The Death of Critical Thinking

History is filled with moments that make no sense. Entire groups of seemingly intelligent people making decisions that, at least in hindsight, just seem totally stupid, disasters that could have been avoided. And there are atrocities that should have been unthinkable. And when we look back, we always ask the same question. Well, what were they thinking?

But what if that question is inherently the wrong one to ask? What if they weren't thinking at all? Or at least they weren't thinking critically? Because the uncomfortable truth is that critical thinking isn't something that we permanently have. It's something we can lose. And right now, our society seems to be collectively losing it faster than ever before. We are outsourcing our thinking to AI. Our opinions are being outsourced to social media influencers and our desires to algorithms. And the more we do it, the less we notice it happening. Until one day, we'll look up from our phones and realize that we're no longer making decisions for our own lives. We're just accepting them.

But it's not too late. We can change course right now and build a better future. But for that to happen, we must first understand what's causing it. This is the death of critical thinking and how to save your mind.

Group think is a psychological phenomenon where our desires for harmony within a group overrides our ability to think clearly under pressure to fit in. We stop questioning things. We stop thinking for ourselves and simply do as we're told. To make matters worse, in an effort to maintain the status quo, we might even join together to silence those we don't agree with. This is how individually intelligent people can end up making irrational choices and how entire groups can convince themselves they're right, even when it's clear to any outsider that they're not.

Group think is often cited as an explanation for why so many Germans embrace the Nazi party. Propaganda, grievance, and conformity lead to a deadly monolithic mindset. If you believe in the steady intellectual progress of humanity, you might assume that group think is something we should have outgrown by now. Over time, we've become more rational, independent thinkers. And honestly, not that long ago, that belief felt reasonable. But today, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of fading away, lost in the books of history, group think seems to be accelerating. And with it, the slow erosion of our ability to think critically at all.

All of this has been made even worse by technological advancements that have made it easier than ever to offload all of our cognitive tasks. For thousands of years, humans have had used tools to reduce our cognitive load to amazing results. When we started writing things down, we didn't need to put as much effort into remembering information. Calculators helped us avoid tedious math. GPS systems allowed pretty much anyone to navigate anywhere in the world without needing to study maps or remember directions. We store less information than we used to because we know that we can always Google the answer that we need. Offloading can free up mental capacity for other more important tasks, but when taken too far, it can impair our critical thinking and our memory.

None of the tools that I've mentioned so far hold a candle to what we're currently dealing with at work, in the classrooms, and at home. You've probably already guessed what I'm talking about. It's AI. It's by far the most significant source of cognitive offloading that we've ever had to reckon with. And so far, the consequences are already deeply troubling. In a recent interview, Sam Alman suggested that one day soon intelligence would be a resource you would need to pay for just like water, gas, and electricity. The key word here is need. The idea that critical thinking will become an essential tool that exists outside of your brain is something that we've never had to contend with. But that future could very well be staring us right in the face.

One of the clearest examples of this is in our current education system. It's safe to say that LLMs like ChatGpt have pretty much rendered the current school system obsolete. If chat GPT can write all the essays, do all the research papers, correctly, answer all the math homework, all in a way that's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from human written work? What exactly will be left for the kids to learn? When we learn to write, well, we're feeling our way through an argument. We're thinking in a sophisticated way, which is only possible on paper. The student who gets an LLM to write their paper is missing out on this cognitive development. They're outsourcing their thinking altogether. And let's face it, they're probably not doing a robust editing job.

In a study conducted by MIT, researchers compared three groups of students. One used their brain to write an essay, while another group used an LLM. Over the course of four months, the LLM users underperformed significantly at neural, linguistic, and scoring tests. They also remembered much less information from the papers that they wrote compared to the people who did it on their own. Ultimately, when we offload the writing process to AI, we lose what we used to gain from it, critical thinking skills and the information that came from the writing process itself. In an educational environment, that doesn't exactly make a whole lot of sense.

Some have argued that the students are learning how to prompt. But to me, that's like saying you're learning how to use a smartphone. It's a tool designed for everyone to use without thinking. Let's not act like you need a degree to get chat GPT to do whatever you want it to. Please. The amount of thinking you have to do when writing your prompts is limited. and theoretically should be reduced over time by the advancement of AI. The challenges in prompting that supposedly have to be overcome will likely be eased or eliminated in a future update. These students will eventually take this absence of critical thinking into the workplace. That is if AI has left any room for entry-level jobs by then.

