Higher education doesn’t explicitly teach critical thinking skills (that is, there isn’t likely to be a course with that name) but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting through any well-rounded undergraduate program without an appreciation for the rigors inherent in the scientific method. Science simply could not progress without building on solid foundations. This is not to say that science is infallible, and moreover, one can find tales of some famous scientific pioneers engaging in various shenanigans that were buried and forgotten when their major discoveries were ultimately vindicated. What it does say is that in the long term, it’s an existential necessity for science to build on solidly established foundations, and were it not so, we’d all still be living in caves.
The idea of “forming your own opinions” about matters that have long since been resolved in climate science (for example) is exactly equivalent to concluding, by this same method of deduction, that the earth is flat because you can clearly see that it is (although it leaves unresolved the question of where the sun goes at night). This is the exclusive domain of the uneducated.
You’re absolutely right that many of those who rely on disreputable and fraudulent information sources do so because those places support viewpoints they already hold. While this is not necessarily the exclusive domain of the uneducated – because even the well-educated can irrationally employ cognitive dissonance to accommodate both their biases and their objective knowledge simultaneously – it’s a domain heavily populated by the uneducated.
Oh, granted, sorry, didn’t mean to imply it’s a course of study, but it part and parcel of the traditional undergrad education, italics in both original and this reply. And of course, some disciplines have a much stronger emphasis on it than others, possibly but not absolutely tied into the whole “Professional” vs “Academic” education we were talking about earlier.
Well, I didn’t arrive at that statement by deductive reasoning. I stated this at the outset. This statement is a heuristic rule. It was ultimately arrived at by abductive reasoning.
I chose to support it with an analogy.
All of these are less likely. My experience is that people with formal training usually have more expertise in the area of training than people who lack formal training. Of all the people I have met, only a small fraction have demonstrated expertise in martial arts. A black belt is prima facie evidence of expertise in martial arts, but it also happens that I have met a few people with black belts who demonstrated to my satisfaction their expertise. There are a number of reasons I need not recite supporting the assertion that a black belt certification usually implies expertise in martial arts. I am justified in crafting a defeasible proposition that states, a person with a black belt usually has more expertise in martial arts than a person who lacks formal martial arts training.
This goes for all sorts of specializations. A person with a formal education in medicine usually has more expertise in medicine than a person who lacks formal training. A person with a formal education in economics generally has more expertise in economics than a person who lacks that education. These are not traditional propositions. Exceptions prove the rule.
There is, in fact, a positive statement about B. B has less formal education than A. And we know that if all other things are equal, less formal education means less credibility. From less credibility there is an assumption of less capability, but that’s only a general assumption and isn’t actually necessary to support my main argument.
The only valid counterattack I recognize thus far is when you imply all other things are not usually equal, or put another way, that exceptions to the rule are too common:
When I think of sneering at the less educated, it’s usually about a specific disagreeable opinion in a particular field of knowledge. My argument is strongest in fields of highly specialized or esoteric knowledge, like medicine, law, economics, physics, and the like. By far the weakest argument I’ve put forth is that it’s safe to generally assume a person without an undergraduate degree lacks critical thinking skills commensurate with a degree holder. I would not say it is reasonable to sneer at people, on the basis of their lack of formal education, when it comes to matters of common sense. I believe critical thinking skills are for the most part developed through practice, and are not likely to develop independently of formal education. At least not in today’s world, not in my neck of the woods, where most children who demonstrate a penchant for critical thinking are strongly encouraged to pursue a formal education.
I disagree with your assertion that STEM degrees do not certify critical reasoning skill. Circumstances may be different in your country, or I could be mistaken. My experience with engineering classes is that critical thinking is necessary to solve the problems. Even in basic science classes some level of critical thinking is necessary if you want good marks for your discussion section. It factors into forming the hypothesis, too. STEM degrees are also built on top of basic undergraduate standards which include social studies and English composition classes.
I won’t discount your claim that in places where formal education isn’t the norm, expertise without formal education is more common. That makes sense to me. My whole argument collapses when applied to a society where formal education is rare.
In another thread, @Exapno_Mapcase mentioned that in the early 20th century, only 6.4% of the U.S. population had a high school education. Today a high school diploma or equivalent is a necessary qualification for many entry level, full-time jobs. There are entire professions which require a graduate degree to lawfully practice. That kind of discrimination is much more serious than mere sneering. The reality is that day in, day out, people make the reasonable assumption that a person with formal education is generally more credible than a person without.
I chose one of those examples specifically because, in the case of education, it’s actually pretty damn likely.
