A Sense of Doubt blog post #3840 - We Must Teach Critical Thinking

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3840 - We Must Teach Critical Thinking

Or we're doomed.

Can we please teach people to think.

Though I care WHAT people think, I try not to teach them WHAT to think; however, this pledge does not mean I do not present both sides of various issues except issues without two legitimate sides.

There's not a valid argument in favor of genocide, slavery, or child abuse (really any abuse but feels worse with children).

See?

Sharing that those issues are really one-sided -- unless you are a soulless monster -- is an example of critical thinking.

Thanks for tuning in.

Study: We Can (and Must) Teach Kids to Think Critically

We quite clearly have a critical thinking problem these days. I mean, we’ve had a critical thinking problem for literally all of human history but as each year passes it becomes more and more disappointing to see people–particularly young people–rushing to embrace conspiracy theories and pseudoscience: particularly as it leads them into far right violence.

Take the recent events in the UK, for example. If you missed it, in late July someone went on a stabbing spree at a yoga and dance workshop, murdering three children and injuring eight more kids and two adults. The organizer of the event, Leanne Lucas, was one of the people injured as she helped save the lives of several of the kids.

As for the attacker, he was only 17 and so as a minor his identity wasn’t immediately revealed. That didn’t stop right wing agitators on social media from immediately blaming Muslim migrants because of course they did. It was honestly either going to be Muslim migrants or trans high schoolers, one or the other.

He was neither, of course–the attacker was a 17-year old British citizen. But despite that information eventually being released, the alt-right rioted anyway, throwing rocks, shouting racist epithets, and “pushing burning wheelie bins at police,” which…I mean, to the American ear “wheelie bins” makes that sound very funny but no it was pretty bad! They even tried to burn down a hotel where asylum seekers were staying, which is horrific.

Oh, but we did get this clip out of the whole incident, which is an instant classic.

These riots were the inevitable result of abject hatred and a complete lack of critical thinking, and that’s why I was happy to see that one immediate response on the part of UK government has been to overhaul the school curriculum in order to integrate more basic critical thinking skills. The Education Secretary told media that “she pledged to look at “embedding” critical thinking skills across lessons in many subjects, with a view to teaching children how to spot and reject extremist content.

“English classes might be used to scrutinise newspaper reports, comparing their style and language to fake news, while pupils may be taught how to identify fake news websites via their designs in computer lessons, and maths students could learn to analyse statistics in context.”

This is great news, and an idea that I’ve been pushing for several decades now. One of my old Skepchick sister sites was School of Doubt, where teachers from across many disciplines discussed ways to incorporate critical thinking into their own curriculums, whether that’s 2nd grade gym class or 10th grade music. Because the cool thing about critical thinking is that it IS relevant in pretty much every field, at pretty much every age.

Man, remember a time before three social media sites became the only sites people could visit, when someone could just set up and fully fund a popular educational blog that makes the world a better place, just for fun? Yeah. Well anyway

I know that science is considered the ideal place to learn basic rules of logic and separating fact from fiction, but personally always thought that my own critical thinking skills were best honed in English, Latin, and social studies classes, mostly thanks to the teachers I had in those classes: critically evaluating fiction to tease out various meanings, translating bawdy poetry and discovering fun new (but old) double entendres, or learning how to compare and contrast sources and put aside my own biases about what I’d previously thought I knew about history.

So yeah, I’m absolutely on board with the UK’s new curriculum and I do believe it will be a big help.

And it just so happens that a recent study from researchers in Spain supports this idea! A large-scale study and six-month follow-up of an intervention to reduce causal illusions in high school students was published this month in Royal Society Open Science, and yes, as you may be able to tell from the name of the journal, this study is available in full for free online and as with all my videos, the link is in the transcript, which is at patreon.com/rebecca and linked in the description below.

Open access is awesome, and even awesomer is that this study was pre-registered, which means the authors submitted all their plans for the study before they did it, which means they wouldn’t be able to massage the results to make sure they got something good.

