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Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
#12you answered your own question
seeking for any more answers would just go against critical thinking ;)
there you go buddy
Re: Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
#13Gather a list of techniques to illuminate people who are trying to sell you a red herring. We do critical thinking all the time in a basic way when we try and determine if an advertisement for a product is 'bull ship' or not. It's likely you are going to do a lot of automatic and basic critical thinking on the answers in this thread.
The same principle is used to filter your own mental direction, thoughts and assumptions. It's like panning for gold. Panning for gold involves sifting through a river of dirt to find specks of gold in your sieve. You're training your thinking to analyze out all the words and meanings that could trap you and find the specks of gold.
Critical thinking and analysis is very helpful for programming problems you find hard and/or debugging some nightmare you've accidentally created. Challenging your own historical reasoning, thoughts and assumptions helps save you from your own programming hubris.
It's possible to become reactionary to new information or too closed off, if you over-analyze everything. You might not notice the real things you need to analyze in life until much later. Analysis isn't protected from your personal beliefs, they will be a soft spot for jumping to conclusions. It's a narrow path and the answers you find might not be the ones you wanted when you started.
Re: Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
#14Thinking is carefully controllef by PR and marketing techniques for profits. 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…
This 100%. There's this quote I like from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (I haven't read it in context or have any familiarity with his work, but it comes up a lot of other different places): "The limits of my language are the limits of my world".
You can't think critically if you let other peoples' reasoning (or their words) replace your own, and mainstream thinking limits your sense of what's posssible if it doesn't have the language to describe something new or unorthodox.
As ComradePhil says, question all assumptions (there are a lot you use to function every day you don't ever think about, as well as those held by people you disagree with) and seek out the furthest things from the mainstream you can find, including dissenting/marginalized opinions. Great idea about showdead, didn't know that was a thing!
Paul Graham turned me onto lots of great ideas, I greatly improved my work environment by sharing his 'Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule' with my boss, it also made me realize that I was putting pressure on myself to work unnaturally.
http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Avoid getting your news from corporate media as much as possible and avoid all forms of advertising. Try to form your own opinions instead of feeling like you have to join a tribe of like-minded people (social media makes it really easy to fall into this trap).
Though it's also OK to not have an opinion if you're not familiar with something, rather being tempted to defer to someone else's strong opinion.
And above all else, avoid mental clutter as much as possible so you can find your own clarity.
Re: Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
#15Alan Kay's lectures on youtube are mostly about (critical) thinking and how to educate your own thinking. Each of his talks is aimed at a different audience but all address your question. For our HN audience the 1997 OOPSLA talk [1] is a place to start, or the "How to Invent the Future I - Stanford CS183F: Startup School" talks [2].
There are many recommendations of books to read to develop your thinking.
Re: Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
#16First, understand the meaning of the word "critical". It is unbiased in it's meaning, it means to examine something without any consideration where the conclusions lead. In common use it carries a negative connotation, to be critical means to reexamine something and come to different conclusions, because it's when we are wrong that it is most often useful.
Second, become very good at articulating your thoughts and ideas. If you can't explain something you don't understand it. So expand your vocabulary, watch your grammar, split hairs, use analogy. This takes practice and is always an ongoing process.
Finally, hold nothing as sacred, nothing. You must be willing to accept that even your most cherished, deeply held views are wrong. You must be willing to entertain ideas you find reprehensible. You must adopt and throw away ideas when your faculty of reason tells you that you are wrong, and you must be unemotional about it. You cannot coddle your worldview. This is very hard, which is why most people can't do it.
Re: Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
#17I had written a comment but thought this article conveyed my thoughts better:
Just the idea of 'independent thought' itself is a contradiction:
Independent thinking connotes the idea of being able to think on your own, to convince oneself on the truthfulness or validity of information received, rather than being swayed by the opinion of others.
However, the premise on which the prevailing conception of independent thought is constructed is faulty.
A Thought is interconnected; no disassociated thinker lives on an island all by themselves.
Can we truly think on our own, independently, in the purest sense of the term? Aren’t our thoughts inevitably contaminated by the ideas, philosophies, and biases we have deliberately and subconsciously imbibed over the course of our lifetime?
Besides, it is hard or impossible to evaluate how “independent” our thoughts truly are, for the simple reason thoughts represent the accumulation of our lived and learned experiences.
Yes, imagination is an important component of thought; yet we do not imagine in a vacuum — we merely adapt and rearrange familiar realities to compose new patterns and entities.
Or to put it more charitably, don’t we all stand on the shoulders of giants — the teachers under whom we studied at their feet; the parents, families, and communities with whom we imbibed their cultural ethos?
Granted, some of the more enlightened among us might experience the occasional “quantum leap” in thought processes, thereby giving birth to innovative approaches to solving problems.
Likewise, when you scratch any of these “independent” thought sequences with the tip of a pencil, underneath you’ll find it is nothing more than existing knowledge repurposed by identifying and combining different patterns and connecting the dots.
Source of the excerpt above: https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/how-independent-th...
Some useful books and links:
Naval Ravikant: Let us Not talk Falsely Now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euzoOkBUzsQ
List of Cognitive Biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/...
How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life Paperback – March 5, 1993 by Thomas Gilovich
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Reading most articles from lesswrong.com or slatestarcodex.com
Slightly unrelated: You analyzing yourself in such critical way reminds me of myself.
The only persistent solution to this was meditation using Sam Harris waking up app (it's free if you email them).
Re: Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
#18Alan Kay's lectures on youtube are mostly about (critical) thinking and how to educate your own thinking. Each of his talks is aimed at a different audience but all address your question. For our HN audience the 1997 OOPSLA talk [1] is a place to start, or the "How to Invent the Future I - Stanford CS183F: Startup School" talks [2]. There are many recommendations of books to read to develop your thinking. [1] https:/…
Mind sharing the books list? thanks
Re: Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
#19Explore gut feelings and thoughts back in the head. Learn when to rely on hope/belief and when to change certain facts/assumptions and reevaluate situation. Try approaching situation top to bottom, starting from basic facts about the situation. Think from all sides, build a model of what's going on and see if models fit with reality. Imagine explaining current situation to someone and see if it sounds obviously flawed when spoken out.
Re: Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?
#20This may be ridiculous advice but go find lots of media that shows experts being wrong. Go find videos of cops beating up innocent people. Go look through the news from 10 20 or 30 years and find people saying things they were sure about that they were wrong about or that they said would be good but ended up causing a lot of problems.
Keep doing this until you have ingrained in yourself
1) People that sound smart often don't know what they are talking about
2) Authority figures often don't have your best interests at heart
3) and learn the specific smells of what these kind of statements tend to look and sound like
And I guess eventually you could build up an intuition for when people are full of shit.
You can also do the opposite and try to build up intuition for when people were right about things that sounded like bullshit to you.
And if you want to get meta about it, listen to this philosopher talk about bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk&t=1s