People have said “critical thinking”. I agree, but we can be more specific than that:
- Formal logic to think clearly
- Relational frame training to think fluidly
- Human cognitive bias awareness and mitigation strategies to avoid magical thinking or otherwise systematic cognitive errors
- Discourse Analysis to be critical of any message https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiaYBVAEUk&pp=
- Mindfulness and acceptance skills to engage with what our thoughts and body tell us, regardless of whether it’s painful or difficult
- Visible Thinking Routines to make thinking and communication with others easier
- Research design (Joseph A. Maxwell) and system design (How to Design Programs) to seek information critically and how to systematically tackle challenges
This covers so many other things.
My usual specific go-to is how to search the internet for things. But not knowing how to search for hyper-specific things is the symptom of a lack of critical thinking skills.
other things
Interesting. So you’re saying that critical thinking is not what I mentioned, but rather it is something different (an “other thing”). What would you say critical thinking is?
Not at all, I’m saying that many smaller problems people often cite are simply symptoms of a lack of critical thinking.
Ah. It sounds as if you’re saying that critical thinking skills are the base of many skills. That’s actually an interesting issue: could you increase skills by skill and end up with someone that is a critical thinker? Or is critical thinking something fundamental that naturally manifests in many different skills?
Yeah, not revolutionary - critical thinking is a skill that’s fundamental to so much else. Its like learning to read or cook. The base skill let’s your learn more.
Fair enough. If it is fundamental, it affects many things. How do you think it’s best taught or developed? What are the specific activities that you as a teacher or as a student would do to improve it?
Basic math. I don’t talk about solving differential equation. But if you don’t want to get scammed you need to understand what’s a 10% discount, how do interest work, price per kg, or price per m^2
searching for things in the internet.
i think LLM/PISS now has a bigger place because people dunno what to look for / what they want specifically.
there’s some legit use for LLMs, but to help you ‘search’ feels like you’re giving away some freedom for an unknown set of weighted biases.
Basic cooking skills
Reading comprehension
Listening to someone speak without interrupting
Remembering to let other people speak when having a conversation
Yes omg it’s so stressful to try to finish a thought before I get interrupted again.
Working with your hands and tools. It’s amazing how far it can take you and how much money you can make and/or save by DIY’ing things around your home with some basic skills. Like there are people that will pay $100 for something easy like mounting a TV when it’s a few minutes of finding studs and screwing down the bracket.
Then as things progress and you get more comfortable, you can start helping friends and doing side work. I’ve been doing industrial electrical for 10 years now, I’m gonna be re-wiring a whole house from the ground up in July
Changing tires or oil on a car.
A lot of cars don’t include a spare tire anymore.
Last couple times I looked, it was more expensive to buy the oil and filter than to go to my local mechanic to get an oil change.
I appreciate that it’s good to know how to do these things, but it really seems like there’s no reason most people need to actually do them with a current model year vehicle.
Number 1 by far is knowing how to separate your opinions from your identity.
I’ve been thinking about this for years and I can’t shake the thought that identity politics is the root of most major problems in western society (esp. US). It means people interpret criticism of their opinions as personal attacks instead. This overblown defensive reaction leads to turning around and conflating the opinions of others with their worth as human beings.
Yes, there some truth to that. If you hold hateful & bigoted opinions, I would say that makes you a shit person. But you’re not necessarily condemned to that forever, because opinions can potentially change. This is tied in with Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance”, i.e. ideas should be tolerated unless they themselves are so intolerant as to undermine the wider marketplace of ideas.
When we equate (potentially temporary) opinions of others with immutable value, that’s what leads to dehumanizing them and taking away their fundamental rights. And as has always been the case throughout history, the burden falls primarily on vulnerable groups (immigrants, ethnic or social minorities, children and the elderly, etc).