In the workplace, there's a greater emphasis on outcomes over process, which is a big reason AI works perfectly for most white collar roles. But I think we run into many problems when we think of work in this limited way. Just as the student doesn't absorb the information from their essays, neither do workers intake the work they put into an AI to do for them. Now, you might be asking, why is that a problem? It effectively makes one useless at communicating their work to others. If what they produce requires explanation, well, that is a problem. That same worker also has a worse understanding of the industry that they work in. They won't internalize the needs of their clients, sending emails written by AI. The less you engage with your work, the less it becomes a part of you.

Now, this all assumes that work is good to begin with, which brings us to an unfortunate new trend plaguing employees everywhere. Work slop. If you work in an office, you may have already experienced this. A co-worker gives you something to review. Let's say it's a public-f facing email. You start reading it, and the writing is pretty good. But slowly, you start to get a strange feeling. So, the individual sentences make sense, but the whole thing put together feels strange, like something is missing. The writing feels absent-mindedly put together. It's as if you weren't receiving human communication, just something imitating it. Uh, so you wonder if you're the problem. Maybe maybe stress is lowering your ability to comprehend it. So, you go to the writer to ask some questions about it, but they're unable to answer. Eventually, they finally admit that they used AI to write it. They're oddly not even ashamed of that fact. You then have to rewrite the email almost completely, wasting hours that you didn't plan to spend doing this. This is a typical work slop scenario.

What should strike you right away is the lack of critical thinking on display. workers across the country are assuming it's okay to trust an LLM to do their work and not even bothering reviewing it afterwards. Editing the AI output requires a lot of time, even more than simply writing it yourself in some cases. Therefore, the editing process quickly gets cut if workers are looking to save time or if there's pressure for time. And this behavior is reinforced by upper management who typically love AI and want their employees to use it so they can justify cutting human labor or possibly increasing productivity overall. You may be wondering how so many people in higher positions can lower their standards for acceptable work. Quality work has historically been a virtue in the workplace, especially when it's for the public. Well, that brings us back to group think. The working world has almost universally embraced AI regardless of its perceived shortcomings. Countless companies are pivoting to AI. Even Allird's Shoes that was almost bankrupt is apparently now an AI company and their stock shot up 600% simply because they changed their name to Bird AI or something stupid like that. They have no product, no service, nothing of value. They just changed their name. Your superiors will expect you to find ways to make your work more efficient with AI, even if there is no obvious way or you have already demonstrated that it's not helpful. To say anything negative about AI in the workplace is a big faux paw, or at least it's a sensitive subject when you have to tiptoe around it. Otherwise, you may be categorized by your peers as a lite who's holding the company back. The eyes of your peers will all turn white as they stare at you in unison. And okay, you get it. But the reality is you will likely face consequences for demonstrating critical thinking about AI. The pressures of group think push for conformity on the issue. That's why even when people bring up criticisms, they usually couch it by opening with, "Look, I'm not against AI, but..." and that's even in light of strong evidence that AI isn't really providing much value. Another report from MIT suggests that 95% of organizations are not finding any measurable return on their investments in AI. Meanwhile, companies like Amazon are laying people off under the assumption that AI will improve productivity. Its employees, however, aren't finding good results with the new tools. Many suggest it's actually adding to their workload when they have to clean up code slop, for example. Then there's the fact that workers feel like they're training AI to replace them, which is obviously hugely demoralizing. The whole AI project just seems shortsighted at every turn. If the tools improve and are legitimately able to replace enormous amounts of workers, then who will companies try to sell to? What impact would that have on the overall economy? If we have mass unemployment without some form of universal basic income, what kind of world will that be? And as less and less of work is actually being done by humans, why would a business need anyone, why would we then need specific businesses? Would it not eventually whittle down to one master AI? Is is that the ultimate goal? Just the end of Monopoly with your weird uncle finally having enough and flipping the table over. There's a lot of existential questions AI raises that the thought leaders in the space only really give a passing thought to. And when they do consider them, it's possible they're just trying to excite investors by flouting the enormous potential AI has, even if that potential is in fact horrifying.

