How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught

I do agree with the sentiment, and that schools need a massive overhaul, but I figured that I should provide my 1 data point to the discussion.

That being said, there was no explicit 'critical thinking' aspect to it, rather one learned the importance of reading and writing. If we define 'critical thinking' as the ability to bith understand a subtle argument and to make one, it was the reading and writing that did that.

Read William James. Read John Dewey - but really read him, because he was more aware that he had to soft-sell the socialist indoctrination program to an individualistic culture that wasn’t interested in buying.

My anecdotal experience is that they teach something close to that in philosophy departments, at least insofar as you need to be able to present the logical steps and connections you're making in a plain way so your paper is easier to engage with regardless of how abstract the topic is.

I think the actual critical thinking is something that happens internally and you can't really correct or improve that as a teacher if the student isn't capable of explaining what they're thinking - and if you can teach the student to explain what's going on inside their head, they can learn more effectively from people more intelligent than them later on because then it's public knowledge what they're screwing up instead of private. So to that end good writing might be even more fundamental than critical thinking skills.

That was a common topic of discussion when in the middle of the process, too - was this actually helping us? We (my classmates and I) always said that the worst education ever is half of a liberal arts education, because you learned how to rip everything apart but did not learn how to constructively put it back together. You have to complete the cycle, not just tear things down.

> That is not "how to think" in my opinion. That is how to split hairs.

I don’t know about you but the GP’s process describes what I do when looking at a problem and deciding what code to write, or when visiting (or revisiting) a piece of code that needs attention.

I’ve been told (by employers) that “it only shows that you can stick to something for four years without giving up”. Which makes it a ridiculously expensive proposition

I believe that making student loans expellable in bankruptcy would go a long way to righting the bloated costs and budgets we see today. There’s also probably a case for setting a price ceiling based on a multiple of the local minimum wage, as well as a whole slew of strategies to be explored before launching a salvo against the research institutions that power our scientific progress.

Liberal arts colleges, as OP was referring to, have only awarded 4-5% of all bachelor's degrees conferred on a yearly basis for the last decade[0]. In light of this information, I find it difficult to believe that liberal arts colleges are the source of the problems you claim, considering that the vast majority of bachelor's degree holders went to a non-LAC. It would be strange to look at the entire population of BA/BS recipients, note some lack of critical thinking ability in them, and then focus your energy on the source of only 5% of them.

If you are interested to point fingers at a major source of student debt and a place where "critical thinking skills" are definitely not being taught, consider for-profit colleges as a potential candidate. "For-profit colleges only enroll 10 percent of students but they account for half of all student-loan defaults."[1]

[0]https://www.gettysburg.edu/offices/institutional-analysis/pd... [1]https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/whos-fault-student-loan-...

Depends what school you go to and crucially -- your attitude going into that school. I never once thought of my education as a matter of learning a set of definitions, or even a series of concepts. But rather -- as the teachers at my (far from elite) high school articulated to me -- as a process, a way of learning where ideas really come from, and for "learning how to learn".

You're perfectly right -- classes by themselves just don't do much. It's your decision to sit down and learn the material, not just for the test, but for the sake of you're life's work and the person you want to be -- that's when you start learning.

But if you expect to just show up and heave your head filled with knowledge -- let alone critical thinking skills -- you're going to be bitterly disappointed.

For 2, I used Virginia Klenk's Understanding Symbolic Logic in a course and recommend it.

Well if they aren't intelligent, wouldn't understanding their reasoning be easier to understand? I at least don't associate simpletons with convoluted logic.

This is a very weak fallacy.

Eventually you'll need to read the original works, but I'd recommend starting with philosophical fiction. Crime and Punishment, The Plague, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, etc. Plato's dialogues are pretty readable, too, as is Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche.

Both go chronologically, from pre-socratics onward. West's podcast is a bit rough in the first episodes, but it keeps getting better.

Descartes - "Meditations"

Rawls - "lectures on the history of moral philosophy"

Or some modern ones like Alain de Botton

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Without criticism, at least a couple times to mastery, it's extraordinarily difficult to differentiate confusion from clarity.

(Programming is a wonderful field because reality is such a harsh critic and experiments are free... your code either works or it doesn't, and the most expensive input to the compiler is measured in human heart beats. But the field is exceptionally rare in that respect.)

But also, as a general heuristic, it's safe to avoid 4 minute reads that promise to tell you something as grand as "How To Think".

Though it's also true that the last photo is also much more frequent. If I took 20 photos of something, I'd say I use either the first or last photo taken probably 1/3 of the time.

Hayek wasn't advocating some way of thinking that is better than scientific quantification or another kind of Positivist analysis involving mathematics and some form of the scientific method, he was saying that the complexity made such a quantification hopeless. He wasn't saying the English Department could centrally plan an economy, he was saying nobody could do it!

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hay...

Some excerpts, since I found it to be a riveting read:

> ...failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the "scientistic" attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, "is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed."

> And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.

> ...the social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. Competition, for instance, is a process which will produce certain results only if it proceeds among a fairly large number of acting persons.

