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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

“Always think critically” is poised to become the “drink responsibly” of AI. A convenient and counterproductive way to push responsibility onto the users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_advertising#Drink_resp...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DnSp2S7vzH4&t=31s

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Yes. Definitely users are responsible for knowing this. And it is one of the key things that education needs to teach.

I’m generally skeptical of the critical thinking movement. There is not much evidence that students can be taught to transfer their critical thinking skills from one subject to another. I think much of what people refer to as critical thinking is more aptly called subject expertise.

Huh? Are you saying that math and logic are not useful in a wide variety of subjects?

Of course they are useful, but the utility is broader than you think. Those skills are just as easily used for rationalization, eg. "Lies, damn lies, and statistics."

I’m a math student. Of course I think math and logic are useful. They’re still subject expertise. They will not help you analyze a painting or a piece of music or a poem.

They also generally won’t help you evaluate scientific claims unless you also have enough scientific background. If someone says “humans will set foot on Mars within 30 years”, you’re going to have a hell of a time determining whether that’s reasonable unless you know a lot about: rocketry, physics, space travel, radiation, astronomy, human anatomy, nutrition, engineering, economics, and many other subjects!

If you’re just a math/logic wiz and not an expert in those other areas, you may be inclined to say “they’ve already put rovers on Mars, should be easy to get humans there!” because there’s nothing impossible or illogical about the question.

Critical thinking isn't about evaluating the claim "humans will set foot on Mars within 30 years" by examining rocketry, physics, space travel, etc. It's about asking questions like "who is telling me this, why would they say this, what other beliefs do they have that might influence this one, what do other people say about this claim?" It's universally applicable but gets more effective the more you know about a given topic.

That’s tautological about whether or not the claim itself has merit. It only says if the claim doesn’t have merit, here is a set of motivations that might have biased the claim. But there’s no way to determine just from that whether the claim has merit. It goes double for the vast majority of the way we get information: ad hoc through conversations with other humans. If a neighbor tells me it’s thunder storming tomorrow, therefore I should postpone putting up my new fence plans, I’m not going through a bizarro world decision matrix involving surveying the neighborhood for validity!

You are massively overthinking this. Critical thinking isn't some giant flowchart of questions and rules that you have to run on every single thing you ever hear or think in your entire life, that's obviously insane. Frankly I don't understand how you could even think that. Critical thinking is just saying "Hey this neighbor has a history of lying to me and my other neighbor said that they tried to get a court order to stop them from putting up a fence. Maybe I should check the forecast before canceling my fence building plans".

Critical thinking is just saying "Hey this neighbor has a history of lying to me and my other neighbor said that they tried to get a court order to stop them from putting up a fence. Maybe I should check the forecast before canceling my fence building plans".

How is that not an application of domain knowledge (know your neighbours) with a bit of intelligence? How do you teach people to do that in general? How do you teach people to deal with questions when they lack domain knowledge?

Again, you're massively overthinking this. Then entire point is to not blindly accept things and instead actually evaluate claims. You can do that with domain knowledge you have, which appears to what what you're calling all knowledge. If there exists some kind of knowledge that isn't domain knowledge, I'm sure you could find a use for it too.

I don't believe that at all, the idea of challenging what you know and how you know it is extremely useful across all subjects. The problem is that the efforts to teach critical thinking has been colossal failures.

Thing is, doing a consistency check on your collection of purported facts is the easy part. What's hard is the soundness check where you need a lot of domain knowledge to see if things actually match objective reality.

I don't see any domain (except politics of course) where asking yourself "is there another explanation for what I'm seeing" isn't useful.

Always think critically, but whatever you do don't do your own research.

Agreed, and due to the way LLM works, misinformation tends to look very plausible.

From the perspective of learning how to tell lies from the truth it's a very good lesson that things can be bs no matter how plausibly and nice they sound. So you always need to check sources and read a lot on the subject.

Misinformation was never a problem on the provider end but the receiver

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