By the way, has anyone else mentioned the Sokal affair yet? Physicist Alan Sokal wrote a paper of pure gibberish and submitted it to a reputable sociology journal. It got accepted. I think that’s pretty good evidence that even if sociologists have important and valuable skills, critical thinking isn’t numbered highly among them.
Not all conferences are equal. Sokol put his paper in a respected journal. Whatever conference this was in China, it was not high prestige.
I have run quite a few IEEE conferences and workshops, and founded a few. IEEE does not enforce any kind of reasonable paper quality checks. The form you submit when proposing a conference is all about money, specifically about returning money to IEEE.
Anyone who has published gets spammed all the time by people offering a spot in their conference or “journal.” A fake paper could get into there easily as long as the page charges are paid.
Now, the people, who ran this conference could be honest and just didn’t understand English well enough to know they were getting scammed, or they could have decided that running a conference was good for their careers and were desperate for contributions and weren’t going to ask questions, or they could be scammers who snuck one past IEEE. But no one would pay any attention to any paper in this conference.
I’m in charge of submitting the papers in our conference to the IEEE repository. They change for PDF standards - content, not so much.
Check for pdf standards.
I think there is a problem in the OP’s definition. Critical thinking is not defined as only thinking “outside the box”. Critical thinking includes taking the premises of an argument or idea and parsing out the truth values of those premises and their ability to build on other premises. STEM fields are much better at this type of critical thinking because as bump mentioned
Humanities are better trained at looking for systemic issues and viewing a problem from different paradigms (or context as Manda JO put it). The same problem can look very different from different perspectives. This is because humans are complex creatures with a complex system called society built on top of it. We need different types of thinking tools to grasp these ideas and perspectives (think of the blind men touching an elephant). I do think proponents firmly entrenched within one perspective often skew too heavily to interpreting everything through that perspective (feminism, class, race, evangelical Christians, etc.)
Applying Humanities type of critical thinking to math and sciences leads to woo thinking (antivacciners, GMOs are automatically evil, crystals in water have memory) because it often doesn’t have to have hard data to “prove” it. Applying STEM type of critical thinking to Humanities can lead to other types of disasters (eugenics, dismissal of minority viewpoints, horrific state run economic plans). Neither way can be called critical thinking by itself. They are different types of critical thinking applied to the right fields in the right ways.
In critical thinking circles engineers are the typical “think I know everything but that leads to a lot of woo” people. The problems is that engineers, as a whole, are very simplistic in their thinking and haven’t read other fields. Certain scientists at least can fall back on the process of science, but without the education and reading in other areas they are useless in those other areas. Engineers, as demonstrated in this thread already, tend to be very closed-minded. You don’t see that as much with other fields, and you definitely don’t see it with liberal arts majors. Many of the biggest questions don’t have a simple answer and require lots of reading in various fields. Engineers and doctors don’t typically do that. The ones who are good critical thinkers think well in spite of that, not because of it. An engineer’s belief about art, politics or whatever is useless, just like a dentist’s views about archeology or a banker’s beliefs about history makes no sense. In any case, there’s always the possibility of idiots in any field, but the more rigid they are the less thinking they tend to do.
I think good researchers, scientists, and students are pretty homogeneous as they can prioritize, categorize, recognize variables, assemble data, etc. well regardless of field or aptitude. The Scientific Method kind of helps. =)
As A C Doyle once said through his character, Sherlock Holmes,
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
and
“… when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
This aphorism sounds neat, but it only works under very restricted circumstances. As a general principle, it’s terrible. If “whatever remains” is highly unlikely, then you must weigh its probability against your degree of certainty that you have, in fact, thought of all alternative possibilities and eliminated them; and the possibility that your model is completely wrong. Conan Doyle, who believed in fairies, could have benefited from some Bayesian logic, or if that wasn’t yet developed at least some basic common sense.
Had there been no Philosophy, there might never have been Science as we know it. It was the philosophers’ search for truth that inspired the scientists’ rigor. Both searched for truth, and both have found it, to a degree, although the search is ongoing.
