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Notes -
On one hand, I agree that classic logic and rhetoric should be included in any elite education, along with statistics and exercises in doing historical primary source research and discovery. However, if you try teaching these things to a midwit, they will just start accusing everyone of "having confirmation bias" instead of "being stupid", they won't actually apply these concepts accurately, just use them as smart-sounding replacements for classic insults.
That said, in order to think well, it's important so simply have a lot of knowledge about the world. You can't be a good thinker in a vacuum. You need high quality information to feed in all those Bayesian priors. If the BBC publishes an article about 10% of Britain being black in the 1300s and black women being hardest hit by the plague, if you have a grounding in lots of historical knowledge about the world of that time period, including lots of primary sources and literature, then you will have a lot better intuition about whether that claim is likely true or absolutely ridiculous.
Chicken-Egg problem.
Yes, it is very important to have a lot of knowledge. But it is just as important to make sure that knowledge is accurate and wasn't fed to you simply to ensure you behave in a particular way to benefit some person's agenda.
For instance, I used to actually believe the "Bermuda Triangle" phenomenon was some unexplained mystery of the world because I saw that factoid repeated a lot in various contexts. Then I eventually saw someone do the basic statistical analysis to show that while, yes, a lot of boats and plane 'mysteriously' disappeared in that area, that's just because it's a particularly busy area of the ocean and isn't really an outlier from any other randomly chosen location.
This gets especially important in the context of history! Where it is very important to learn what 'primary sources' actually are and how to cross-reference and confirm details rather than just accepting one person's account as accurate.
That's part of my concern, if 'education' means memorizing "10% of Britain was black in the 1300s" and at no point do you learn to examine how that conclusion might have been reached, then the knowledge they're inheriting is not going to do them much good.
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