In a few different ways, I think we've been perfectly conditioned for this moment. AI wasn't our first mass foray into group think in recent history. We've all been undergoing a large social experiment for well over a decade now. If you were around for the early days of social media, it was a pretty fun time. You connected with strangers or old friends and shared your thoughts, your pictures, and the occasional funny video. And it seems like from there things have just gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Algorithms that powered social media feeds developed with more complexity and they changed what we see. We went from reading random status updates from friends to seeing mostly updates that generated a strong reaction. Likes, uh, reposts, and user data determine the content you are shown, all for the purpose of keeping you on the platform longer so that you can see more ads. The more time we spend on social media, the more addicted we are to the instant gratification that we get from it. Notifications and likes pour in, constantly distracting us from the kind of sustained thought that is necessary for critical thinking. We crave the dopamine responses we get from the distractions, often running away from our own thoughts. When we doomscroll, we're taking in a constant feed of bad news that we never fully reckon with. We become perpetually attracted to content that alarms us. In the throws of all this distress, we experience a cognitive overload that hinders our brain's ability to process and assimilate information effectively. A lot of this content is also not fact checked very well. According to a survey by UNESCO, 62% of content creators say they don't confirm the accuracy of the content they're sharing with their audience. 40% of influencers base their sources reliability based on whether it's popular or not. So, I guess keep that in mind the next time you're alarmed by something that you read online. From our doom scrolling, we're left emotionally exhausted with a shorter attention span and a reduction in our ability to sustain thought.

A big reason social media impacts our critical thinking skills is that we're unable to just let ourselves be bored. When we have a quiet moment, most of us will reach for our phone before even a minute has passed. Social media is having a direct impact on your cognitive abilities, but it's also introducing a unique form of group think that has shaped the world significantly in the past 15 years. When algorithms try to tailor content to our pre-existing beliefs, they create echo chambers. We are fed content that reinforces our biases, usually because we're interacting with similar content. Our beliefs become more entrenched because we keep seeing more and more similar content to reinforce that bias. The algorithms are playing off of our confirmation bias, which is our inclination to prefer information that confirms our existing beliefs. This effectively makes us less open-minded and less capable of exploring our intellectual curiosity. We oversimplify events to fit the bias and actively tried to exclude opinions that exist outside of that.

Society has by and large become more polarized. As a result, factions have formed, creating what is commonly referred to as the culture war. Each side attacks the other online, but also finds reinforcement for their opinions from others in their own group. They share memes that mock their cultural adversary, often tailoring their content to please their group first and foremost. These echo chambers don't just stay online, however. They make their way into the real world. Politicians use culture war talking points in their campaign promises, leading to bizarre policies that do little to help people, but a lot to excite some potential voters. There's also the fear of punishment that leads to heightened group think among social media users. If you belong to one side of the culture war, there's a lot of pressure to keep all of your opinions in line with the consensus of the group. You risk being shamed or in worst case scenarios getting cancelled if you dare to have a different opinion. And of course, I'm not talking about opinions on matters like human rights or the safety of civilians. Those are always going to be or always should be non-negotiable.

Running alongside this ideological culture war is another trend that is undermining our critical thinking in a unique way. Therapy speak. If you exist online, then you definitely know someone who frequently uses terms like narcissist, gaslighting, toxic, and trauma. This is all therapy speak. Terms like that were originally supposed to be used by professionals in a proper health care setting and now they've proliferated social media and have had their meanings watered down for mass consumption. They're used by just about everyone to diagnose the people in their lives and typically in an unflattering way. In other words, the language of therapy has been weaponized against other people. A therapy speak is often used to antagonize others. When people use the word narcissist, for example, they're typically not trying to invoke sympathy for that person. They want you to think of that person as bad, even though the supposed narcissist probably didn't choose to be the way they are. These words also tend to overpathize behavior. Normal human flaws like impatience, insecurity, selfishness all are reframed as clinical disorders. Ordinary conflict becomes trauma. Disagreement becomes abuse. Suddenly, every negative interaction turns into a medical diagnosis.

When therapy speak gets evoked, it's rarely receiving a critical response. We have a habit of taking the utterance at face value given the authority that the words carry. Complaints about someone's behavior are given a scientific label and then we accept these labels as true. We forego critical thinking in the presence of language with epistemic authority. This is a common component of group think. In the presence of authority, we are more likely to suppress critical opinions.

