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Comment by seph-reed | Hacker News Reader

What if -- and I know this is a crazy idea -- but what if there was some sort of metric beyond popularity by which things were reported? Maybe even decided?

For instance: if there was a free online study (in person test) "critical thinking" series of classes, where you could become accredited as a person who knows at least the basics of how lying works, statistics can be manipulated, science is hard, etc, etc, etc... if you had that credential, it could be included in stats.

"While 85% of people say they're really worried about X, only 12% of critical-thinking accredited citizens consider it something worth focusing on."

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That would be great, but it would be gamed so badly.

Like those lists of "over 500 scientists have signed a document saying 5G is harmful to health so it must be true". When actually half of the people on the list aren't real people and the rest of them are political scientologists, dentists and people who know absolutely nothing about radio waves.

Hopefully, anyone who had taken even introductory critical-thinking would recognize what was going on there and throw the article out.

If the worry is, "this is one more way to convince non-critical people of things," I'm pretty sure that's a lost cause to begin with.

Sure but then politics becomes about controlling what's on those tests.

That's a good thing.

Having a giant political flamewar about how critical thinking should work has good potential to result in mutual destruction.

If you really play it out in your head, critical thinking is pretty hard to abuse because it tends to lean away from blind trust.

Every trick that could be taught to get people not to trust your enemy, is one less way you can take advantage of them yourself.

I have my doubts. People can learn “critical thinking skills” all they want, it’s the failure to apply them fairly that breaks political discourse at all levels of education.

People don’t investigate statements that conform to their biases. And if the statement is something they don’t want to believe, people will deploy the full force of their “critical thinking” toolkit to fight it, while allowing themselves to become vulnerable to all sorts of fallacies and cognitive blinders as long as it only obscures the inconvenient facts.

But compare that to someone who has no critical thinking skills at all.

Further, at least some people will be clever enough to use critical thinking on their own beliefs. Maybe some will only use it to further entrench, but not all. And it only takes a few amazing people to push society forwards; that's all we've ever really had.

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