But you don’t know what B lacks. All you know is that they don’t have a black belt. Not what training they may actually have.
You keep harping on this part, but it’s irrelevant.
That isn’t a statement of ability, just accreditation. Not a positive statement of B’s abilities.
Still confusing accreditation with credibility.
And your STEM degree is…? I have 2, and “critical reasoning” was not a necessity for either. It definitely helped you do better, but wasn’t necessary. I know this from all the uncritical thinkers throughout both my degrees who nevertheless graduated alongside me.
Not anything like as necessary as rote memorization and practice.
Again, memory and experience are what counts, in undergrad.
Lots of places outside the US, that isn’t the case. You can just do science courses and get a science degree.
I’m thinking we’d better clearly define critical thinking here. I’d say it’s the ability to evaluate an idea’s strengths and weaknesses, contextualize it with other known facts and determine through a thorough examination whether it holds water. If it doesn’t, it should be discarded, or at least demoted. I imagine this manifests differently depending on your field, but it must apply in a lot of academic disciplines. I think it’s interesting that many conservatives view liberal arts education especially on social issues to be indoctrination, because my experience of it was to be bombarded with one point of view after another and the real academic work being to make sense out of all these conflicting or different viewpoints. Obviously we all, including the instructors, had our biases, but at no point did a professor hand us some manifesto to regurgitate. We had to engage with these ideas on their own terms and figure out what we thought about it all, and then articulate those thoughts convincingly and coherently.
I’m not saying this doesn’t apply to engineering but I have a harder time understanding how it would. In engineering there is a lot more objectivity: does this lever carry this load or doesn’t it? Would some other length of lever carry it better? Presumably there’s an objective answer to that.
Subjectivity in engineering generally manifests in the form of tradeoffs – e.g.- this design is more robust but will take longer and cost more to build; this material is stronger than alternatives but deteriorates faster; this software design is more functional but takes up more resources or takes longer to code or is harder to test, etc etc ad infinitum.
So ultimately I think the only difference between engineering and the social sciences is that many (not all) engineering decisions can be made on the basis of well-quantified objective parameters, whereas IMHO the quantified parameters in the social sciences tend to be fictions that are inferred from nebulous, contrived statistical assessments. Nevertheless, real-world engineering abounds with subjective decisions, most often cost-benefit tradeoffs and sometimes deeply subjective moral considerations like “how safe is safe enough?”.
Or innovation cannot be held back for excessive safety such as the recent Titan submersible loss (which I suspect you were referencing). That was a tradeoff, and one that was both utterly subjective and with sadly predictable consequences.
Or as my wife chipped in, claiming success (the likely outcome of the recent high temp superconductor) without sufficient evidence and research, or blaming your failures on instrumentation errors or contamination when it was your theory that was flawed.
Lots of room for critical thinking failures when your needs and emotions are invested, even in hard, supposedly empirical science.
Sorry if this was alluded to before, but any “sneering” done at people with less formal education is hugely outweighed by current popular tendencies to sneer at and demonize those with extensive formal education and professional expertise, in medicine and other fields.
Yes, I think most posters have been trying to be very careful to avoid hypocrisy. Devaluing someone else’s expertise, skills, and/or knowledge isn’t a good idea regardless of the social class / wealth / educational level of the person doing so.
And the specific forms address in LHoD’s OP is that the educated may have a tendency to fall into this particularly form of prejudice, not that there aren’t other, possibly more common, and probably more pernicious versions we see everyday that lack that particular correlation. But those have been addressed to the point of tedium in various threads about Qanon / MAGA / Anti-Vaxx.
No, it’s very unlikely: if I were to pick a random person, out of all the people who do not have a black belt in martial arts, the chances of that person having expertise comparable to a randomly selected black belt are slim to none. There is even less of a chance that the person is a former marital arts trainee who specifically dropped out for financial reasons. I am justified in making the inference that absent unusual circumstances indicating otherwise, the person who has had formal education is more credible.
I’m using the same logic here as if I said, creatures with wings are generally better at flying (or gliding) than creatures that lack wings. You and I both know this is a reasonable rule of thumb, even though there are unusual cases where a snake or spider can fly a long distance, while a penguin or ostrich cannot.
Yes, originally I argued that less credibility generally means less capability. And I still believe that argument. But it’s not necessary to support my main argument, which you acknowledged has a valid form:
Unless I misunderstand you, the only premise you object to is premise B(1)(ii): People with less formal education are generally less credible. That is, I thought, the major point you and I disagree on.