As a social scientist (Poli Sci/Econ) turned human resources professional, I see the capabilities and contributions of both STEM and LibArts grads daily. I argue with executive management daily that just because Dr. Doe is a superstar in the lab, does not mean he’ll be equally as stellar as a manager of other human beings. Although it’s not as likely that execs will want to put a sociologist in a research lab position, it would also likely be a poor fit. I will very passionately defend the need for both types in the very practical sense, as well as in an aesthetic sense.
I have always felt blessed that my scientist dad took the time to teach me how to think like a scientist. It adds considerable depth to my decision-making skills. I’m still a big picture thinker, like most social scientists tend to be, but I have those analytical skills at hand to use when needed.
Truly, neither is better. Both are equally necessary.
Possibly.
If I were a cynic, I might say that very good sales people are good sales people because they spent most of their formative years socializing and working on being “popular”. The correlation with having taken humanities courses has more to do with those courses being “easy” and not requiring as much work as STEM classes.
No…they really aren’t
http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-12-18
The problem with social sciences and liberal arts is that people don’t bear the cost of being wrong. Whatever is the cause of the day gets pushed and intellectuals will go to great lengths to do mental gymnastics to support their worldview. An important book on the subject is “Intellectuals and society” by Thomas Sowell.
When I was a liberal arts major, I saw a lot of it.
I don’t think the STEM/Liberal Arts divide is as sharp as one may think. I’m a non-techie in IT, and I do pretty well for myself analyzing and presenting data, working with change management, and thinking through the larger implications of the systems we are developing. The actual programming is such a small part of the larger IT picture.
Quantative thinking and critical analysis, along with storytelling and managing people, are related and complementary areas of strength, not two sides of a scale. The best critical thinkers have a broad foundation across disciplines and understand how they work together.
In principle, surely any academic discipline should entail critical thinking skills; perhaps a pursuit of the the humanities might refine slightly different aspects of critical thinking than STEM.
But I there is a problem with the fact that academia has lost its way since postmodernism took hold. If empiricism is dead, and all truth is an arbitrary cultural construct, it’s not clear that critical thinking is necessarily even considered a virtue any longer in po-mo circles. Certainly, clarity of ideas is not a virtue, and there’s nothing there that a scientist would recognize as critical thinking.
Hell no. Many of them can barely do 6th grade math.
Well said. It certainly seems to be the case that STEM scientists are more prone to believing that their capabilities ought also to extend to the social sciences, and they generally use fallacious reasoning (‘my kid could paint that’ and similar) to come to that belief. Just witness the recent deluge of (very capable!) physicists trying their hand at philosophy—Michio Kaku’s ‘The Physics of Consciousness’, Lawrence Krauss’ ‘A Universe from Nothing’, Max Tegmark’s ‘Our Mathematical Universe’—all of which are really just bad philosophy. So there’s a trend in STEM scientists falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, overestimating their abilities in a field precisely due to their lack of knowledge of it.
That’s not to say the same thing doesn’t also happen the other way around, but it seems less conspicuous to me. But from my own experience, there’s a pervasive attitude in STEM departments that’s rather derisive of the social sciences, which often goes along with holding terribly simplistic views of the positions those social sciences debate. In general, if you’re not deeply familiar with the literature, your chances at producing worthwhile contributions either in the social sciences or the STEM fields are rather slim; but unfortunately, it seems that one’s confidence in being able to to so is rather unfettered by such considerations.
All of these things, of course, were invented because there was a need for them. Gutenberg didn’t just come up with the printing press ex nihilo, which then caused people to think of a use for that thing and start writing novels.
This I find deeply puzzling. We’re steeped in the solutions that came out of the humanities—our political and economic systems, the ever increasing equality between ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations, the education system, our code of law, and on and on and on. Basically, every aspect of our social lives is subject to continuous discourse in the social sciences, and the movements born therein shape the future of society. Our world isn’t just born out of gadgets and scientific advancements, important though they may be—see the industrial revolution, or the information age, and so on. It’s equally well a result of social, political, and yes, even philosophical movements.
