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I my critical thinking skills are very poor for my age.
You can start by reading: "It wasn't luck" by Goldratt it's a business novel where the protagonist has to think deeply about his different companies.
If you like it, then you can move to the whole textbook: "H. William Dettmer The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving"
Apart from that: "thinking in bets" is a really good book for better decision making.
Hint: There are an awful lot to be found on podcasts.
Find people who think critically and listen to them criticize stuff. Hint: There are an awful lot to be found on podcasts.
Most critics I see just make snide remarks about Chesterton's Fence.
And to OP, this isn't a snide remark, but due to your typos, which I often make, you might have ADHD, if you do and is undiagnosed, CT is all the more difficult.
Another aspect in embracing CT, you need to be emotionally and intellectually honest with yourself, this is by the hardest aspect. If you try and expand your CT while not growing emotionally, you will be constrained in many ways.
I also found it useful to build up a framework of analysis to remove some weight of the research. After all one cannot take that research methodology to everything one would like to research into, so by getting a framework one knows which material to avoid.
Find people who think critically and listen to them criticize stuff. Hint: There are an awful lot to be found on podcasts.
Criticizing is small, not entirely healthy subset of Critical Thinking. CT is much much more than criticism. Contextualization, path dependence, understanding motivations, not allowing someone else to decide the dimensionality of the problem or the weight of those dimensions. Most critics I see just make snide remarks about Chesterton's Fence. And to OP, this isn't a snide remark, but due to your typos, which I often…
Ordinary people have been doing that long before eggheads got paid to sit in rooms and produce 12-step programs on "CT," so the answer is simpler than they'd have you believe.
Independent thought is like any other human skill; you learn by imitation. Really! You'll not only pick up all the mental skills you'd hear about in books (just without their fancy names), but the non-mental skills too -- like knowing when's your turn to speak, how to crack a joke, and how to silence self-doubt.
Learning how it is done might make you somewhat immune to it. I highly recommend the following to better understand what is going on:
- Book: Propaganda by Edward Bernays, the father of PR
- Book: The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
- Article: The Submarine by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Another thing to do is listen to exactly those people who are supposedly "evil", "immoral" or otherwise bad in some way. Think about the political ideology opposite to what you were brought up as... or religious ideology which you were taught was bad. And of course, listen to people who are silenced (set showdead=yes on your profile on HackerNews, for example).