I my critical thinking skills are very poor for my age.
In the first place, do not allow yourself to be carried away by [the] intensity [of your impression]: but say, ‘Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are, and what you represent. Let me test you.’ Then, afterwards, do not allow it to draw you on by picturing what may come next, for if you do, it will lead you wherever it pleases. (Discourses 2.18.24–5, trans. Hard)
The third area of study has to do with assent, and what is plausible and attractive. For, just as Socrates used to say that we are not to lead an unexamined life, so neither are we to accept an unexamined impression, but to say, ‘Stop, let me see what you are, and where you come from’, just as the night-watch say, ‘Show me your token.’ (Discourses 3.12.14–15, trans. Hard)
Make it your study then to confront every harsh impression with the words, ‘You are but an impression, and not at all what you seem to be’. Then test it by those rules that you possess; and first by this–the chief test of all–’Is it concerned with what is in our power or with what is not in our power?’ And if it is concerned with what is not in our power, be ready with the answer that it is nothing to you. (Handbook 1.5, trans. Matheson)
Reference: https://iep.utm.edu/epictetu/
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you will not be harmed.
Aiming therefore at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself to be carried, even with a slight tendency, towards the attainment of lesser things. Instead, you must entirely quit some things and for the present postpone the rest. But if you would both have these great things, along with power and riches, then you will not gain even the latter, because you aim at the former too: but you will absolutely fail of the former, by which alone happiness and freedom are achieved.
Work, therefore to be able to say to every harsh appearance, "You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be." And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.
There are many recommendations of books to read to develop your thinking.
Book references:
Human Blindspots and “Bad Brains”:
Francis Bacon, “Novum Organum Scientia”
Daniel Kanneman, “Thinking: Fast and Slow”
Robert Meyer, Howard Kunreuthner, “The Ostrich Paradox”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Alfred Korzybski, “Science and Sanity”
YouTube: “How To Catch A Baboon” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctol7JwpcuQ
Exemplary Practices and Perspectives:
Amory Lovins, “Reinventing Fire”
E.F. Schumaker, “Small Is Beautiful”
Christopher Alexander, “Notes on the Synthesis of Form”
from: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/Kay_How.pdf
http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/alan-kay-books
https://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKaysReadingList
https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/alan-kay-books
I know there must be lots more if you search online, there is even a HN post with a book list written by Alan himself.
I have gathered the books on these lists and all the video's of the talks in a 500 GB torrent. Maybe you can help organise it so we can publish it here?
Talks:
It is fairly shameful to answer this question with authority, so largely you are selecting for shamelessness among the answerers. I am revealing my own shamelessness then, now, by answering you.
To start with, the main thing that is required for my process is an emotional investment. This isn't dispassionate analysis. Truly critical thought requires, in my experience, a strong fear of being wrong. I do not believe there is a shortcut to this. Fear is a powerful motivator, and if you are not afraid of being wrong, then why do you care at all?
The fear drives an internal adversary that tries to find flaws in all encountered beliefs. Preempting the arguments that could be used against you if you were to hold them. So afraid are you then of being wrong, that you will change your mind. You will do this even if it means you will disagree with people you don't want to disagree with. You will fear being wrong more than not agreeing with them.
This fear should be relentless, but it does not have to be unpleasant, and by submitting to it completely, you can gain true confidence in your beliefs. The adversarial process does not always converge upon the truth, but it does at least converge on something that is hard to refute.
I have one more piece of advice, but I'm not sure how applicable it is to everyone. There is no such thing as true or false for beliefs. Or rather, you should not act as if there is. Whether a belief is true or false is one of the less usefull things about it. Instead, you should consider beliefs as resting on top of each other, in a sort of jenga tower. Since you have committed to potentially changing your mind about anything, it is far more important to keep track of why you believe things, than that you believe them. If you then do change your mind, you can be less wrong in a lot of other ways for free just by letting the jenga tower above it fall down.
Especially your last paragraph there. So many conflate thoughts and beliefs and opinions and truth. Everything is separate. Our reality tunnels are not unbiased.
