Ask HN: How do you develop and cultivate your critical thinking? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you develop and cultivate your critical thinking?

9 pointstithe11 comments

The first chapter of Michalos' "Improving Your Reasoning" ends with the following:

"The question is: Will you study logic in order to learn more about this tool [logic] you have been using for years and will continue to use? Or, will you ignore the study of logic and continue to use it anyhow? The choice is yours. So are the consequences. (That is supposed to sound threatening.)"

What heuristics, techniques, and questions do you use to untangle or cut through complexity?

I've found that studying logical fallacies naturally helps me to detect them more readily, but given the complexity of the world, I often wonder what it would look / feel like to reach a level where one's reasoning and speech is 100% consistent and correct (given the perceived facts).

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Two oblique answers to a question that seems to betray rigid thinking patterns:

1. Learn to think. Stop regurgitating and repeating someone else's thought but sit and think very hard about things. There is no critical thought, there just is original thought or repeated ideas that are someone else's. Form ideas of your own.

2. Learn not to think. In the "meditation"/non-duality/Zen kind of sense. Thinking is giving names to things, which constrains you to apply names you already know to novel phenomenons, thus missing the forest for the trees. So learn not to think, but to observe reality as it is, unfiltered by your conditioning, education, biases, fallacies. Maybe then you'll notice what you always believed was a pipe, or what you were told is a pipe, truly isn't.

Not thinking has never worked well.

I taught Informal and formal fallacies as part of my history classes. While formal and informal fallacies are an important first step, you should consider taking a collegiate-level logic course. Of course, one may study on his own, if you can focus and set aside time to do so; but a rigorous classroom course improves one's ability to transfer the nuances of logic to real life.

Interesting! What kind of history class was it, that would include studying logical fallacies?

The application to real life is the most important step, I think. I guess that makes me a pragmatist.

First- and second-level American History. Each class succeeding year, I suspect, some of the students took the course just to sit in on the fallacies section. We used David Hackett Fischer's Historian's Fallacies and Copi's text to narrow some of the fallacies more precisely to history throughout the history course.

Problem solving ability is proportional to the pre-existing knowledge you have. So if you continually learn more, you'll naturally become a better problem solver.

This means reading, mostly. And I'd add that sometimes the gold can come from very unlikely places. So read widely.

Having a kid in general forces me to review all of my past studies from primary school up to at least high school. It's basically a second chance to develop and cultivate my critical thinking.

I have considered having a child for this very reason.

> I often wonder what it would look / feel like to reach a level where one's reasoning and speech is 100% consistent and correct (given the perceived facts).

I think the closer you get to that, combined with doing what you agree is right, translates to happiness.

Aside from the logical fallacies have you taken note of your own biases? They're everywhere, not just in the obvious places.

Basically you have to get out of bubbles to get more ideas + boredom.

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