This study was sort of a replication of a previous, much smaller study from 2013 that investigated whether or not a class on critical thinking can help stop adolescents from falling for “causal illusions.” That’s basically the classic problem of mistaking correlation for causation, which I’ve gone over many times on this channel. Basically, it’s assuming two events are related when they actually are not, or are not related in the way you assume. Like, the classic example of the number of pirates in the world decreasing at the same rate that global temperature has increased, which might suggest that piracy is the solution to global warming, an idea whose idea may have come, I think, thinking of how many streaming services have increased their rates and inserted ads recently.

Anyway, that previous study did find evidence that teaching adolescents about causal illusions works to protect them from falling for the fallacy, but it only included a “convenience” sample of 62 students, meaning they weren’t randomized as they were kids who had already signed up for a robotics class. The researchers also didn’t follow up to see how long the effects lasted. This new study was much more expansive: they started with about 300 students in a pilot study, and then moved on to test 1,668 students across 40 schools.

The researchers started by demonstrating to half the students how easy it is to fall for this fallacy. They had them wear special rings made of space age technology that was meant to improve them both mentally and physically. They pulled out the old Power Balance Bracelet trick, which was big in the early 2000s. They were rubbery bracelets with holographic stickers on them, and people in malls would demonstrate their power using old carny tricks that made it look like you, the mark, are much stronger when you’re wearing it. But you aren’t. It’s just a little rubbery bracelet.

So the researchers fooled the kids, and then revealed the tricks to them. They point out that some research suggests you maybe don’t need to do this step to de-bias someone against causal illusions, but they wanted to in part because it’s fun. Which I love! Because they’re totally right: this is EXACTLY the kind of mind blowing demonstration that would have captured my imagination when I was a kid, and so it’s likely that without it, fewer kids would be engaged in the rest of the lesson and fewer kids would really understand how the lesson might apply to their future selves. The researchers note that without this part, the lesson would just look like a regular science lesson, and that’s just not going to intrigue as many kids.

After this demonstration, the researchers taught the kids how proper controls would have allowed them to see that the rings really didn’t work. They got some more examples to demonstrate, like if you take a medicine and your cold goes away, how do you know it was the medicine and not just the natural cycle of the cold ending?

Meanwhile, the control half of the students just did general science learning on astronomy and nanotechnology.

Finally, all the participants were asked to play a little game to figure out if a made-up medicine was effective or not. They could choose whether or not to give the medicine to a made-up patient and observe if the patient got better. One medicine was basically a placebo, and another actually was effective.

In line with the previous research and their own hypothesis, the students who got the magic ring training (as opposed to the general science education) were FAR better able to correctly identify the placebo, while still being able to understand that the “real” medicine really worked. In other words, they were just the right amount of skeptical without tipping over into just assuming it’s all a scam.

The best part is that the researchers came back to the students in six months and found that the kids who got the training were still significantly more likely to be able to apply what they learned to new situations, though of course there was some drop off.

I love this study, and it reinforces for me the importance of our schools NOT just assuming science classes will handle basic logic and critical thinking. The ability to recognize our own biases and control for them spans all disciplines. It’s bad enough that many science classes that I took growing up were focused on rote memorization, but it gets even worse if the curriculum assumes that that’s where all critical thinking should be taught. We need to teach kids to read, write, watch, play, and think critically all the time, because if we don’t they’re just going to keep getting sucked into the pseudoscience alt-right bigot pipeline. We can put a stop to it now and I’m very glad that the UK government has gone on the record to say they’re taking action.

Now, I know I normally end with a clip of Indy but I’m sorry, I just can’t today. I have to see that nazi getting cranked in the nuts one more time. Remember kids, learn to think now or tomorrow this could be you.

WE MUST TEACH CRITICAL THINKING

Rebecca Watson


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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2508.23 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3705 days ago & DAD = 359 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3384 - Einsteinian Problem Solving

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3384 - Einsteinian Problem Solving

This THAT ONE THING for 2405.24.

LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2405.24 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3248 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3342 - Guns, Germs, and Steel - Wrong? Rebecca Watson

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3342 - Guns, Germs, and Steel - Wrong? Rebecca Watson

My second Watson shares of the week.

I read Guns, Germs, and Steel, too, Rebecca.

I guess I was another one of those boyfriends with the bookshelf, though I am older than Watson.

Not sure if I fully agree with this one. I am still think of rebuttals. Stay tuned.

Thanks for tuning in.

Study: Guns, Germs, and Steel was Wrong

Rebecca Watson

March 2, 2024

SUPPORT more videos like this at  

SUBSCRIBE at https://www.youtube.com/user/rkwatson

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ABOUT: Rebecca Watson is the founder of the Skepchick Network, a collection of sites focused on science and critical thinking. She has written for outlets such as Slate, Popular Science, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. She's also the host of Quiz-o-tron, a rowdy, live quiz show that pits scientists against comedians. Asteroid 153289 Rebeccawatson is named after her (her real name being 153289).

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MORE: http://www.skepchick.org

Transcript:

I’m going to continue my streak of posting absolute banger videos about the most viral topical debates by today discussing whether or not a book published nearly thirty years ago was right. Put on your flame resistant suit and get ready for the hottest of hot takes: Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, was actually wrong and dumb. BOOM. I’ll pause here to give you a moment to pick your monocle up from the floor.

Jared Diamond, if you didn’t know, is a scientist, historian, and polymath who has written several popular science books, with Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies being his most celebrated. That book contains a lot of thought-provoking assertions, with the main thrust being that the reason Eurasian people conquered and displaced people on other continents is largely a result of a geographical advantage. Eurasia is oriented primarily on an East/West axis, which allowed a cultural exchange to happen along a line that was more homogenous in terms of climate and day/night cycle and wildlife that could be easily domesticated. Conversely, Africa and the Americas are primarily oriented on a North/South axis, which did not offer those advantages. QED.

This book BLEW OUR COLLECTIVE MINDS back then, and I’m including myself in that. I read it off a boyfriend’s bookshelf in my early 20s and was very impressed. That book was on every boyfriend’s bookshelf, selling millions of copies, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and even getting a television documentary series in 2005.

You don’t get that kind of popularity without some pushback, and boy was there a lot of it from a lot of different directions. First I’ll mention the racism angle: Diamond went way out of his way to point out that his hypothesis was explicitly ANTI racist. He argued that white societies didn’t end up dominating because they were genetically superior to other races and societies, but because of a bit of geographical luck.

But a lot of people pointed out that while explicitly racist people might not support this hypothesis, implicitly racist people would LOVE it. Because instead of grappling with the idea that white people became dominant due to brutality and the exploitation of others, we can just throw our hands in the air and say “Well, it can’t be helped, can it? This is just how things were always going to shake out. Blame the continents.”

For this reason, there was a lot of hemming and hawing over whether liking the book meant you were a racist or a nonracist. White supremacists hated the book, but so did many antiracist progressives. Moderates loved it though, so obviously it was extremely popular.

I’m not going to spend any more time on this argument because while it is worth interrogating how certain nefarious groups will use and abuse certain hypotheses, today I just want to talk about whether or not the hypothesis itself is, you know, based in reality. Because if it is, sure, then we can talk about what it all means. But if it isn’t, we can put it in the bin and move on to more interesting discussions, like ranking all of Alan Cumming’s outfits on the latest season of Traitors SPOILER ALERT they’re all S-tier.