- READY? Center yourself (that means notice and acknowledge your emotional state which might be pushing you toward one conclusion; then counter that); Consider whether you are qualified and prepared to think critically on the subject at hand.
- HUH? Say "huh?" to yourself as a reminder that you might not understand the matter at hand. You might be miscomprehending the words entirely. Check that understandinf.
- REALLY? As to any matter of alleged fact, ask how we know it is true?
- AND? Whatever is being alleged, start wondering what ELSE is true that you have NOT been told? Sometimes errors of thinking are related to errors of scope and perspective.
- SO? Ask how the matter at hand is important. What difference does it make? Who cares?
These five words are a sort of mental swiss army knife for me when I have to critique my own thinking or someone else's.
The same principle is used to filter your own mental direction, thoughts and assumptions. It's like panning for gold. Panning for gold involves sifting through a river of dirt to find specks of gold in your sieve. You're training your thinking to analyze out all the words and meanings that could trap you and find the specks of gold.
Critical thinking and analysis is very helpful for programming problems you find hard and/or debugging some nightmare you've accidentally created. Challenging your own historical reasoning, thoughts and assumptions helps save you from your own programming hubris.
It's possible to become reactionary to new information or too closed off, if you over-analyze everything. You might not notice the real things you need to analyze in life until much later. Analysis isn't protected from your personal beliefs, they will be a soft spot for jumping to conclusions. It's a narrow path and the answers you find might not be the ones you wanted when you started.
Steven Pinker taught an open course at Harvard in 2020, "Rationality", that over 3 months exposes a student to a wide range of ideas and tools one can apply to thinking. Syllabus and lecture videos are publicly available. Many of the syllabus reference material is available as well. Pinker's focus on rationality eventually lead him to publish a book on the subject [2], but his earlier works are also great sources for critical thinking as well.
This is essentially a recommendation to go broad and deep in cultivating critical thinking skills that you'd benefit by for the rest of your life.
[1] https://stevenpinker.com/classes/rationality-gened-1066
[2] https://stevenpinker.com/publications/rationality-what-it-wh...
Second, become very good at articulating your thoughts and ideas. If you can't explain something you don't understand it. So expand your vocabulary, watch your grammar, split hairs, use analogy. This takes practice and is always an ongoing process.
Finally, hold nothing as sacred, nothing. You must be willing to accept that even your most cherished, deeply held views are wrong. You must be willing to entertain ideas you find reprehensible. You must adopt and throw away ideas when your faculty of reason tells you that you are wrong, and you must be unemotional about it. You cannot coddle your worldview. This is very hard, which is why most people can't do it.
Keep doing this until you have ingrained in yourself
1) People that sound smart often don't know what they are talking about
2) Authority figures often don't have your best interests at heart
3) and learn the specific smells of what these kind of statements tend to look and sound like
And I guess eventually you could build up an intuition for when people are full of shit.
You can also do the opposite and try to build up intuition for when people were right about things that sounded like bullshit to you.
And if you want to get meta about it, listen to this philosopher talk about bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk&t=1s
Eventually you'll read a book that you agree with a lot and come out with an opinion on a topic. Later down the road, you'll read another book with a very different take on the same topic which also is very plausible and will have to try to consolidate the different interpretations of things.
When you begin to appreciate how nuanced and complex even the most seemingly simple things are, I think that's when you'll know you're on the right path.
For almost every topic there are nuances/exceptions/gotchas/angles and they apply as much to the person communicating to you on the topic as much as the topic itself.
Details. So many details. Seek them out because the nuances always exist and they shape how you take what people say.
When I read critically I usually do a few passes over the text. Before I start reading I make a list of what to Expect in a text. Then a quick pass to see if what I expect is there, and to add what’s extra. Then a concentrated read writing down questions. Then a phase to cross away the questions answered elsewhere. The remaining questions I can ask, or use as the basis for a written response. This works for papers, documentation and chapters and a bit less for whole books. I think this is a strategy I learned in high school, but never really used until the time the quality of my teams output started to depend on the way we share feedback.
