Do what you're sold^H^H^H^Htold.
Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
251–260 of 328 posts
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#252I remember the moment I unlocked the critical thinking I do have. It was 7th grade, and I was in a home-ec-like class. The day before we had learned how to order from mail order catalogues (showing my age there). This day the teacher passed out magazines, told us to pick an ad, and then find 5 ways it was misleading. Easy, right? Sex, money, Fame, these associations are in a bunch of ads, and everyone knows about the…
Nice story.
My moment was something my father used to say. I realized how bad i am (still) naturally at critical thinking.
There is a 50% chance of rain today. Until i was in college i really believed that this meant 5 of the 10 weatherman voted yes for rain and 5 voted no.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sort of thing can just as well make you wish you'd gone to real estate school. "A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention -- do I have your attention? Interest -- are you interested? I know you are because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision -- have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action."
Thank You for the condescension! :-P
It's a quote from Glengarry Glen Ross. That is one of Alec Baldwin's lines.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean I don't feel like I get much out of listening to the same talking points trotted out over and over again, personally.
I'm solidly on the liberal side of most issues, and I definitely try to remain informed, which includes exploring conservative viewpoints and media. The problem is that MOST media (of any focus) is shallow. Reading the "opposing" side is just as tiresome as reading points I already know if obvious information is skipped over or not explored (actually, more tiresome). I end up chasing down lots of details myself, whic…
There is something to that. I agree with a lot of what Glenn Greenwald writes, but I rarely read him because he can get so repetitive.
> Secondly, I've found left-leaning sites that do more factual digging (at least it seems that way) and will cover and attempt to disprove some of the opposing arguments. (Both sides have vapid overly dramatic coverage offered by many sources - I'm referring to the better sources on both sides). The closest I've found on the right is the National Review. I'm all ears if someone has better suggestions, but as it is I tend to read more within my "echo chamber" because it's actually the best source of nuanced information I've found so far.
I think the American Conservative can be good, especially Daniel Larison. But then again, they also run pieces with bizarre claims like "Uber is an example of distributism."
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#255The problem isn't critical thinking skills. You can get together any 5 jokers and ask them 'what's the best way to build a backyard patio?', and they'll all start stroking their chins. But when thinking critically interferes with some sort of strong emotion, or pre-conceived belief system, then forget it. It doesn't matter how much education you have, if entertaining a particular problem causes your amygdala to start…
Ah the glorious cognitive biases we have. I believe you're referencing the Backfire Effect coupled with cognitive dissonance of your views being a part of your identity. Plus a generous helping of the overarching Confirmation Bias[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Cognitive bias pretty much sums up the whole of the tech industry these days. Educated fools who never apparently strayed from the tech courses to ever consider philosophy, history, or even a foreign language. But they sure do know what's best for us.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#256It isn't just that people aren't taught thinking skills, it's that people are actively attacked and coerced into suppressing that kind of thinking style. Going through normal public schooling systems most people are taught during key developmental phases that questioning the world around you causes punishment. If it isn't your parents, it's your teachers or the government constantly shoving stupid thought-suppressing ideas in your head. During these phases your immune system learns to associate free thinking with abuse and pain. When you are an adult it becomes very difficult to undo this. An adult who gets very emotional when their beliefs are questioned likely got abuse and punishment when they questioned the beliefs of those around them in youth.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or perhaps worse: think critically the same way the test writer does: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-s...
I've often thought that a lot of the high-brow analysis put into art was junk. Just people taking dots and connecting them with shreds of evidence existent in the art. Confirmation bias masquerading as analysis. It's nice to see an artist agreeing with that viewpoint. I should clarify that I don't mind when the context of a piece is explained. I like knowing about where the artist was when a work was created; what wa…
Ha! I don't know if you've ever seen Ocean's 13, but there's a line in that movie that cracks me up along the same "high brow" analysis lines.
> Matt Damon - "Do you have any wine back there?
> Lady - "Château d'Yquem?"
> Matt Damon - "As long as it's not '73..."
Just makes me chuckle every time because he's a con artist in such a broad field almost nobody can actually identify all of the good and bad varieties from any given year. By just giving an obscure reference you somehow sound like you know what you're talking about...knowing that nobody else actually knows enough about what they are talking about to call you on it.
Just struck me as a great bit of "high brow crowd" humor.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I should hope so. A nation cannot exist without some social cohesion, Americans need to (and do) agree on most issues.
In a lot of the bipartisan Washington consensus stuff Beltway opinion is in lockstep with itself but not with average Americans.
>The pretense in disputed elections is that the great conflict is between the two major parties. The reality is that there is a much bigger conflict that the two parties jointly wage against large numbers of Americans who are represented by neither party and against powerless millions around the world.
-Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#259Critical thinking is an important skill but I'd like to caution against this fixation on critical thinking thought in collage as some sort of beacon for society. Critical thinking is something people develop over the years and it starts early IMO. It's not just a 4 year course. It's a whole approach to the world around you. There are many critical thinkers in my experience outside of collage. And I don't see it a pro…
it took me a while trying to figure out what you meant by a collage of critical thinking.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#260I teach community college biology, and I agree that we're really bad at teaching critical thinking. But the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) cited by this article was graded by a computer last time I checked. Here's a direct quote from one of their papers a few years ago: "Beginning in fall 2010, we moved to automated scoring exclusively, using Pearson’s Intelligent Essay Assess or (IEA). IEA is the automated sco…
As a computational linguistics grad student I find Pearson's "product" line completely mind-boggling, and their peddling it deserving a giant class-action lawsuit. Consider that the state of the art in machine representation of words is something around Word2Vec or GLoVe, and that we have some okay dependency parsers. That their system provides scores consistent with human raters is likely just evidence that they have a coarse-grained and noisy human evaluation system.