Since Guns, Germs, and Steel was published, the other pushback it received was from anthropologists and other scientists, the kindest of whom pointed out that while Diamond has some interesting ideas, he ultimately fails to support his hypothesis with any hard data and he ignores social elements of history that surely had as much if not more influence on how cultures developed than simple geographic luck. Other scientists weren’t quite so even handed. As an example, here’s David Correia, who managed to publish an article in a peer reviewed journal titled simply “Fuck Jared Diamond,” which opened:

"Jared Diamond is back at it, once again trading in the familiar determinist tropes that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for his 1999 book Guns, Germs and Steel. That dull book was chockfull of the bad and the worse, the random and the racist. At best it is just silly, as when he offers unsupported, and unsupportable, assertions such as his get-off-my-lawn grouse that children today are not as smart as in the recent past and television is to blame. At worst, it develops an argument about human inequality based on a determinist logic that reduces social relations such as poverty, state violence, and persistent social domination, to inexorable outcomes of geography and environment.

“Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel.

“His crime spree continues with 2012s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?”

That’s right, that was just a drive by excoriation of Guns Germs and Steel as an introduction to an excoriation of his latest book. God damn.

Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes are the anthropologists who used to blog at Savage Minds, who published several thoughtful rebuttals to Diamond’s hypotheses. For instance, Kerim Friedman writes that the inequality between nations is less important than the inequality within them. For a good distillation on the arguments I recommend this article from Inside Higher Ed that links to a lot of great critiques.

I tell you all this to make it clear that almost immediately, there was a lot of valid criticism of Diamond’s book, and over the past 27 years there hasn’t been much to support his assertions. And the reason I’m talking about it all today is because a new study has just been published that directly tested that primary assertion. The title gives away what they found: “Geography is not destiny: A quantitative test of Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis,” published at the start of this year in Evolutionary Human Sciences.

An international team of ecologists and cultural anthropologists examined a metric shit ton of cultural, environmental, and linguistic data to trace the spread of cultural traits across 1,094 mainland traditional societies in different geographic regions to try to nail down how much the geography of the land influenced them. And they actually found that geography really DID impact the spread of certain traits, like domesticated animals and subsistence types,

agriculture intensity, and major crop type. Geography didn’t significantly matter when it came to many other cultural traits, like sexual segregation of labor, games and rituals.

And the biggest takeaway was that despite geography impacting the spread of some cultural traits, the researchers found that the geography of Eurasia did NOT give the inhabitants any overall advantage compared to that of other continents. They conclude that, “we have shown that although Diamond’s intuition that ecological similarity facilitates cultural transmission is probably correct, these ecological effects are unlikely to be as influential as Diamond intuited. Moreso, we found no support for his argument that key areas of Eurasia are more ecologically homogeneous than comparable sites in other regions of the world. Our findings point out that latitude, like genetics and ecology, is not destiny (Blaut, 1999). We echo earlier concerns about the perils of single factor explanations and suggest that chance, and perhaps factors that promoted colonial empires, need to be more seriously considered as potentially important drivers of human inequality.”

In other words, beware the extremely popular Popular Science bestseller. It’s frustrating that it seems like in order to publish a massive hit, scientists and science writers need to flush nuance down the toilet. No one wants to read about how geography has a minor role in how cultures evolve. We want to read a mindblowing fact to drop at a dinner party: did you know that the only reason why the average American is better off than the average Nicaraguan is because of the plants that grew at 53 degrees latitude ten thousand years ago? Wow! So nothing to do with Ronald Reagan secretly and illegally funding and arming the rightwing terrorist rebels that overthrew the socialist government there? That IS a fun fact, thank you. Excuse me, I need to find the restroom. To get away from you, and also to throw up.

Anyway, kudos to these researchers for performing a massive amount of data crunching to verify what the experts have been saying for three decades. Even though it’s not a shocking result, it’s good science, and you gotta love that.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2404.12 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3206 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3054 - Critical Thinking Compendium

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3054 - Critical Thinking Compendium


Just a quick share today because yesterday's post took A LOT of time (two years and then multiple hours over the last four or five days).

It's also good to follow-up a post on Critical Race Theory and the actions to ban it with a post on CRITICAL THINKING because that's a thing that's obviously needed and kind of missed by so many who think they have the power of right behind them.

English Department

Everett Community College

Critical Thinking Compendium

 

Francis Bacon (c/o Joyce Walker)

Read not to contradict nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.

