But, how do I decide? [Critical thinking]

Great Debates
41

[QUOTE=Voyager]
I was thinking school. I agree with you about the home. We used the Santa issue as a good case study of CT - not saying he existed or didn’t, but encouraging our kids to reason it out themselves.
[/QUOTE]

Hah. I haven’t told our 6-yo that Santa exists–I’m not actually too big a fan and we don’t do much Santa in our home–and kind of hoped that she would figure it out early (as I did). She firmly believes in Santa and when a kid told her otherwise on the playground, came up to me and told me to tell the other kid how wrong she was. I think she got all her Santa-knowledge through some kind of diabolical osmosis; she started talking about him the summer she was two and hasn’t let up since.

I agree with QtM–this is one weird thread.

42

I’m actually finding it rather sad that this is such a revelation for him or that he feels a need to “study” it.

43

[QUOTE=Walter Windchill]
I had the same impression of coberst – almost like he was copying and pasting snippets from a website. It’s weird. I have to think he’s just a recent convert and going into it with the zeal of a converter.
[/QUOTE]
If you go to the website he links in his OP, and check the forum of that site - at the least, his OP is a direct copy of a post he made there, too.

Not that i’m insinuating he may be some kind of troll (I can say that I don’t think someone is that in GD, right?) since that forum also gives a link to his homepage; it looks to me as though he’s invested too much time into this to be trolling.

44

[QUOTE=Walter Windchill]
I had the same impression of coberst – almost like he was copying and pasting snippets from a website. It’s weird. I have to think he’s just a recent convert and going into it with the zeal of a converter.

Coberst, what is your line of work and/or study?
[/QUOTE]

I am a retired engineer with a good bit of formal education and twenty five years of self-learning. I began the self-learning experience while in my mid-forties. I had no goal in mind; I was just following my intellectual curiosity in whatever direction it led me. This hobby, self-learning, has become very important to me. I have bounced around from one hobby to another but have always been enticed back by the excitement I have discovered in this learning process. Carl Sagan is quoted as having written; “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.”

I label myself as a September Scholar because I began the process at mid-life and because my quest is disinterested knowledge.

Disinterested knowledge is an intrinsic value. Disinterested knowledge is not a means but an end. It is knowledge I seek because I desire to know it. I mean the term ‘disinterested knowledge’ as similar to ‘pure research’, as compared to ‘applied research’. Pure research seeks to know truth unconnected to any specific application.

I think of the self-learner of disinterested knowledge as driven by curiosity and imagination to understand. The September Scholar seeks to ‘see’ and then to ‘grasp’ through intellection directed at understanding the self as well as the world. The knowledge and understanding that is sought by the September Scholar are determined only by personal motivations. It is noteworthy that disinterested knowledge is knowledge I am driven to acquire because it is of dominating interest to me. Because I have such an interest in this disinterested knowledge my adrenaline level rises in anticipation of my voyage of discovery.
I have been posting on various Internet discussion forums for thirty months. I am a big fan of CT because I think it can furnish the foundation for any adult who wishes to develop a hobby of intellectual development after schooling is over.

45

[QUOTE=coberst]
I am a retired engineer with a good bit of formal education and twenty five years of self-learning. I began the self-learning experience while in my mid-forties. I had no goal in mind; I was just following my intellectual curiosity in whatever direction it led me. This hobby, self-learning, has become very important to me. I have bounced around from one hobby to another but have always been enticed back by the excitement I have discovered in this learning process. Carl Sagan is quoted as having written; “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.”

I label myself as a September Scholar because I began the process at mid-life and because my quest is disinterested knowledge.
[/quote]

From http://www.septemberscholar.com/;

[QUOTE=coberst]
Disinterested knowledge is an intrinsic value. Disinterested knowledge is not a means but an end. It is knowledge I seek because I desire to know it. I mean the term ‘disinterested knowledge’ as similar to ‘pure research’, as compared to ‘applied research’. Pure research seeks to know truth unconnected to any specific application.

I think of the self-learner of disinterested knowledge as driven by curiosity and imagination to understand. The September Scholar seeks to ‘see’ and then to ‘grasp’ through intellection directed at understanding the self as well as the world. The knowledge and understanding that is sought by the September Scholar are determined only by personal motivations. It is noteworthy that disinterested knowledge is knowledge I am driven to acquire because it is of dominating interest to me. Because I have such an interest in this disinterested knowledge my adrenaline level rises in anticipation of my voyage of discovery.
[/QUOTE]

From http://www.septemberscholar.com/essays/septemberscholar.html;

So yes, he is pretty much just copying and pasting, but it does appear to be from his own site.

46

I’m OK with that, and the name/concept of “September Scholar” is a good one. Learning is a lifelong process.

Thanks for opening the thread, coberst. It’s a good topic.

47

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]

So yes, he is pretty much just copying and pasting, but it does appear to be from his own site.
[/QUOTE]

Hardly a Great Debate then, is it?

48

Is anyone else struck by the fact that this thread keeps referring to Critical Thinking with the abbreviation “CT”–the very same abbreviation we use in other threads for Conspiracy Theorist?

49

Interesting observation. Please elaborate.

50

[QUOTE=Qadgop the Mercotan]
Hardly a Great Debate then, is it?
[/QUOTE]
I agree. I’m just saying I don’t think he’s a troll.

