The universal bobber and critical-thinking education in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

[This idea (combination of ideas) has been a bee in my bonnet for a while - a new bee from the hive, I guess. This morning I got up at 3 and chewed a mouthful of coffee beans and wrote it up.]

Behold, I tell you a mystery:

Well, not a hidden mystery or anything.

Everyone thinks they’re pretty good at critical thinking.

You do. I do. Everyone does.

Everyone thinks, or feels, that they’re pretty perceptive.
Have a pretty good sense of plausibility and proportion.
Are pretty logical.
Pretty much right on.
Or at least about the important things.

This is universal enough that it’s a mysterious significant fact. It’s like a right-side-up bobber. I have thought that it might be an in-mind/in-brain necessity - the mind can’t function under the assumption that the stuff the mind is giving itself is garbage.

(It really is odd. We can be depressed about ourselves and our doings in detail right down to the ground, but it is very difficult for us to get to a place where we think we’re not basically perceptive at least about the important stuff or on the base level, etc. Even the depression will insist on this, if it comes to it.)

The sense is amorphous. And in fact the actual thing that is said to be “critical thinking” is pretty amorphous, as people think of it. Because it’s “good thinking” - and it’s the sort of thing that each of us thinks he or she is pretty good at. Which means that it tends to substantially match our own patterns of thinking and our own particular personality. “That which I think, is critical thinking.”

We each tend to think that critical thinking, by that or any other name, is generally in alignment with our own sense of plausibility and proportion and priority.

… Which - please note in passing - is completely ravingly unsound with regard to what is known, through specific study, about what goes wrong with this thing called “critical thinking”.

(This is where I am worried about losing you in the weeds. I must distinguish some things. Note that there is a topic area of “good thinking” and of the things that go wrong with it. Perhaps I should say the problem area, since that links up to where I’m going.
But there is also this thing we universally feel we’re pretty good at. And we can have conception-level senses of a more or less explicit topic area of what “critical thinking” is, that semi-consciously exude from our own senses of what we feel we do well, which just happen to match our own patterns and specialties.)

There is comedy in this! And there can be genuine virtue in it - we can be genuinely expending effort to reason well, to school our thinking according to sound patterns, etc. And those patterns may sometimes be well-chosen from the standpoint of the third-party formal topic.
… And meanwhile this in turn will be fodder for our own dangerously happy base sense of ourselves as bearers of a steady A to B+ in critical thinking. As anything would be.

Our “sense of plausibility and proportion and priority” is a hallucination machine. Confirmedly, consistently, definitely. But meanwhile it’s not as if any of us can wisely get rid of it, even ideally! We can try to keep ourselves to explicit good reasoning - but every one of us has a bounding dog that is actually doing the work, that we have on a leash. The leash varies extremely. Our sense that the leash is necessary varies extremely. (The question of the trainability of the dog… floats. Perhaps the dog is partly trainable in some respects. But the dog is not the training. Nor does the partial trainedness of the dog mean as much as we will tend to make of it…)

For the comedy, picture a roomful of people who all warmly think of themselves as having that A to B+ in critical thinking. (Which, again, is everyone.) Suppose even that these are people who do think of “critical thinking” as a concern in so many words - and whose warm self-regard takes that form. Picture a person using his or her sense of plausibility and proportion and priority to listen to the others - listen to their senses of plausibility and proportion and priority - and to gauge their critical handling… which tends to boil down to to some degree gauging differences in style from the observer, in a way that the observer cannot really screen out… We are frail creatures.

Now.

There is a consequence to this that has bedeviled me, and that I think has bedeviled society.

Here is the main part, if you’re still with me. The preceding was preface.

Think of the problem of critical thinking education.

Here is the second place I am worried about losing you in the weeds. Let us take it that we would like to have education to develop kids’ critical thinking. And let us take it that there is the problem of how to do that. And of what the precise objective forms should be. I must cut myself extremely short here and only very briefly characterize the problems… certainly it must involve not merely a few topic areas, the ones that come to mind - though definitely those topic areas - but also the inculcation of certain habits of thought - of interest, if you like… part of the problem being not just to familiarize students (on the level of vocabulary words) with cognitive biases but to successfully improve their dealing with those biases (or else you’re just disastrously training them in insults with which to irrationally disregard others)…

So. Critical thinking education. Call it X.

What really strikes me is that everything I have talked about really interferes with people’s ability or propensity to think about critical thinking education, or about the priority of having it.

People’s ability or propensity. Which people?

That’s the thing.

YOU. ME.

EVERYONE.

Usually if I’m saying that people’s point of view may cause blah blah, I’m necessarily talking about some people and particular points of view. Because points of view vary. But look up to the top, where I started writing - in this respect, this is everyone. No matter how much our particular points of view may vary!

What do I mean? Look at this closely.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to say that critical thinking education is needed. (One could doubt or deny that it’s possible in one respect or another - this is part of the problem of X - but it’s virtually impossible to doubt or deny the need.) We all nod at this. We all can look around ourselves and see examples of critical thinking failing. RIGHT OR WRONG, we WILL SEE them!

