I am disagreeable IRL. Like, everyone I get to know well eventually starts avoiding me. I can find lots of advice for how to deal with other disagreeable people, but not much for people who are themselves disagreeable. Surely some of you lot are the same. Have any of you overcome this? If so, how?
I struggle to imagine any educated person in North America admitting that they do not possess the power of critical thought. Few uneducated people would say "Oh yeah, I'm a total rube." I have heard doctors say that they would only trust other doctors to raise their children in case of an accident because medical training imbues critical thought. Complaints about "stupid people" being allowed to vote are widespread. I am a teacher, and literally every teacher I have ever met believes that it is their core mission to "teach kids to be critical thinkers." The fact that not one of those teachers shows any evidence of critical thought suggests either that I am the world's most arrogant man (possible) or that I do not understand what critical thought actually is.
So what is critical thought? This is an honest question. Some uncritical googling gives these definitions:
-the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment
-self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of mind
-the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.
-Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe.
The problem with these is that pretty much everyone would say that their own thought meets the criteria in the definitions and few people would accept that their own thought is irrational, shallow, unclear, etc if you tried to point it out. Consequently, critical thought comes off as a sort of cool kids club, where we, the in-group, are right about important things because of our superior something-or-rather, and the erroneous out-group is deluded by their own biases and lack of discipline. The definitions are either so vague or so inclusive that they boil down to "I know it when I see it." I don't see it very much, though. Perhaps it is only me who lacks this understanding, since it is probably impossible to imagine anyone smarter than oneself (because if you'd imagine their thoughts and then you'd be that smart too). Maybe I just can't imagine anyone more critical(?) than me.
Below are some possibilities and the reasons why I don't think they work. Tell me why I'm wrong, and how to be right.
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Formal logic: A sound deductive argument provides true conclusions, but even a little work with formal logic raises the question of GIGO. "All men are mortal" is pretty uncontroversial, so Socrates must be mortal. Beyond that, however, very few premises are solid enough to merit insertion into logical argument. Induction is famously self-defeating (Hume), enough to lead to hypotheses that we're just hard-wired to believe in it (Kant, Schopenhauer). Abduction (Sherlock Holmes-style reasoning) is a nice idea, but boils down to experience and breadth of knowledge.
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Avoidance of fallacies: Fallacies are obviously bad, but day-to-day thought is just not very prone to fallacies of any consequence. Again the big danger is untrue or misunderstood premises. When someone brings up the Bible, for example, and says "The Bible says that the Bible is true, lol," they aren't really taking issue with the question-begging reasoning; if some Biblical council proved that that line was a later addition, the fedora guys wouldn't all become Christians- they just don't believe the Bible is true. The object-level debate over the facts is the root of the issue.
Furthermore, formal fallacies are of very limited applicability and informal fallacies are fallacies in limited enough circumstances that their fallaciousness is at very least debatable (the slippery slope, for example, happens all the time).
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The stuff stupid teachers tell students: "If the website ends in .edu you can trust it," "If bad people funded the study it's not true," "Check the credentials of the author," etc. List of tips on how to spot fake news are full of this. If these tips are even true, they depend on you either blindly trusting that PhDs (or whoever) are right about everything, which even someone as confused as I am can tell is not critical thought, or they depend on you knowing which PhD's are trustworthy and which aren't, who the bad study-funders are and why, which parts of .edu are part of the replication crisis, and so on. This doesn't take a PhD, but it takes a ton of subject knowledge.
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Fighting The Man: Big corporations are lying to you, Manufacturing Consent, AdBusters, cui bono, don't trust anyone over 30, and so on. This is all true enough, I guess, but the people who are the loudest about critical thinking are now The Man themselves (See the Disinformation Governance Board). Fighting The Man these days involves not getting vaccinated, driving your truck in a freedom convoy and rooting for Putin. If critical thought is the power of telling truth from falsehood, or Truth from Falsehood, then it doesn't shift as the culture shifts. And if it shifts as the culture shifts, then it would seem to be no more than a proclamation of tribal allegiance.
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Avoidance of cognitive biases: You shouldn't embrace them, but are they even real? Did most of that stuff not come out of questionable psych research?
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LessWrong-style rationalism: Even if Bayesianism is questionable, much of what is written in the Sequences is still true. That whole line of thinking, however, depends on knowledge of statistics, engineering, computer science; lots of knowledge of subject matter. Furthermore, it has severe blind-spots with regard to morality and metaphysical stuff because stats and programming don't lead that way. This is a sort of "I'm looking for my keys out front because the light is better" solution, where the meta-problem ("We don't have a solution") gets solved, but the actual problem ("How can we be right?") doesn't. That's why it's called LessWrong, and not just Right.
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All of these put together: Maybe the task is so huge that you need all of this. It seems to me that that would compound the flaws in each approach and result in amalgamating everything good into "Just know tons of stuff about the world. Like, literally everything, if possible." And if that's the case then "critical thinking" just means "breadth and depth of knowledge." It would also correlate with knowledge, though, which plainly isn't the case. Lots of polymaths are very wrong about things outside their specific fields, and one hears of them being wrong even within their fields.
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All of this plus intelligence: This seems like we're back to the cool kids club: "We just know more and we're smarter." This would, however, explain why some very knowledgeable people don't seem to fit the definition (?) vibe (?) aura (?) of critical thought- they just aren't smart enough. But it takes a certain intelligence to become very knowledgeable, so it would be surprising to find very many knowledgeable people without this power. This would also explain why many smart people don't fit the definition- they just don't know enough. It would suggest, though, that you could take smart people and have them read Wikipedia all day for 2 years and then everyone would agree that they were critical thinkers. I can't be sure that this isn't true, and I don't have an argument for why. But I really don't think it's true.
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All of this, plus wisdom. Well, what is wisdom? And so we go back 3000 years and start the entire conversation over again and hope for a better result the second time. Let's not.
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Emotion: When I consider the many defects I see in other people's thought and consider the ways I have avoided those exact defects (not all defects- you can't imagine anyone smarter than you, remember) I get:
-Intelligence
-Breadth of Knowledge of "facts."
-Familiarity with philosophy and religion (breadth of knowledge of "ideas," maybe?)
-Suspicion of consensus
-Love of conflict
-Hatred of error
-PROFOUND suspicion of any comforting thought/EXTREME fear of motivated reasoning. Like, crippling fear.
The last 4 are at best aesthetic preferences and at worst emotional tendencies. Is that what it takes? If so, is there any hope for someone without them?
TLDR:
-Is that what it takes?
-Is there any hope?
-What is critical thought?
-Are my objections flawed?
-Have I missed something?
-And I guess, is it possible to imagine anyone smarter than oneself?
In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?