People need to understand that YOU ARE NOT YOUR OPINION. Others can and should criticize your opinions, but that doesn’t mean they are attacking you personally. Defend the opinions, but don’t turn around and go ad-hominem in response. And for fuck’s sake, unless an opinion is so abhorrent or intolerant that it threatens someone else’s existence (e.g. Nazis), you don’t get to take away the holder’s rights to citizenship, food, shelter, healthcare, etc.
The ability to process information. It seems like the reason need AI to summarize different things is because they never learned how to do it themselves.
I think our skill to process information has natural limits, which were overwhelmed decades ago by the social media firehose and a breakdown of information-filtering infrastructure.
an average edition of a newspaper the size of The Times already contains more information about the world than a person in the 17th Century was likely to come across in a lifetime. (Wurman, Information Anxiety)
That was back in 1989. We’re now 30 years later with an internet supercharged by predatory algorithms.
And we can’t filter all of it without either completely withdrawing from the world entirely or spending months learning why and how to filter it ourselves.
We have had information overload in some form or another since the 1500s. What is changing now is the filters we use for the most of the 1500 period are breaking, and designing new filters doesn’t mean simply updating the old filters. They have broken for structural reasons, not for service reasons. (Shirky, It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure)
Perhaps, but I’m talking about are problems within human limits. For example, take information from 5 different sources to synthesize an answer to a question.
I use AI because I’m done being asked to turn off my ad blocker, and accept cookies, and download the mobile app for a “better” experience, and scroll through pages and pages of absolutely worthless fluff completely unrelated to what I’m searching for. Or, alternatively, get blocked for simply having a VPN on to find out how to do the most absolutely mundane things you could possibly imagine.
The internet has been dead since 2016.
I get it, but I’m talking about taking specific information from a facility that you can’t find online. There are records, but there isn’t an AI that can read all the drawings and churn out details.
Integrity.
Reading a map.
GPS is great & all, but I know people that if you put a paper map in front of them they’re still lost because they can’t correlate the map with reality.
I can read a map (and hate letting the car navigate) but map has to be aligned with the world. Before the cell phone, I used to spread the map out on the ground, with north pointing north.
Thank you! You know what you need to do to make things work, and you’re not one of the people who think “North” = “The direction I’m facing”
Understand and knowledge that they are not an island. That the things they do, even if they believe it only affects them, affects those around them.
I might as well go first: Basic troubleshooting and reasoning.
I mean, we’re not talking debugging assembly language here. But at least you should be able to reply correctly to the question “is it dead or faulty” when it comes to a computer. And when a your car has a weird noise, at least try to locate it for an obvious cause such as something rolling around under your seat.
Basic troubleshooting and reasoning.
That drives me nuts sometimes. Like even professionals sometimes seem unable to do basic troubleshooting. I work in live music, I am not a tech/engineer but have done a lot of tech work on and around stages.
Simple stuff like - one speaker is not giving a signal, two techs are unable to identify the fault for over 20 min. I observe for a bit, they check the console, they check the speaker, they check the power supply.
And I, half joking, ask - have you switched sides already? Both look at me like they don’t understand my question, I walk over to the signal line for the PA, unplug them both, plug the left side into the right signal and vice versa on the other side - the problem moves from one speaker to the other, so it has to be a faulty cable. I was so baffled by that.
WHY IS THAT NOT THE FIRST THING YOU DO??? It takes seconds!
Or a wireless in-ear system has weird noises in the signal, I suggest to switch the frequency, the old tech grunts at me that he has already done that, I check and he moved the frequency like 10mhz. I suggest to move to a totally different frequency range and he gets rude so I go somewhere else. Half an hour later it turns out I was right. Why do you fuck around with firmware and shit before you do something simpler and quicker?