Well, then the same conclusion also applies to us theoretical physicists, see the Bogdanov affair. But of course, both simply show (if they show anything at all) that no system of review is ever perfect; cherry picking these sorts of things to support a preconceived conclusion is, of course, not exactly a prime example of critical thinking itself. Additionally, Social Text, contrary to the journals in which the Bogdanovs managed to publish their nonsense, didn’t practise peer review at the time—one must keep in mind that the focus of such a journal is different from that of a physics journal: texts are, effectively, data in the social sciences, and Sokal’s text has proven to be an important data point for the ‘science wars’ (although not necessarily in the way Sokal intended), so one could even justify the publishing decision in this sense. (Which Social Text’s editors were quick to point out, apparently to no avail.) It’s an interesting case study on how importing standards and goals appropriate for one field to another leads to faulty assessments of that other field’s quality and rigor.
Personally, I’ve published both in physics (the field in which I received my education) and in philosophy (albeit only once, so far), and in my experience, I was taken much more to task for sloppy argumentation in the latter than in the former—which, no doubt, is in part due to the luxury of easy checkability in the STEM fields: if your calculation is wrong, it’s wrong, whereas in a philosophical setting, where the problems are typically not all that well-defined, more care must be taken to ensure that something sensible is being said.
Sure you do. Those professional artists call their medical dabbling “homeopathy.” 
Yup. Now think about what the artistic dabblings of doctors would be called.
The idea that people appear to have–science is hard, art is easy–is responsible for a lot of the artistic atrocities afflicted on the world.
Scientists/engineers are also prone to believing that their capabilities ought to also extend to scientific fields outside of their own.
I’m working with an engineer on a project right now. The project is supposed to be driven by scientists, not engineers, but he was included in the group anyway. He keeps coming up with unorthodox, ad hoc solutions, and perhaps in another context this would be fine. But we’re tasked to come up with something defensible (in my biz, that means “keep us out of court”). He thinks defensible means being able to explain everything you’ve done just in case questions come up. But I think defensible means someone shouldn’t have to ask you for an explanation in the first place. Your work should be self-explanatory to a skilled technical reviewer. If a scientist worth his or her salt looks at your work and thinks, “this is some shit right here”, then it doesn’t matter how many explanations (excuses) you can come up with. You’ve failed. (And if this engineer were to suddenly quit the project, we’d be left with a product that no one really understands and thus explain. That’s unacceptable.)
Scientists are good at scrutinizing other scientists’ work when everyone is in the same field. I doubt an evolutionary biologist would know how to dissect a physics paper, and vice versa. And really, scientists are limited to the tools they are most familiar with. If you’ve never worked with conditional probabilities before, for instance, you probably aren’t going to know what to look for when called to review someone’s risk analysis.
Or really, consider any of the various cranks disproving Einstein, or proving the Riemann hypothesis with elementary algebra, inventing theories of quantum gravity based on biblical numerology, and so on. Anybody who’s ever had an email address with an academic affiliation probably knows tons of examples.
So, expecting the amateur artists to just fill the void once the professionals disappear really isn’t that much different from expecting Deepak Chopra to step up and do quantum physics when the scientists are gone.
There are occasionally people producing great art without any formal training; there are likewise occasionally people doing great work in STEM fields without such training (Ramanujan comes to mind). But by far the greatest amount of the time, you end up with bad fanfiction and the like.
First order, knee jerk reaction from a former Computer Science prof.
Those bozos in the Liberal Arts and such are completely incapable of logical thinking at all. They say ridiculous things and expect the rest of the University to follow along.
But …
Many are actually really amazing thinkers, just in a very different way.
The main group that jumps to mind are the Philosophy people. They can thread really long and complex arguments using terms in very finely honed ways to make nuanced points. They really have something going on there. It’s just that most other people don’t get it at all. Who cares? So it sometimes comes down to just whether you respect the purpose of the field or not. Sort of.
The problem is that this special Philosophical way of thinking doesn’t have a lot of real world use. They don’t use it to launch satellites or anything.
If your field can point to that amazing supercomputer that costs a couple hundred bucks you’re holding in your hand and say “That’s what we do.” and the touchy-feely people can’t point to anything so dramatic, you kind of get a smug feeling. But again, that’s a value judgment.
(Of course we got looked down upon by the Arts folks for exactly the reason that we create useful stuff.)