I don’t wish to debate the definition of discrimination here. I’ll concede this point in this thread. The main idea from that paragraph was that where I live, formal education is very common. That is still true.
That’s fair! My claim that undergraduate degrees are evidence of critical thinking is by far the weakest point. I can see some reason in taking the other side there.
But I think I’m on strong ground when it comes to things like medicine (read: vaccines), climate change, economics, etc. Most sneering, in my opinion, is not merely at a person’s general lack of formal education, but is directed towards their relative lack of education in a highly specialized field of knowledge.
Subjectivity in engineering is a bit of a digression here so I don’t want to belabor the point; my post was basically intended just as a one-time response to @Spice_Weasel. But just FTR, no, what I had in mind was actual products – everything from aircraft structures and avionics to cars and toasters. In my view, the Titan submersible disaster was more an example of engineering incompetence, enabled by one man’s hubris that caused him to mistake objectively dangerous incompetence for brilliant innovation.
Nevertheless I think @Jackmannii makes an important point. To the extent that both the left and the right are critical of each other in this respect, the right explicitly demonizes education as “liberal indoctrination”, while the left’s criticism of the other side – as I and other posters have pointed out a number of times – tends to be directed more against ignorance than against any particular level of educational attainment. To the extent that the latter prejudice exists – or seems to exist – it’s because, as I said earlier, there is an inverse correlation between factual ignorance and educational attainment. To criticize or “sneer at” people for holding objectively stupid ideas is not prejudice.
It’s hard to believe that someone with a post-graduate degree in microbiology, for example, is likely to fear that the COVID vaccine will inject tracking chips into their body or make their body magnetic, or that anyone with any sort of STEM degree would genuinely deny that anthropogenic carbon emissions are disrupting the climate. Of course not everyone with a good education has a STEM or medical degree, but any good education will be sufficiently well-rounded to offer a good exposure to the STEM areas.
It’s not analogous. Flying ability is a direct result of possessing working wings. Credibility is not a direct result of having a college degree. Only the ability to pass courses is.
My entire point is that that ability is not as closely correlated with credibility as you seem to think. Especially in an era of degree mills, online colleges and a general deterioration in uni standards.
In fact, I have two. By Max’s logic, I’m twice as credible
That’s up to you, but me, a multiple degree haver, is telling you it really shouldn’t. Other measures of expertise - peer acclaim, publishing record, postgraduate work - are all much better markers of credibility than mere undergraduate degrees.
I know people with advanced STEM degrees who first spent years trying to deny that climate change was happening, and still deny that it’s anthropogenic.
Their degrees are in other fields. [ETA: though I think there are a few people whose degrees are in climatology who are also still holding out; just not many.]
I also know people without any such degrees who know better.
To the extent that it does so, it does so only in its own field.
And even in its own field, it’s not a guarantee of anything other than that the person managed, somehow, to get through the course. I passed my formal logic course while disagreeing with the axioms; plenty of other people have learned what the expected answer is and know how to give that even if they don’t accept its accuracy. And very many people, at multiple levels, have passed courses and then promptly forgotten nearly everything they supposedly learned in them.
Sure, such people exist. What I’m suggesting is a correlation between education and an appreciation for how science works. There will always be exceptions, especially in politically charged matters like climate change, mostly due I suspect to some combination of right-wing ideology and/or personal vested interests, along the lines of the famous quip by the writer Upton Sinclair that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
Yeah. I very nearly majored in philosophy in undergrad. It was notoriously difficult to do well in these courses. I pulled off an A- in one and a B+ in another, doing little more than last minute cramming. I saved my blue book exams for posterity, and now when I read them, I don’t know a damned thing I was talking about. All I really remember is that there was an ideological divide between empiricists and rationalists, which interested me because those two things are today regarded as equally important bedfellows. But I couldn’t even tell you which philosopher was on which side.
Now if I had majored in philosophy and then went on to a career in philosophy, that would have probably resulted in my retaining a lot more information. Which is to say I think a degree gives you some extra credibility when accompanied by experience.
Now ask me how many people I run across on the Internet giving colossally stupid advice to people, with the claim they work “in the mental health field.” I do lend credence to experts, particularly expert consensus, but being married to a behavioral psychologist and knowing how much bullshit psychology is out there, I have a hard time taking any one expert seriously, unless what they are saying seems to fit with the facts as I know them. I’m particularly interested in all the BS about trauma psychology that is out there. It’s one of those subjects that attracts a lot of magical thinkers, PhD or no.