Google suggests this is the three phases of reading model. Try it out. It will make you gain clarity in understanding and giving feedback.
Learning how it is done might make you somewhat immune to it. I highly recommend the following to better understand what is going on:
- Book: Propaganda by Edward Bernays, the father of PR
- Book: The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
- Article: The Submarine by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Another thing to do is listen to exactly those people who are supposedly "evil", "immoral" or otherwise bad in some way. Think about the political ideology opposite to what you were brought up as... or religious ideology which you were taught was bad. And of course, listen to people who are silenced (set showdead=yes on your profile on HackerNews, for example).
You can't think critically if you let other peoples' reasoning (or their words) replace your own, and mainstream thinking limits your sense of what's posssible if it doesn't have the language to describe something new or unorthodox.
As ComradePhil says, question all assumptions (there are a lot you use to function every day you don't ever think about, as well as those held by people you disagree with) and seek out the furthest things from the mainstream you can find, including dissenting/marginalized opinions. Great idea about showdead, didn't know that was a thing!
Paul Graham turned me onto lots of great ideas, I greatly improved my work environment by sharing his 'Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule' with my boss, it also made me realize that I was putting pressure on myself to work unnaturally.
http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Avoid getting your news from corporate media as much as possible and avoid all forms of advertising. Try to form your own opinions instead of feeling like you have to join a tribe of like-minded people (social media makes it really easy to fall into this trap).
Though it's also OK to not have an opinion if you're not familiar with something, rather being tempted to defer to someone else's strong opinion.
And above all else, avoid mental clutter as much as possible so you can find your own clarity.
Like any other attainable skill, it becomes better with practice.
First, start reading descent novels- any kind of novel that you will. It can be Stephen King-type, Tolkien-type, Dune-type- anything.
Start your critical thinking practice with humans. Empathize with them. Also become a little cynical. Try to find out someone's motives, background, etc. behind what they do and tell.
This is way you can practice critical thinking a lot. Never judge anyone. Judgmental mentality clouds clear thinking.
Try to understand where the character of a novel comes from, why they do what they do. What would you have done? These lead to better situation-reading for any situation.
Then, do anything that requires critical thinking. Play chess. Learn HS/college level math. Solve a lot of problems yourselves.
Look at past questions from coding competitions. Do not worry about the time. Solve them.
To be good at critical thinking, just practice thinking.
I also suggest maintaining a journal/blog. Here you write your heart out, simply walk the steps that you have traveled while solving a problem. If there is a thought clouding, just write is down clearly. Do not worry about writing quality. Just write.
Writing makes thinking mamy times better. And I do not say that lightly.
Maintain habits where you practice critical thinking.
I'm not so sure. Many critical thinkers end their life with suicide or end up in mental asylum. It's easier to be a sheep for sure.
The reason for that is of course the fact that critical thinking allows you to see and ponder how f'ed up everything is. It is a dangerous road.
Even the smartest person can make bad judgements if they're relying on inaccurate information. Thus, anything like critical thinking about a topic has to start with some kind of test. One thing to look for (and this is a very math-centric way of looking at it) is to look for inconsistencies, i.e. if two pieces of information are claimed to be reliable but they appear mutually exclusive, then there is probably a problem with either one or both pieces.
There's a web page listing many similar useful logical tests for the quality of information (and arguments) that's been around for a long time. Going through the list is a good exercise.
http://www.nizkor.com/features/fallacies/
Example: Description of Biased Sample
This fallacy is committed when a person draws a conclusion about a population based on a sample that is biased or prejudiced in some manner. It has the following form:
Sample S, which is biased, is taken from population P.
Conclusion C is drawn about Population P based on S.
X% of all observed A's are B's.
Therefore X% of all A's are Bs.
“Why should they be trusted?”
“How do they know?”
“What motive(s) could they have behind their claims?”
“Do they have an agenda? Who funds them?”
“Are there gaps in the story?”
“There are lots of people saying the same thing. Is it group think? Are the people related?”
“Where’s the source?”
