%% Title: Critical thinking Created: 2022-03-06 18:56 Status: Parent: [[Resources/Philosophy/Thinking|Thinking]] Tags: Source: %% # Critical thinking Critical thinking is a perishable skill, like playing a musical instrument or flying. It must be constantly exercised. It allows us to challenge our worldview and examine what we believe about the world. ### Basic skills 1. What are the ideas that are actually being asserted, whether explicitly or implicitly? - Some people make their ideas their identity. You don't have to be this person, and you can be more than the sum of your ideas. Don't take someone applying this process to your ideas and assertions personally. - Be aware that these people exist and are common. If you attack their ideas, they will take it personally. These people aren't worth expending mental or emotional energy on, and it's best to ignore what they are saying and disengage. - Some people will also make assertions that they themselves don't believe in to produce a behavioural change in other people. These people should be treated the same as the previous paragraph. - Some people's worldview, and thus the ideas that they assert, are based on how that worldview makes them feel; these worldviews usually develop in a [[Resources/Philosophy/Thinking/FilterBubble|FilterBubble]] or [[Resources/Philosophy/Thinking/EchoChamber|EchoChamber]] and aren't based in reality. These worldviews are unsuitable for integration into your own, and you should generally ignore any ideas that derive from these worldviews. - Ideologues are rarely useful sources of knowledge to integrate into your own worldview, but they may be useful sources for understanding other people's worldview. 2. What do you personally know about these topics? If you have limited or no knowledge of the subject, you cannot pretend (even to yourself) that you do. - Be aware that just because something seems intuitive, it may not be. - You may be able to draw lateral inferences with the previous caveat. - Be very cautious about overfitting your mental model on limited useful information. Things may seem to make sense, but they are based on a house of cards of faulty assumptions and knowledge gaps. 3. What are the underlying assumptions of these asserted ideas? Which ones are linchpins - e.g. if this assumption is actually false, the asserted idea is wrong? Focus on the linchpins. - Avoid falling into the trap of getting hemmed in by phrasing. Don't let other people try to get your to use their terminology, but rather use your own. You need to understand the ideas in your own terms. - Avoid playing the game of the overly-politically correct "euphemism mutual admiration society". There's a far less polite way to phrase this, but I'm trying to avoid that here. - Mark these differences in terminology, so you can recognize them later to improve your understanding of what people actually mean. - Understand where your terminology is wrong, and potentially shaping your thinking in the wrong way. - Avoid hyperbole (the 5-star effect). 4. Identify and prioritize the importance of the relevant parts. 5. Apply your relevant knowledge to the ideas and assumptions. - You can choose some combination of acceptance, rejection, ignoring, and investigation. - Acceptance means you alter your worldview. The ideas can be considered processed (e.g. in the [[Resources/PKM/Zettelkasten|Zettelkasten]] sense). - Reject means that you make a conscious decision not to alter your worldview. The ideas can be considered processed (e.g. in the [[Resources/PKM/Zettelkasten|Zettelkasten]] sense). - Ignoring means that you have decided not to continue or to defer processing the ideas. This may be due to a lack of connections with the rest of your knowledge. - Investigation means that you have decided to ignore the ideas for now, but they merit following up on, and building out your own knowledge until you are able make informed inferences. - If you have a large degree of knowledge gaps or a lack of relevant knowledge or usable connections, you probably should ignore or investigate. - Apply common sense. If a doctor is telling you something directly related to your own health, it's unlikely you're going to reject it outright. Maybe. 6. Integrate your conclusions into your worldview. - The conclusion might be that the source of the asserted ideas is an untrusted source, and you mark further assertions from this source as untrustworthy (implicitly reject) without further investigation or agreement from knowledge sources that you do trust.