Or the less descriptive title “We are all born with a brain, why the hell are we not passing out owners manuals?”
The essence of my argument is pretty simple. We have the knowledge of how flawed our brains are, How badly they function under all sorts of hidden influences that the vast majority of the human race seems to be completely ignorant of. Why are we not teaching this in required classes? Should we be teaching this in required classes?
Feel Free to add anything else along these lines to the list of things we should know and usually don’t.
The idea for this thread came from a brief exchange with Voyager in another thread. That and my general on going research into not being a permanent idiot my whole life.
There has been plenty of agreement here on the need to teach critical thinking, but I definitely agree that we need to extend it to the teaching of cognitive biases.
Two examples. A lot of resistance to regulations come from those who claim to think, or might actually think, that people always make rational choices. We don’t need any mortgage regulations - who would take on a mortgage guaranteed to be bigger than they can pay. And before you say they should learn math, a financial reporter for the Times (Edmund Andrews) ran into this very problem. His confession of how and why he screwed up is fascinating.
More people in the West seem to get into trouble being caught up on mountains during storms without adequate clothing than in the East. (My perception.) Could this be an availability issue? In the West people don’t have images if snow storms as available as in the East.
There are tons of other advantages to doing this, I’m sure.
Yes, we should. I’ve designed critical thinking courses that were hugely successful at the middle school level. To go one further, it’s absolutely essential that we teach critical thinking as early as middle school. Preferably sooner.
Good points. Most HS graduates have very little knowledge of finance-which is why many of them overpay on car loans, for example. Critical thinking should also be stressed-as much as the government doesn’t like its citizens to be skeptics.
I would love to learn more about your curriculum, and I tend to agree with the idea that this type of thinking should be introduced as early as reasonable.
This is looking like the least debatable debate I could come up with so far. I should have added a “How do we get these changes made?” to the op
False premise. We covered a lot of logical fallacies when I was in high school. Surprisingly or not, we had an entire section devoted to rhetoric in my literature class. This was only a decade ago, while curricula do change, I would imagine it’s still there.
Pretty much all Dopers are in favor of critical thinking courses because they think they are good at it, and they are pretty much right. I wonder how many would claim to be immune from the cognitive biases in your list. I discovered quite expensively that I am not immune to loss aversion, and I’ve restructured how I do my investing to recognize this. It is hard to admit that even the most rational of us anchor, like I gave in the example in the other thread. So you’ve got agreement on the easy stuff.
This is another one that surprises me. I had a semester long course in personal finance that was required. And I went to a public school in one of the bottom 5 states in the nation.
I’m not sure we’re actually missing this education, I think most high schoolers are just ignoring it or gasp are not actually that bright to begin with.
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We covered a lot of logical fallacies when I was in high school. Surprisingly or not, we had an entire section devoted to rhetoric in my literature class. This was only a decade ago, while curricula do change, I would imagine it’s still there.
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I went to high school in Kentucky, and I received no instruction in critical thinking, logic, or finance.
I don’t know if these are state-level decisions or local ones. It bears further research as to how commonly these subjects are taught.
I can relate; the false-consensus effect meant that it took a while for me to internalize that libertarianism, even the moderate form I favor, is unappealing to most people, rather than it being a matter of needing to fully understand it or “really think about it” to accept it.
Should we have “critical thinking courses”; or should critical thinking be one of the things that are taught in one or more (or all!) existing courses?
Covering a lot of something is very different than a devoted course teaching you how flawed your brain really is and giving you tools to combat this. Logical fallacies (imho) are less important than the knowledge of bias due to the subversive nature of bias. We spend so much of our lives engaged in self deception its crazy to think about. Of course there is the other side which a couple posters have already pointed at, Not everyone has your best interest at heart. It is certainly easier to take advantage of the ignorant than the enlightened. An Example (note this is an example, I am not trying to take this thread into another anti religious fun ride)
People actively exploiting bias to promote their world view. If you are ignorant of fallacy and bias how would you know which is true? How could you spot the flaws in the logical argument or the bias they are exploiting? (or for that matter the bias they are falling victim to)
In a recent thread I started I went looking for non biased evidence that could be presented without fallacy to support the concept of god. I realize that the dope is hardly representative of the entire world, but the efforts of the believers are very telling. The idea for that thread came from my studies of fallacy and watching debates/talks with people like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. In every single talk their opponents are incapable of making an argument without resorting to fallacy, and in most cases display clear evidence of personal bias. I know personally people who’s retirement plan is to win the lottery, and yes they are serious. I even went so far as to explain that if you spent 750,000$ you would only have a 10% chance of winning (Washington state lottery odds 1/7,500,000) and that you would have to spend 75,000$ to have even a 1% chance. I got nothing, didn’t even make a dent in their retirement plans.
