TL;DR: To cut to the truth and learn as much as possible, listen more than talk, identify logical fallacies, collect trusted sources, and be particular with your language.
What Is Critical Thinking?
Critical Thinking is “disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence” [1]
Why Is Critical Thinking Important?
When an individual learns to think critically, they learn how to lead themselves and others, which helps in their career and personal life. If the average person practiced critical thinking, we could lead ourselves into a future based on truth rather than manufactured consensus.
Critical thinking is a way to restore order in your own mind, and by extension, in the world.
It is especially important to learn critical thinking in the 21st century because of information overload, misinformation, and herd mentality.
Information Overload
The average person feels overwhelmed with information, and for good reason. The amount of information we are exposed to is greatly increasing each year and is only accelerating.
There is more information than the average person can handle, which means attention is now a precious resource. Critical thinking will make us more efficient with our attention because it will tell us better where to put it.
Big Data is a lucrative field now. Companies and governments have become very interested in it due to how valuable it can be for finding insights. This increase in interest over time is illustrated in the graph below.
Large amounts of information are overwhelming, but can be used to your advantage if approached intelligently.
Misinformation
Fake news is now a meme.
It’s clear that news agencies and social media sources are both subject to high degrees of bias, and most people are aware of this.
According to a poll of 70,000 individuals across 36 countries, “Only 24 percent of people said social media did a good job separating fact from fiction, compared to 40 percent for mainstream media.” [3].
Politicians, most businesses and Hollywood don’t seem to be any more scrupulous, and with a certain amount of influence, opinion can be bought. When billionaire business tycoons are buying news agencies, as Jeff Bezos did with The Washington Post, we should take “news” with a grain of salt [4].
The following 12 headlines are some prime examples of media manipulation, and these kinds of examples can be found in unlimited numbers.
Slate tells you to give up on facts, and across the board, all major news outlets have not only the exact same opinion on Trump, but eerily use the same words. With this kind of media there is no room for a balance of opinions. Echo chambers are a slippery slope to being closed minded.
Actively seek both sides of a story thoroughly and fairly in making an evaluation. Check out the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix, and this short video for some eerie examples of where our democracy could be headed without critical thinking.
Herd Mentality
Herd mentality is where individuals in a group stop thinking for themselves and start to adopt whatever the group thinks as a whole. This often leads to drastic actions that people would never take individually.
A famous example of group-think is the Salem Witch Trials, where the town of Salem, Massachusetts got together and killed 25 “witches” in 1692 [8].
Strategies for Critical Thinking
Systems Thinking
“One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree – make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.” – Elon Musk [9]
Systems theory is the strategy of seeing everything as parts of a bigger system. A part cannot be understood without understanding the system it is a part of.
“Systems theory brings together principles and concepts from ontology, the philosophy of science, physics, computer science, biology and engineering as well as geography, sociology, political science, psychotherapy (especially family systems therapy), and economics” -Wikipedia [11]
For instance, if you have a heart problem, it isn’t just the heart a doctor should look at, but the body it is a part of. The doctor wants to know about your diet, your weight, and your exercise habits as well. These all affect circulatory system that your heart is a part of.
When trying to understand something, understand its relationship to other things.
Start from the basics of a new subject, the trunk – grade 3 level stuff – and then build outward from there finding facts along the way. Don’t start with the leaves.
This naturally helps you remember things as they are grouped into categories, like the well-known memory trick called chunking.
If you can simplify it enough to teach it to a child, that’s a good test that you have used systems thinking.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” -Einstein [12]
Be Open Minded
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” -Stephen R. Covey [13]
Although it’s obvious, it is important to note that when considering another’s viewpoint, we should truly listen to the other person before replying.
This requires us to empty our minds, and just be sponges for a bit. Then, we can ask questions and probe their viewpoint. This is one of the main messages of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Listening and being genuinely interested in the other’s view, even if we happen to disagree. We learn a lot and become known as a good conversationalist this way.
Sometimes silence is better than talking even if you feel the “vacuum” or urge to fill the silence. This is very similar to the way we practice observation of our own thoughts during mindfulness meditation.