So, we have several ways in which our ability to think critically is under attack and they are all working in concert. Our social media feeds are filled with mindless AI slop. We're also getting AI to write our posts for us, especially on LinkedIn. Our posts are also stuffed with therapy speak, which is often used to disparage someone in a very public way. For the critical thinkers out there, this all starts to feel like we're living inside of a hive mind, always on the lookout for transgressors who won't tow the party line, always targeting the enemy of their belief system. The recent TV series from Vince Gilligan, Pluribus, captures this feeling very well. In the show, almost the entire human population has become unified as a hive mind while several humans remain individuated. The main character, Carol, is one of those individuals. She's immediately distraught and frustrated by the hive mind working in unison, expressing a strict moral code that governs their behavior. They do have one imperative that most of us would consider immoral that everyone should be absorbed into the hive mind. In a way, Carol is a champion of critical thought as she attempts to resist joining her mind with the group.

While many of you watching probably consider yourselves disconnected from the many forms of group think out there, I think we're all probably struggling to some extent with technology impacting our cognitive capacity. Our attention spans and our willingness to explore one subject are probably greatly diminished. I also want to point out that some of the most intelligent people in the world have struggled with deploying critical thinking at important moments. Robert McNamera, the architect of the Vietnam War, was considered a highly intelligent person. But even after the war was demonstratively a disaster, he continued to advocate for it. He was compromised by the sunk cost fallacy. Rather than properly evaluating the war as it was going on, he was more persuaded by the investment that had already been made.

So how can we restore our critical thinking abilities and free ourselves from group think? Let's start the restoration by understanding what critical thinking is to begin with. Critical thinking is widely considered to be one of the central goals of education. But defining it precisely isn't so simple. At its core, critical thinking refers to careful, deliberate thought directed towards some goal. The kind of thinking where you actively evaluate information. You question assumptions and you consider alternatives. Exactly what counts as careful thinking or even what the goal should be is still under debate. Philosophers, educators, and psychologists all approach it slightly differently, but they do agree on one thing. It requires effort and it does not happen automatically.

The American philosopher John Dwey who first defined critical thinking believed that it would be greatly valuable to the individual and to society. It would increase individual happiness and reduce societal waste. To foster critical thinking, he thought teachers should respect students by honoring their demand for reasons and explanations. Education should encourage their self-sufficiency and initiate children in rational traditions like history, science, and math. It should ultimately prepare students to become democratic citizens with critical thinking skills. As we've already discussed, these skills that people like Dwey wanted to foster are under assault by technology. Even basic skills such as the ability to read are at risk. There's a recent trend of teachers on Tik Tok suggesting that their students are in alarming numbers not able to read.

Getting your mind back is an imperative. Let's face it, the more harm we are doing to our critical thinking skills, the more vulnerable we are to feeling terrible and allowing harm to proliferate. We're nearly defenseless against a barrage of negative content. Luckily, it sounds like people are starting to take this issue very seriously. Gen Zed, for example, is starting to return to the cinema. Many had predicted that movie theaters would die with younger viewers sticking to shorter form content, but that may not be the case. According to a recent survey, Gen Zed is going to see seven films a year on average, ranking above all of the older generations. There's also a wider trend of people sharing the longer form content they're consuming. They're watching films, they're reading books, they're listening to podcasts, and they're reading lengthy articles. The fact that we've gradually made our videos longer also shows this. People are intentionally choosing to spend more time with educational content rather than watching scrolling slop. I know that trends come and go, but this also could be a promising sign of things to come. Imagine instead of just scrolling through slob on your phone, you go to a movie with friends and discuss the film afterwards. That's a much more worthwhile experience than doomcrolling a stream of bad news in bed. Perhaps the dissatisfying reality of consuming feeds is finally settling in and turning into action.

And to help encourage this move, I want to discuss ways in which you can change your habits to give you more time alone with your thoughts. This advice comes from Dr. Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Mark suggests that we acknowledge that scrolling has no real value for us and that all we have the option to replace it with is something valuable. Immersing yourself in a book, for example, is a powerful and memorable experience. Compare that to scrolling, where after a half an hour of ingesting short form content, we can barely remember what we've experienced. We're often just left with a vague, uncomfortable feeling to sit with. Instead of clamoring for the phone when a notification excites you, Dr. Mark suggests we raise awareness of our actions. Probe yourself. Ask why you're going to check the news. Is now a good time for it? Or am I just checking the news out of boredom? Instead of allowing yourself to compulsively check the internet, give yourself permission in the form of breaks. Your mind does need to relax after focused work. You're fatigued and you'll be more likely to do compulsive things in this state. Taking a break is not a bad thing. We all have peaks and valleys of when our focus is strongest. Track these moments and prioritize your work in the times of day when you are at your peak. I think you'll find that you're much more productive when you work within your body's rhythms.