We can go into it and find true urgency! “It is clear that we do not face a static situation! We are losing people at the margins!” Again, right or wrong we will see this.

But what do we do? What’s the need?

Well.

Clearly what’s needed is to educate children so that they do not fall into foolish patterns… so that they reach our grand estate.

Our.

Grand.

Estate.

But the thing is, we did not ourselves go through whatever this would be. And so we did not need it. Ourselves.

Or we did ourselves go through this or that, and that specifically was just what was needed, so helpful - and here we are. And that was - whatever it happens to be; perhaps a specific class; perhaps a helpful individual teacher - whatever.

Or what really helped us was our exposure to books… whichever books we happened to read, however we encountered them…

Or, you know, a good environment, like I…

Do you see how the whole thing has exploded into feathers?

Exploded into feathers because of our universal floating sense that I am the target. Well, you know, roughly speaking. But actually, you know, specifically speaking. In the core aspect.

But, um, harrumph, harrumph, of course critical thinking is needed for when that doesn’t work. Although, meanwhile, of course, attention to the environment as when I - ahem! Yes, of course it’s needed. Would be a good thing. Remedial! Remedial! Should be there.

But.

What do you think is the reaction, generally, if and when specific, serious, exacting proposals for critical thinking classes come out?

I am thinking of a number of proposals vaguely remembered - and I am thinking of my own reaction to some possibilities that I myself have thought of. Dear Reader, I have spent ten minutes typing and backspacing and hesitating at the bridge here, because, Dear Reader, I am afraid of biasing your reaction (or giving you occasion for bias?) by giving something specific here. Perhaps make up your own.

I think that, to the extent that ambitious and detailed proposals are made for critical thinking education (hmm, I think I’ll get back to something about this in a second), our reaction will tend to darken toward dubiousness.
Our reaction to the critical thinking education will go toward, with furrowed brow: “That might distort their thinking.”

I think that our reaction will start pulling that way no matter how defensible or carefully well-founded the substance and strategy being proposed is.

Because we ourselves did not go through it.
Because we did not result from it.
And because, to whatever extent it is specific, the instruction and intent will tend to not line up with our own hazily conceived certified-A-to-B+ housekeeping.

“Statistics that early? Of course it would be helpful, but that’s not really core, is it. Kind of a side business.” “Rote? Like with chanting the multiplication tables? ROTE?”
Or just… anything. (I’m not particularly boosting or pointing at either of those, but I think objectively both of those would be extremely defensible.)
I think only a straight informal-logic course would pass the gauntlet without too many bruises, but only on a “hard to argue with that” basis. The only time it would be actually enthusiastically supported would be if someone had themselves gone through precisely that sort of course at precisely the same age as is proposed.

I am saying that this makes real support for critical thinking education - as opposed to a sort of Live-Action Role-Playing support - incredibly soft.
And incredibly… fuzzy? Soaped lens?
It makes for a sort of macular-degeneration view of this most pressing matter of how to improve critical thinking.

(By the way, on the matter of, not merely support, but ideas… I talked about reactions to rivetingly specific proposals, but how many rivetingly specific proposals have you actually seen for critical thinking education or how to carry it out? Outside or beyond the productions of people who are studying the relevant phenomena in detail… there’s just kind of a lot of nodding. Yes, more of that.)

(And - if I may introduce a suspicion, or an explicit reference to a background assumption that may already have been detectable above - there has seemed to me to be too much emphasis on how to teach about critical thinking in college. Which is weird to me, because people’s patterns are formed by then. It’ll tend to just go on one mental shelf. It seems to me that you’ve got to be going much earlier. You’ve got to be going foundationally. But… well, did people themselves encounter this topic area in college? And, as I said before…)

I could further diversify the bestiary. Like, when people have already raised their kids, there’s the complicating matter of their of course having known how to raise their kids. Or there’s the view, by older people, that what really enables critical thinking (has enabled theirs) is years and experience - which is the not-in-so-many-words suicide of the whole topic area, and which really requires that the wise mature person not look around at others at the given age point. Or other things. But it doesn’t help the point.

I think that this is universal enough that it cannot be pushed back against if the pushback is not explicit. We aren’t - the person writing this is not, the person reading this is not - the objective of critical thinking education!
Some other you, or some other me, who did go through whatever carefully definable best form of critical thinking education is the object, if we can’t abstract away from our own selves any further.

Any special characteristics of you or me do not modify this.

In this light - if the light can be held, which our egos will really not like, again universally - we might, on a scattered individual basis, be able to give attention to the design and running and maintenance and improvement and defense of good forms of critical thinking education.

I really hope that I’ve made myself understood.

Because, well, I rarely see opposition to critical thinking education talked about - I mean, who argues? But, when I have, it’s been a mention of some particular point of view that sees it as some stealthy, deceptive indoctrination of children in some other respect.

But that’s not what gets in the way.

That’s not WHO gets in the way.

It’s not someone saying “No.”

It’s us - saying “Yaas.”

This is a serious problem.

Last updated August 26, 2018