-cutter problems.
>It was fantastic teaching my fellow classmates and a ton of fun to boot.
I think this is as important a point as any. Children are naturally curious. The Socratic Method of learning is all about building on that curiosity to constantly ask (and answer) questions. Learning in this way allows children to exploit their natural curiosity and find their intellectual niche in a fun and fruitful way, rather than boring them to death with rote instruction that is little more than a memorization lesson.
It is awesome, but then my classmates for that course are all students who got admitted to my school (which admits around 7% of applicants to math) so I would expect them to be more engaged and to have better critical thinking skills than the average high school student.
I think the other issue we have (speaking for teachers now) is that you don't get to teach students from K-12, you get them for one or two grades max. I think the reason kids of highly educated parents tend to be better off is because they get the benefit over their entire childhood, rather than teachers who vary a lot from year to year.
> Can't say I agree, Socrates figured it out thousands of years ago!
Now as an exercise, analyze this critically. What are the known historical sources for this claim, what biases and motivations they had? Did he really succeeded at consistently teaching people critical skills, or we just assume so cause we learned in school that he was cool and dont know more about him?
Historical Socrates and popular Socratic Method are different things. Studies whether it actually measurably teaches critical thinking are less optimistic.
> Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well.
That's because low-level philosophy courses are taught as history courses. Memorize what each great thinker who died hundreds of years ago thought, regurgitate it in essay format.
Statistics is taught as an arithmetic course. You are given four numbers, figure out which formula you should use to transform them into an answer.
Unsurprisingly, neither of them develops critical thinking skills.
Memorize what each great thinker who died hundreds of years ago thought, regurgitate it in essay format
I've taken 3 undergrad philosophy courses so far, all at second year level, and none of them were as you described. If you did that on your essays, you'd get a very low grade.
All of the essays I've had to write were critical essays. Believe me, it is NOT EASY to come up with a new counter-argument to a famous philosophical position that's already been poked at for centuries.
Have I developed critical thinking skills from taking these courses? I don't know. I take the courses because they're fun and interesting. I love getting into intense discussions with my classmates.
This is so important. I couldn’t care less if my daughters learn about evolution of relativity in high school. What possible use do those have unless they become a biologist or physicist? (I’m the latter)
Even programming is an edge case. I’d much rather they learn logic, more mathematics (more depth and breath) and philosophy.
>Over time, I've come to realise that the most important gift we can give our children is formal training in critical thinking.
Assuming 'critical' thinking can be taught (I do not think so, though teachers/parents can be catalysts. There is an IQ barrier to contend with). What exactly do you propose for children of parents who themselves are not thinking 'critically' be taught? This constitutes the vast majority of deluded masses.
I have put 'critical' thinking in quotes, because if you ask a person who is not a critical thinker (in your opinion) if he/she is a critical thinker, you are most likely to get a response that he/she is indeed one.
I'm not saying that verifiable truths do not exist but people disagree on what the truth is while each vehemently believing that their version of the truth is the right one. Rarely will they progress to a point where there empirically verify if the view they hold is correct.
The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties etc. is important not only to realise the truth at an abstract level, but also has practical implications on things such as successful investment strategies.