“The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.” -Socrates [15]
Logical Fallacies
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” -Terry Pratchett, Diggers [16]
While being open minded is the first step to learning something new, it can be both overwhelming and difficult to determine what’s true and what’s not when you let all that information in.
Your mind can be open, but that doesn’t mean you let everything in. Train your mind to cut through BS, and absorb only what makes sense to you.
When people make points or discuss an idea, you can test that idea out against the most common logical fallacies. These are faults in a person’s thought process. Learning these over time will help you to calmly and logically learn from others, as well as become more persuasive in your arguments.
Common examples are strawman, ad hominem, begging the question, appeal to authority, and anecdotal.
For example, if person A states, “abortion should be illegal”, and person B replies, “so what you’re saying is women don’t have a right over their own bodies?” that would be straw manning their argument – making their argument into something else and then defeating that weaker argument. Instead, a reasonable reply might be, “so what you’re saying is the right of the baby to live is more important than the mother’s right to an abortion?”.
Full image here [17]
Trusted Sources
Another way to help reduce the burden of being open minded is to build a list of trusted sources. Friends, individual content creators, and colleagues make good sources. We can then take these sources in more efficiently.
In history, different sources have different credibility. Sources are like broken telephone; the further you get from the source, the less accurate the story gets. First hand sources are the most credible. Learn from people who directly experienced whatever it is you are learning about. Above all, trust your own first-hand experiences over whatever you hear.
Speak Clearly
The way you talk is the way you think. Becoming sloppy with language will degrade your mind over time, while expanding your vocabulary and speaking in clear, coherent sentences will upgrade your thinking.
George Orwell and other famous authors like Aldous Huxley have expressed concern in multiple books on the power of language to affect our minds – and how they predicted this power would be abused. This is why free speech is such a large concern and has been such a large theme in the news recently.
Expanding your language use will expand the environment in which you can think, allowing you more freedom of thought.
This works in English, as well as computer programming, mathematics, music and any other language. Recognizing that any form of communication uses some form of language allows us to see that language is the form an idea takes. The form can only be as good as the language used.
Summary
Think for yourself. Challenge new sources of knowledge or arguments by understanding the big picture first, approaching with an open mind, and using strategies to figure out if the ideas people are trying to put in your mind make sense before you act on them.
References
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/critical-thinking
[2] https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/141104110138-techonomics-big-data-slide-research-papers-horizontal-large-gallery.gif
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-media-news-survey-idUSKBN19D015
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies/#16924476660a
[5] https://slate.com/technology/2017/11/why-conservatives-are-more-susceptible-to-believing-in-lies.html
[6] https://pics.onsizzle.com/headlines-think-the-media-got-the-memo-in-acceptance-speech-3136408.png
[7] https://listverse.com/2013/07/28/top-10-instances-of-mob-mentality/
[8] https://famous-trials.com/salem/2078-sal-acct
[9] https://lifehacker.com/elon-musk-on-learning-new-things-view-knowledge-as-a-t-1677850415
[10] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newoxfordreview.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2FBanyan-Tree.jpg&f=1&nofb=1
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory
[12] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/albert_einstein_383803
[13] https://www.awakenthegreatnesswithin.com/35-inspirational-quotes-on-listening/
[14] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F-KKKUJzEI3gM%2FUidoc_BRsUI%2FAAAAAAAAAfQ%2Fv30WJYW9LjE%2Fs1600%2Fopen_mind.jpg&f=1&nofb=1
[15] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/826247-the-ancient-oracle-said-that-i-was-the-wisest-of
[16] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2627-the-trouble-with-having-an-open-mind-of-course-is
[17] http://projectupriver.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/75400-logicalfallaciesinfographic_a3copy.jpg
[18] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.incimages.com%2Fuploaded_files%2Fimage%2F1920x1080%2Fgetty_943018312_402276.jpg&f=1&nofb=1
[19] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.azquotes.com%2Fpicture-quotes%2Fquote-a-man-may-take-to-drink-because-he-feels-himself-to-he-a-failure-and-then-fail-all-the-george-orwell-86-56-17.jpg&f=1&nofb=1
