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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

>One challenge is that theory is not theology, though it sometimes tries hard to be, and though students, particularly students looking for language with which to critique various forms of power, often treat it that way.

I feel like this is something I see often where new language and ideas come out and folks who find it convient use them as a sort of unquestionable club to unleash upon the world.

I'm not sure that no matter how correct the theory is, that doing so is helpful in their cause.

Taking theory out of the classroom and into the larger world seems very difficult.

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A related observation; we try to teach critical thinking but it never really gets spelled out how uncritical thinking works; so students are generally unprepared to recognise it in themselves.

Uncritical thinking isn't the same thing as stupid. It is possible to make really great decisions and achieve the preferred combination of wealth, fame and influence by thinking intelligently but uncritically.

Uncritical thinking as far as I can tell boils down to trusting authority figures. That works really well for people with a slight knack for choosing reliable authority figures. You can see it in action when people start treating learned facts as faith-based truths.

Critical thinking, IMO, has more to do with WHY you trust or mistrust authority and expertise in a particular area than whether you do.

Why? is the hyperlink of the mind -- the unifying link between domains of knowledge know-how and true understanding. It's the most important question in the world.

Truth is optimal, and why? is how you get there.

> I feel like this is something I see often where new language and ideas come out and folks who find it convient use them as a sort of unquestionable club to unleash upon the world.

This frequently irritates me too but, in cases where "new" applies (the word you used) I have a more charitable interpretation.

When I'm working on a problem there are a couple of early strategies I employ. One is to look for the poles or extrema. In debugging this might be "what if arg is null?" "What if arg is the lat element in the array?" I actually trained as a historian and the same process is used: "what if the role of the proletariat were negligible or irrelevant? Could I find an example? Could this be falsifiable"? When a theory is developing you don't even know what bounds might properly exist.

And to that last sentence, the second tool: expand the scope of the problem domain. See if using this new filter/model changes more than I expect. The mid 1990s encompassed one enormous parallel experiment of millions of people saying, "Hey, could I do this on the Web?", which was a dumb question (the right question is "would using the web make this easier to do?" But the second question was impossible to answer ahead of time without the results of a ton of experiments looking at the first question ("could I do this on the web?")

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