This state of being is embarrassing, if aliens ever do come to earth they won’t have to take over with weapons and warfare. They can just use our own messed up heads against us. Why are humans incapable of thinking ahead more than one step? Why do we fight tooth and nail to preserve our precious beliefs when we can clearly see the harm those beliefs are causing both us and others? How to we get people to understand that our great great grandchildren will either suffer for our ignorance or bask in the glow of our understanding?
I think this is correct. Essay-writing, particularly of, say, the compare-and-contrast model, certainly teach critical thinking a lot better than some taxonomy of colloquially-named fallacies pulled off Wikipedia.
There is a weird fetish in certain quarters of this board for fallacy names. About once a month, you’ll see a post asking “What’s this fallacy called?”. As if the argument cannot be refuted without mystical incantations of “Affirming the Consequent” (a pity it’s not in Latin for heightened magical effect, no?) or “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc” or the nearly universally misused “Excluded [sic] Middle”*
If you want to teach critical thinking, an important step is to teach why these modes of argumentation have the shortcoming they have. Simply teaching: “When you see this argument form, use this jargon!” is perhaps the furthest thing from thinking critically.
Instead of saying, “Here is some Latin to deploy when someone says ‘X follows Y, therefore Y causes X.’” You should teach them: “While it does seem that an effect always temporally follows its cause (but query why and whether this should necessarily be the case!), mere sequential following doesn’t seem to entail causation. Can you think of cases where something followed something else, but that first thing wasn’t necessarily the cause? Can you think of cases where something always follows something else, but even so, that first thing is not the cause? In general, what else, besides following in time, might be needed to show causation?”
This is what is taught in any composition course worthy of the name. And as you can see, sacerdotal mutterings of “No True Scotsman!” does not a composition make. How hard is to say, and how much clearer is it to the reader to read, “My opponent made a claim about members of group G. I have shown that not all members of this group have that attribute. He now alleges that he was referring only to those who have some further quality of “true” G-ness. He offers no rationale for invoking this mysterious true G-ness, and it is, instead, an attempt to handwave away the shortcomings of his argument.”
The fallacy is “Undistributed Middle,” and refers to a syllogism that fails to “distribute” the middle term (i.e., the term that is neither the conclusion’s subject nor predicate) in at least one of the premises, according to the Aristotelian definition of distribution of terms. (A-statements (All S is P) distribute the subject alone; E-statements (No S is P) distribute both subject and predicate; I statements (Some S is P) distribute nothing; and O-statements (Some S is not P) distribute the predicate alone.) The “Law of the Excluded Middle” asserts that for all propositions p, either p or its negation is true. (Note the LEM alone does not forbid that both might be true; however at least one must be true by LEM.)
The general term for where has set up two choices as jointly exhaustive of all options is “False Dilemma.” This nomenclature is apparently not as sexy as the solecism “Excluded Middle,” which is curious, as “dilemma” is Greek and classical languages are particularly bonerizing for this set.
One would hope that these skills would be used in all courses. But with teaching to the test and all, it is probably vain to hope that any one teacher would do the job any justice along with the regular material. In any case, since the techniques are so broad it would be good for a class (or subsection) to show how the techniques apply all over - and how the student can get better grades by applying them.
When to teach it? Waiting until senior year seems kind of pointless, right? Why not in IS or junior high, when the student is plenty old enough to get it, and where it could be applied for all of high school?
I don’t recall anything from back in the dark ages when I went to High School, but I’ve heard several younger people tell me this was a major topic in a several classes. I heartily endorse the idea that schools should more to help students learn how to think, and not just *what *to think.
I designed it for 12-13 year olds, but it’s scaleable to high school students without much difficulty at all. Basically I started out with a general philosophical statement that we’re all ignorant of the vast majority of human knowledge, let alone all the facts in Universe. From that I point out that there is no shame in ignorance, and that recognizing ignorance is not a weakness, but a profound strength and the beginning of wisdom. From that I transition to discussions on how “I don’t know” is often the most reasonable and accurate response to a great many questions and situations.
From there I transition into a formal study of logical and rhetorical fallacies (which I teach on Fridays from then on out, and have students bring a specific folder just for those. Yes, it’s their Friday Fallacies Folder.) I generally start with the fallacies of Hasty Generalization/Anecdote and Biased Sample. I seque from that into a discussion of the Fallacies of Composition and Division, using categories/groups and exemplar/individuals as the whole and the parts, respectively. An activity I’ve found I have tremendous success with is to have the kids clear the room’s desks to the sides and stand in the middle to start. I’ll then describe certain standard/stereotypical belief or behaviors, be they political, ideological, whatever. Kids who agree walk to one side of the room, and who disagree walk to the other. What they quickly find is that no two of them end up on the same side for the whole exercise, or consistently remain with any other person even with side switching accounted for, for that matter.
And on so on.
I include media literacy, science-in-society, expository/persuasive writing and debate as parts of the course.