“What’s left of the claims if I remove the name-callings?”
“Are the claims falsifiable? Are they provable mathematically?”
Okay, maybe a strange comment. But you always have to option not to have an opinion or view about something. What's the best solution to global warming? How to solve the Ukraine/Russian war? How to solve poverty? When will the next financial crash take place? How should my colleagues and friends behave? All very hard questions, which may of may not have an answer. You always have to option not to have an opinion about something. Being opinionless is not a sign of intellectual weakness, it's a sign of critical thinking.
Websites: - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/ - https://www.skeptic.com/ The Skeptics Society
Reading: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
You can start by reading: "It wasn't luck" by Goldratt it's a business novel where the protagonist has to think deeply about his different companies.
If you like it, then you can move to the whole textbook: "H. William Dettmer The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving"
Apart from that: "thinking in bets" is a really good book for better decision making.
FEEDBack is most important in any endeaVour!
It will be a very sad existence for you.
Ignorance is bliss, trust me.
Join your local Skeptics circle.
His analysis of the stock market and investing is a prime example of critical thinking.
Hint: There are an awful lot to be found on podcasts.
Most critics I see just make snide remarks about Chesterton's Fence.
And to OP, this isn't a snide remark, but due to your typos, which I often make, you might have ADHD, if you do and is undiagnosed, CT is all the more difficult.
Another aspect in embracing CT, you need to be emotionally and intellectually honest with yourself, this is by the hardest aspect. If you try and expand your CT while not growing emotionally, you will be constrained in many ways.
Ordinary people have been doing that long before eggheads got paid to sit in rooms and produce 12-step programs on "CT," so the answer is simpler than they'd have you believe.
Independent thought is like any other human skill; you learn by imitation. Really! You'll not only pick up all the mental skills you'd hear about in books (just without their fancy names), but the non-mental skills too -- like knowing when's your turn to speak, how to crack a joke, and how to silence self-doubt.
Putting the critical in critical old timey commenter person!
seeking for any more answers would just go against critical thinking ;)
there you go buddy
Just the idea of 'independent thought' itself is a contradiction:
Independent thinking connotes the idea of being able to think on your own, to convince oneself on the truthfulness or validity of information received, rather than being swayed by the opinion of others.
However, the premise on which the prevailing conception of independent thought is constructed is faulty.
A Thought is interconnected; no disassociated thinker lives on an island all by themselves.
Can we truly think on our own, independently, in the purest sense of the term? Aren’t our thoughts inevitably contaminated by the ideas, philosophies, and biases we have deliberately and subconsciously imbibed over the course of our lifetime?
Besides, it is hard or impossible to evaluate how “independent” our thoughts truly are, for the simple reason thoughts represent the accumulation of our lived and learned experiences.
Yes, imagination is an important component of thought; yet we do not imagine in a vacuum — we merely adapt and rearrange familiar realities to compose new patterns and entities.
Or to put it more charitably, don’t we all stand on the shoulders of giants — the teachers under whom we studied at their feet; the parents, families, and communities with whom we imbibed their cultural ethos?
Granted, some of the more enlightened among us might experience the occasional “quantum leap” in thought processes, thereby giving birth to innovative approaches to solving problems.
Likewise, when you scratch any of these “independent” thought sequences with the tip of a pencil, underneath you’ll find it is nothing more than existing knowledge repurposed by identifying and combining different patterns and connecting the dots.
Source of the excerpt above: https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/how-independent-th...
Some useful books and links:
Naval Ravikant: Let us Not talk Falsely Now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euzoOkBUzsQ
List of Cognitive Biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/...
How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life Paperback – March 5, 1993 by Thomas Gilovich
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Reading most articles from lesswrong.com or slatestarcodex.com
Slightly unrelated: You analyzing yourself in such critical way reminds me of myself.
The only persistent solution to this was meditation using Sam Harris waking up app (it's free if you email them).
I also found it useful to build up a framework of analysis to remove some weight of the research. After all one cannot take that research methodology to everything one would like to research into, so by getting a framework one knows which material to avoid.