 

Roger Berger

I'm somewhat concerned with the emphasis on critical thinking.  It's important, but ultimately, in the classes I teach, I'm interested in improving students' quality of mind, especially that quality which can manifest itself through writing and speaking, so I can't say that I necessarily ask for critical thinking, as I think you're defining it, in every paper or assignment.  

 

Kevin Craft

Critical thinking involves the ability to collect and evaluate information from a variety of sources, to hold contrary or even contradictory ideas in the mind simultaneously, to anticipate and incorporate refutations to one’s own viewpoints into one’s writing, to recognize the multiplicity of perspectives that informs and advances writing about complex subjects.

 

Charles Fischer

Critical thinking is analogous to Kant's idea of enlightenment, which he defines as a person's "emergence from (their) self-imposed immaturity."  For Kant, this maturity means the reliance on an external or outside authority as the source of your knowledge about yourself and the world.  "Dare to know," he commands his readers.  Use your reason!  Free yourself from your dependence on what others tell you is the truth about the world.  Such a liberation, of course, is difficult, but it involves learning to use your "understanding" instead of blindly accepting the claims of another.  It is a form of Emersonian self-reliance.  Or, to quote the great Morpheus,  "But I can only show you the door, you are the one who has to walk through it."

 

Holly Hill

Writing which demonstrates the students' engagement with and refection on events, experiences, and texts; specifically, they can summarize, support, connect, compare, synthesize, evaluate, analyze, apply, question, and argue effectively.  It can take many forms, fiction or non-fiction, and shows a flexible, inquiring mind.

 

Diane Ripper

Critical thinking involves questioning what you are told and what you
read, challenging the assertion (or position) of someone else, and
seeing a pattern within and between previously unrelated facts,
incidents, or thoughts.

 

 

 

Josh Searle

In my portfolio, I have a section devoted to critical thinking.  Basically, I look for critical thinking in three ways: metacognition, measured through my students' portfolio 'entry slips'; strategic choices made during revision, identified by having rough drafts and final drafts together in student portfolios; and students' capacity to a) effectively synthesize multiple pieces of evidence into a coherent analysis/argument and/or b) effectively utilize literary devices and detail to construct a compelling controlling idea — this is measured on my scoring rubric.

 

Phebe Shen

The ability to evaluate something, be it an idea/piece of writing, etc, in a logical and objective manner, breaking it down into parts if necessary.

 

Regina Zull

In an essay I believe critical thinking includes weighing evidence, analyzing and evaluating the evidence and composing a response that clearly presents the evidence and analysis in a persuasive form.  It could also include self-evaluation in the form of revision and peer-evaluation in the form of critiques.  Frankly, any exercise that asks the student to apply knowledge as opposed to regurgitating it is critical thinking.  For example, a quiz asking students to determine if citation standards are being followed appropriately in a paragraph requires critical thinking.  Reciting those standards does not.

 

From the Web (via Marcia Huntington):

 

Reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.

 

The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit.

http://www.insightassessment.com/dex.html

Exploring questions about and solutions for issues which are not clearly defined and for which there are no clear-cut answers.

http://aaahq.org/aecc/intent/glossary.htm

Reflective thought and a tolerance for ambiguity. http://web.uccs.edu/bethelstudenthandbook/definition_of_curriculum_terms.htm

Purposeful, reflective reasoning, and analysis used to form beliefs and guide decision-making.

http://www1.indstate.edu/nursing/organization/glossary.htm

The careful and deliberate determination of whether to accept, reject, or suspend judgment about a claim.

http://www.mhhe.com/mayfieldpub/ct/ch01/glossary.htm

 

Barack Obama (c/o George Packer, NYer 11/17/08):

“Instead, Sunstein suggested as the governing philosophy of an Obama Presidency the idea of ‘deliberative democracy.’ The phrase appears in The Audacity of Hope, where it denotes a conversation among adults who listen to one another, who attempt to persuade one another by means of argument and evidence, and who remain open to the possibility that they could be wrong.”

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2306.29 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2918 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.