I used to work as a refrigeration technician and when I first started I was working with an old Russian dude who had no filter. We’d walk into a store and he’d ask the owner “ok so what’s the problem?” and if they ever said “the machine isn’t working.” he’d immediately reply with “no shit man, I wouldn’t be here if it was working…” Lol
This grinds my gears super hard. I’ve had a few new hires come through and they can’t do anything unless someone tells them to do something or if its written out step by step. Absolutely no critical thinking, curiosity or even basic understanding of why we’re doing what we’re doing, the job might as well be severance lol. I have no idea whats going on, they interviewed well, had relevant experience and can do the basics but as soon as we have to troubleshoot or use our brains they just go dear in the headlights. Its something thats difficult to train.
Maybe they got in trouble too many times for not doing it exactly as instructed, even if the instruction is obviously bullshit in some ways?
Maybe they prefer the work to be mysterious (and important)
“I don’t know what the error said, I clicked ok and it went away. Now fix it”.
I mean, that’s really a software design issue. Like, the system should be set up to have a system log of those.
Most visual novel video game systems provide a history to review messages, if one accidentally skipped through something important.
Many traditional roguelikes have a message log to review for the same reason.
Many systems have a “show a modal alert dialog” API call, but don’t send it to a log, which frankly is a little bit bonkers; instead, they have separate alert and logging systems. I guess maybe you could make a privacy argument for that, not spreading state all over even the local system, but I’d think that it wouldn’t be that hard to make it more-obvious to the user how to clear the log.
Bingo.
I used to work with internet on trains, and the system was relatively simple by today’s standards. Not so much back then, but:
- One carriage had UMTS/LTE and CDMA modems and a router that load balanced between the uplinks. Usually in the restaurant carriage, because there would only be one per train. It also had a short range wireless link in each end for other carriages to connect.
- Each carriage that could potentially be in the same train had wireless clients in each end for connecting “upstream” towards the router.
- All carriages had a wifi radio
And sometimes we’d get tickets such as this sent our way: “Internet doesn’t work”
- No info about which carriage
- No info about when
- No info about where
- No info about which train
This is usually coupled with the expectation that I’m going to use some special knowledge to do it rather than just pasting the contents of the error message into a web search and following the simple instructions contained in the first link.
I had that stuck to my desk at work for years. And I haven’t even opened the link yet to see if it’s the one I think it is.
Yep, it was 😁
Is nuance a skill?
Like, the world isn’t black and white, left and right, right and wrong, etc, but too many people want to simplify complex issues down into binary choices and leave out any trace of nuance.
I agree, and I’d say the backing skill is emotional maturity or emotional management
Not sure if it’s an actual skill, but it certainly is a trait that fits this question. It’s gotten so bad that I tend to tag people with “Nuanced” to people who understand this, so that I know they’re actually reasonable if I seem then in a discussion over a controversial topic.
Its like we live in a floating point world, and too many people are only capable of dealing with integers lol.
I’m stealing this.
I wish I could do this with the web version. I’d like to tag people “Made sense once - don’t block”
Somewhat related is the belief that things are simple rather than complex. I’d argue that thinking something is simple - or believing you have a solid understanding of it - should be a red flag that you probably don’t know as much as you think. I mean, when have you ever heard a true expert give a short and simple answer to anything?
We’re living in a particularly toxic time, and splitting is a reversion
Maybe related: The ability to understand complete statements and considering the context, instead of latching onto one phrase and ignoring the rest.
We live in a hyperbolic age. People’s attention has been commodified so almost all messaging is exaggerated to pull attention to one pole or another. Nuance and patient, thoughtful debate can’t live in that atmosphere.
Not to mention we’re in a period of morality panic. We’ve been brainwashed to think there are only good and bad, either with us on all thoughts or against. We’ve been sucked into a hard lined good vs. evil plot, except everyone is wrong.
Are you really claiming that ALL messages are exaggerated and that thoughtful debate can NEVER exist???
😜
Clutches
pearlshyperboles
Critical Thinking Skills
Reading the screen.
Seriously, about 90% of computer problems would be solved if people just read the fucking screen.