The last thing I want to say on this subject is that you need to take action. There's a great parable in the Buddhist text, the Suta Pitaka, that works nicely here. A monk questions the Buddha about metaphysical matters such as what happens after you die. In response, the Buddha suggests thinking of the immediate problem here and now, that of suffering. You have a poison tipped arrow inside of you, and you should be focused on getting that out first. Treat your disastrous screen use like a poison tipped arrow inside of you. You need to focus on getting it out rather than expecting happiness from all the toxins. By taking this discipline seriously, you will not only improve your cognitive capacity, but you will also help with that pesky group think problem that I described earlier. So much of our creepy hive mind behavior comes from the algorithms that fill our feeds. But beyond the screens, the unfortunate thing is that group think can still find you. It is lurking around every corner, asking for obedience to a belief system, whether it's coming from others or from within your own biases. And you know what? In some ways, group think is not always a bad thing. It may inspire you to drop the phone and go read along with all of your cohorts. And we're more often than not better off believing in authorities on a subject matter than doing research without standards of research. But we do want our critical thinking to be accessible at the ready. There are key moments where we will need it and we need the capacity to be careful and considerate.

Digging deeper, however, there's still a remaining threat to our critical thinking abilities. And I this is the last one. I I promise. One of the greatest threats to our ability to reflect deeply is also one of the things that makes life worth living. Love. Our attachment to people and ideas can severely limit our ability to make thoughtful choices. When algorithms feed off our cognitive biases, they're feeding off our pre-existing love of ideas, we then find belonging among other like-minded people and drift further away from critical thought. With love and attachment often comes hate. We vehemently reject ideas that contradict those that we hold dear. We spew hateful comments at the people who hold opposite opinions. But of course, this is not a recent phenomenon. Our attachment has been compromising our rational decision-making since the dawn of humanity. But we've found ways to help with this problem along the way. The Buddha most famously suggested we rid ourselves of craving and attachment to avoid suffering. His method of mindfulness meditation prepares the mind for deep thoughts on the subject, allowing our critical thinking to go on less impeded. But whatever way you go about improving your critical thinking skills, just remember that you have in you the capacity to pull out that poison arrow, and you will be thankful that you did.

If you want to learn more about how to think for yourself, we made this video talking about the highest levels of thinking and how you can rise to the very top. One of the best ways to improve your critical thinking skills and save your mind is to set aside time every day to learn something new. You'd be surprised by how much your mind will be transformed by just taking some time every day to learn. I used to think I wasn't a math person, but after taking several lessons using Brilliant, the sponsor of today's episode, I realized that I wasn't bad at math. I was just taught poorly. And I've had countless aha moments that finally unlocked concepts that I've struggled with for years. And it's not just logic or math. Brilliant also covers computer science and even AI, breaking down complex ideas into something surprisingly intuitive. Brilliant helps you build your critical thinking skills through active problem solving. Instead of just watching someone explain an idea and then hoping it sticks, you actually work through concepts step by step, which makes it much easier to understand how they work and why they matter. It's a much more effective way to learn because you are constantly engaging with the material rather than passively consuming it. Beyond interactive lessons, Brilliant also helps you personalize your learning. It starts you at the right level based on what you already know and lets you progress at your own pace. It also encourages you to keep that progress going through fun and motivating challenges. Brilliant also makes an amazing gift for younger siblings and relatives who are, let's face it, already glued to their phones anyway. It's designed for ages 10 to 110, so it's great for everyone. Instead of mindless scrolling, Brilliant gives them something challenging, interactive, and genuinely educational to do with their phones. To learn for free on Brilliant for a full 30 days, go to brilliant.org/apperture. Scan the QR code on screen or click the link in the description. You also get 20% off an annual premium subscription, which gives you unlimited access to everything on Brilliant.