51

[QUOTE=Lissa]
I envy you. I first went to a public school where the teachers gave you blank looks if you asked about anything that wasn’t covered in the text and then ended up in a private Christian school where critical thinking was a punishable offense.
[/QUOTE]

I went through five different public school systems due to my father’s multiple transfers (he was active duty Army). And then I went to two separate overseas branches of the University of Maryland, followed by Monterey Community College and finally University of California at Davis. The only one where I got in trouble for demonstrating my thinking skills was when I cursed at my 1st Grade teacher for telling me I misspelled my own surname. (Yes, within five minutes of the first day of class.) Every other class I attended required a demonstration of thinking about the data presented. I think my luck lay in that I got to move around and wasn’t stuck in one school system.

52

[QUOTE=coberst]
Most all subjects one takes in school teach us how to think critically in that particular subject matter.
[/quote]

And grammar class teaches one not to use “most all” to mean “almost all.” I mention that because your thread here is about education. That aside, your assertion is incorrect. Critical thinking skills are skills in thinking. They are not solely skill in Math or solely skills in Environmental Science.

Already refuted. BTW, you’re still spouting platitudes. Why not demonstrate to us some of that Critical Thinking you’re touting?

53

A child clinging to her mother’s skirt is not an uncommon site. A child with wide eyes and a look of apprehension seeking security and assurance by remaining very close to his mother (his center of balance) is similar to the centricities we all carry forward and often remain with us until we die.

Our centricities, our centers of irrational influence, are often the ego and the group. I suspect that as we get older we focus less on the ego for guidance and more upon the social group. Our nation centric, our ethnic centric, our political centric forces provide us with illusions of security without any independent thinking on our own.

I think that it is worthwhile to focus our attention on the metaphors ‘egocentricity is a disease’ and ‘sociocentricity is a disease’. The cure for both diseases is self-consciousness. Being self-conscious permits us to combat the fever of irrationality caused by both tendencies.

Of the two I suspect sociocentricity causes us and our community the greatest harm. When our ego leads us to do stupid things the harm done is limited because we generally affect only our self and maybe a few others. Sociocentricity, however, can easily be identified as the cause of the destruction and death of millions.

Ethno centric is one form of socio centric attitudes and behavior. Ethno centric is placing ones own race as the privileged group. This form of socio centric behavior is perhaps the most predominate and lethal form of social bias. Regardless of which group we belong to I suspect that one of the most important things one might do to make the world a better place in which to live is for all of us to become self-conscious of these innate human tendencies.

Basic concepts become weapons of warfare within social groups. Basic words such as capitalism, socialism, communism, democracy, freedom, oligarchy, plutocracy, evil, patriotism, terrorism, etc. are twisted and maneuvered to confuse, distort, and to excite members of a group one way or another.

I think that people often have difficulty distinguishing ideological uses of such words from their non ideological uses. What do you think?

It appears that the key question of an egocentric is “How can I get what I want and avoid having to change in any fundamental way?”

54

[QUOTE=coberst]
I think that it is worthwhile to focus our attention on the metaphors ‘egocentricity is a disease’ and ‘sociocentricity is a disease’. The cure for both diseases is self-consciousness. Being self-conscious permits us to combat the fever of irrationality caused by both tendencies.
. . .
Regardless of which group we belong to I suspect that one of the most important things one might do to make the world a better place in which to live is for all of us to become self-conscious of these innate human tendencies.
[/QUOTE]
Are you aware that the word self-conscious already has a meaning that is closely allied with ego-centric? In fact, its meaning is simply that one is embarrassed to have others noticce one’s ego-centric focus.

You may have some point worth considering, but you might want to work on developing a vocabulary that does not seem to undermine what it appears you hope to say.

55

Tom,

Personally, I don’t think he has any vocabulary. All I see in this thread is buzzwords.

56

[QUOTE=Voyager]
Not the academics I hung around with! When I was in grad school the way you gained academic brownie points was by critically dissecting someone else’s idea or defending your own. It continues today. If you cannot critically examine your own ideas, your paper will get shot down by reviewers, or, worse, shot down by the audience if it slips through.

I would suspect professors are fed up with standard shallow freshman arguments. I’m afraid that may be what happened to you - Descartes can be refuted, but not by your argument, and saying he was joking is no argument at all. The first step in critical thinking is critically analyzing your own arguments before you start analyzing anyone else’s. Academics don’t like regurgitive thinkers, but they also don’t like shallow thinkers.
[/QUOTE]

You and I were educated in very different systems, I am British, and the place I went to worked on the tutorial system. We were given substantial reading lists and required to produce two essays per week. From what I can gather our workload in one week was about the same as a term’s work for a normal UK university.

In my year there were six of us, with widely different talents, we spent most of our time in a bunch discussing our subjects and would never have dreamed of shooting each other down in a tutorial - in effect we were a symbiotic group.

My experience was that academics did not like having their views challenged, one of our tutors used to indulge in sneaky one-upmanship tricks, but he was unusual.

I don’t think that you appreciated the humour of Descartes proposition, should anyone admit that God is, to them, not a ‘simple idea’, then they would risk looking less holy than their peers.

Quite a neat trick, put up a proposition that is highly dubious, yet nobody (relevant) is prepared to question it.
From the dubious proposition, draw an equally dubious, but undisputed, conclusion.

I was not a ‘freshman’ - I was a cynical 22 year old, with an acute sense of ‘context’ for concepts - what someone wrote is pretty simple, why they wrote it is a lot more interesting.

You were spot on in your comment to Coberst, this place is heaving with ‘critical thinkers’ - but I would not like to use that phrase.

I detest the use of jargon, if a concept is not expressed in plain English then it turns into a verbal truncheon.