> ..."phenomena of organized complexity" with which we have to deal in the social sciences... [where] the character of the structures showing it depends not only on the properties of the individual elements of which they are composed, and the relative frequency with which they occur, but also on the manner in which the individual elements are connected with each other. In the explanation of the working of such structures we can for this reason not replace the information about the individual elements by statistical information, but require full information about each element if from our theory we are to derive specific predictions about individual events. Without such specific information about the individual elements we shall be confined to what on another occasion I have called mere pattern predictions – predictions of some of the general attributes of the structures that will form themselves, but not containing specific statements about the individual elements of which the structures will be made up.

> I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false. The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.

> ...I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects. The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion. Especially all those will resist such an insight who have hoped that our increasing power of prediction and control, generally regarded as the characteristic result of scientific advance, applied to the processes of society, would soon enable us to mould society entirely to our liking. It is indeed true that, in contrast to the exhilaration which the discoveries of the physical sciences tend to produce, the insights which we gain from the study of society more often have a dampening effect on our aspirations; and it is perhaps not surprising that the more impetuous younger members of our profession are not always prepared to accept this. Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.

> The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power. It is often difficult enough for the expert, and certainly in many instances impossible for the layman, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims advanced in the name of science.

> A theory of essentially complex phenomena must refer to a large number of particular facts; and to derive a prediction from it, or to test it, we have to ascertain all these particular facts. Once we succeeded in this there should be no particular difficulty about deriving testable predictions – with the help of modern computers it should be easy enough to insert these data into the appropriate blanks of the theoretical formulae and to derive a prediction. The real difficulty, to the solution of which science has little to contribute, and which is sometimes indeed insoluble, consists in the ascertainment of the particular facts.

> A simple example will show the nature of this difficulty. Consider some ball game played by a few people of approximately equal skill. If we knew a few particular facts in addition to our general knowledge of the ability of the individual players, such as their state of attention, their perceptions and the state of their hearts, lungs, muscles etc. at each moment of the game, we could probably predict the outcome. Indeed, if we were familiar both with the game and the teams we should probably have a fairly shrewd idea on what the outcome will depend. But we shall of course not be able to ascertain those facts and in consequence the result of the game will be outside the range of the scientifically predictable, however well we may know what effects particular events would have on the result of the game. This does not mean that we can make no predictions at all about the course of such a game. If we know the rules of the different games we shall, in watching one, very soon know which game is being played and what kinds of actions we can expect and what kind not. But our capacity to predict will be confined to such general characteristics of the events to be expected and not include the capacity of predicting particular individual events.

> Of course, compared with the precise predictions we have learnt to expect in the physical sciences, this sort of mere pattern predictions is a second best with which one does not like to have to be content. Yet the danger of which I want to warn is precisely the belief that in order to have a claim to be accepted as scientific it is necessary to achieve more. This way lies charlatanism and worse. To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. In the physical sciences there may be little objection to trying to do the impossible; one might even feel that one ought not to discourage the over-confident because their experiments may after all produce some new insights. But in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority.

> If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success", to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

Lessons for System Design practioners in there somewhere.

...whose most popular professional contribution appears to be lamenting his own irrelevance from the comfort of an ivory tower with an endowment whose safe withdrawal rate is larger than many country's GDPs.

> STEM thinking doesn’t carry over well to social systems

1. Apparently is does. Otherwise the newspapers full of humanities folks would've won the advertising wars.

2. What the hell is "STEM thinking"?

2a. Is Philosophy "STEM thinking? OP mentioned philosophy, right? Although I can't pretend surprise at the notion that ignoring 1 of 2 examples counts as close reading these days in humanities departments.

2b. Is Geometry "STEM thinking"? Geometry has certainly been included in the western definition of liberal art for longer than Economics has been a science. Or a field. Or a word.

2c. Are esoteric prognostications on the nature of transubstantiation "STEM thinking"? What about (other) extremist propaganda that flames religious violence (today instead of far long ago)?

> Hayek

Even hard core leftist scientists would probably agree with Hayek's critique of the social sciences, none of which fall under the STEM umbrella.

Also, have fun with the ensuing flame war this is sure to trigger.

My contribution: Hayek always struck me as a very crisp thinker, but in terms of intent more of a high brow propagandist than a public intellectual. The Google ad engineers don't really give a shit about how you perceive various humidifiers, but do sincerely want you to click the ad. Hayek was the google ad engineer of his age, and was quite good at his job. Which isn't to say he didn't care. He did care. A lot. He was just a bit of a tool. But, crisp thinker. Good tool. Comfy life from it, too, and well-deserved. No judgement here.

Thus what little philosophy I have read (mainly Popper) has helped me to tolerate confusion.

Paradoxically my ability to think has been improved by this ability to be confused, I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxa1gLt5YKI

For instance, I've noticed that most people refuse to see problems. They either want the answer straight away, or they want to pretend that the question or task is invalid or not needed. It takes a real thinker to put a confusing thought on one side and then pick it up later.