Critical Thinking is Dead. Here's how we get it back

Critical thinking has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years. There's this general perception that it might be on the decline and people are rushing to figure out what to do about it. So, I thought it might be helpful to put together a rough guide to critical thinking based on what I have personally used to improve my own thinking because ultimately I think we may be approaching the whole topic of critical thinking in the wrong way.

As always, bear in mind that this is just my view on things and it's certainly not the final word on the issue. It would be really ironic if I didn't encourage you to think critically about the very things that I am saying here. But I want to start with something that you might initially think is quite an unsexy part of critical thought, but I hope to convince you it is anything but. My name is Joe Folly and this is unsolicited advice.

One, getting clarity. I've spoken about this on the channel before, but I had a little bit of an unusual route into philosophy. The thing that drew me to the field and eventually to specifically logic was the fact that the people around me seemed to use words in very vague ways. And this made it quite difficult for a socially challenged me, let's say, to understand what they were talking about. And I still think that a fair amount of unnecessary disagreement is just caused by a lack of clarity.

I know this is a pretty trivial example, but I once witnessed an argument between a fairly liberal American and a fairly liberal Brit over the merits of republicanism. The Brit had proudly announced themselves as a Republican and the liberal American disagreed with this. The dispute was heightened almost to the point of insult before they realized that they were simply using the word Republican in different ways. In the UK, being a Republican means that you oppose the existence of the monarchy and would like to see the UK become a republic rather than what it is currently, which is a constitutional monarchy. Whereas in the US, it tends to denote support for the Republican party. In reality, there was no substantial dispute to be had between these two people. They were just using the same word in different ways.

And yeah, this is an obvious case, but many others are not so easy to spot. It is in my experience at least surprisingly common for people to use the exact same term in subtly different but ultimately still significantly different ways. I see this a lot in the atheist theist debating space. Oftenimes there is a real equivocation between whether the topic of the debate is the existence of let's say the god of the philosophers that is an omnipotent omniscient omnib benevolent being who created and rules the universe which is sort of a minimal form of theism or on the other hand whether it is about the truth of a particular religious tradition like Christianity. This often means that debates can quickly become quite muddled because two different questions are being run together as if they were the same because of vague terminology. A few clarifying questions could clean this up and then hopefully at least a more productive conversation could ensue.

If you need further convincing, just think how differently people conceive of the following words: conservative, progressive, communist, capitalist, socialist, life, knowledge, good, bad, evil, expert, creative, possible, impossible, rational, reasonable, scientific, unscientific, pseudoscientific, nonsense, and many, many more. There are so many unclarified terms and so much of their unclarity goes completely unressed. This is because there is just inherent imprecision in the language of everyday speech. And to be absolutely clear, I suppose appropriately, this is not necessarily a bad thing. It's part of what keeps language so flexible and thus so useful. Imagine if we could only ever use a word to refer to one single precise thing for all time. we would just need a hell of a lot more of them.

However, in the context of properly understanding a claim that someone's making, including our own claims, we need to clear up some of this imprecision in order to know that we are both thinking about the right and relevant thing. If I make a statement and you interpret it entirely differently to how I intended, then we can't have a productive discussion. We we haven't even fulfilled the basic prerequisites even if we are both wanting to act in good faith.

But if there's one area where we could all use a little bit of clarity and critical thought, it is the news. Which is why I recommend today's sponsor, Ground News. Ground News is a website and app that gathers related articles from thousands of sources around the world in one place so you can compare how different sources cover the same story. Every story comes with a clear breakdown of the political bias, factuality, ownership, and headlines of the reporting sources with ratings backed by independent news monitoring organizations. Ground News are very kindly offering anyone who uses my link or scans my QR code 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan as a special deal. So, I highly encourage you to snap this up. For example, let's see how left and right-wing sources differed in how they reported on a judge unsealing documents related to the charging and conviction of Gelain Maxwell. Whereas left-leaning coverage chose to frame this as a moral victory, some right-leaning sources were more skeptical, with one source focusing on a statement by a judge who warned that this reveal may be of little consequence. Even when sources agree on the facts, they often choose to frame them differently, which leaves different impressions on the reader, and ground news gives you access to all of them. One of my favorite features for encouraging critical thinking is the blind spots feed, which highlights stories that are disproportionately covered by either the left or the right. It's so easy to get stuck in our own echo chambers, but this way we will learn about those stories that might pass us by in our own news feeds. Like a lot of people, I don't have a lot of time to keep up with the news and certainly not to examine every single source for bias or misinformation. So getting my ground news roundup dropped in my inbox every day means that I can stay informed and learn which sources to trust and just generally make the world less of a bewildering mess. Ground News is giving my viewers 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan. It's an invaluable tool in navigating our current chaotic information landscape and I'm confident that you'll find it helpful. But anyway, back to the video.

And sometimes in asking these clarifying questions, we will find out that a position genuinely is conceptually confused. And thus, by seeking to understand it, we will have as a side effect come up with a critique of it as well. I've mentioned this on the channel before because it's the example that I basically always use of this, but this exact thing happens at the beginning of Plato's Republic where the character of Socrates asks Thrzy Marcus about what his definition of justice is. Thrazimcus replies that it is whatever is best for the most powerful. But Socrates points out that there is ambiguity here since this could mean what is best for the powerful in the opinion of the powerful or what is genuinely best for the powerful appealing to some kind of objective prudential measure. And these two definitions conflict. So Thrazimakus' view at least at this point in time is shown to be either unclear or contradictory. Socrates didn't even need to launch a full-on critique of Thrazimakas' position. He just needed to ask a few clarifying questions and a critique naturally emerged.

But one last thing on this point, while clarifying questions certainly can reveal weaknesses in someone's position, it's important for this not to be our direct goal when asking for clarity. This is how we end up arguing in bad faith and asking leading questions disguised as clarifying questions to try to walk our interlocutor into a trap. This is all well and good if your aim is just to attack a particular position. But if so, I probably wouldn't call that critical thinking, but something more akin to pmical critique, which is a very entertaining thing in its own right to read, but it's a bit different from attempting to get to the truth of a matter. For instance, I've seen a lot of people use, "What did you mean by that?" with either an air of incredul or a suggested unflattering answer that's implied by the tone of voice. So then this potentially very helpful question that could be used to clarify the territory of the debate is aimed at making the interlocutor look foolish and that's a shame. I'd like to see less of that, I suppose.

And this ties into something that will come up an awful lot in this video. It is so very easy to strawman someone even when we don't consciously mean to. We understandably want to be right. And when we're confident we're right, we want to show that opposing beliefs are false. Part of critical thinking, in my view, is to work to somewhat avoid this natural human tendency. So when we ask clarifying questions, it's important to be open to what their answers might be. It might turn out that their position is actually far more defensible than we initially gave it credit for. And if we want to become skilled critical thinkers, then we've just sort of got to accept this. The only exception might be if the person you're talking to is very obviously employing a Mott and Bailey argument structure where they have an outrageous position and a modest position and they retreat to the modest position under questioning, but then return to the audacious position whenever they're not under scrutiny. Nonetheless, as long as we're considering particular arguments and stances rather than people as a whole, this is not such an issue.

In terms of which questions to ask, there is obviously the standard one which is what do you mean by that? Or picking out a particular term and asking what they are using that term to mean. But we can also as an alternative offer up what we are understanding of their argument and see if they agree with our interpretation of them because then if they do well, we can be pretty confident that we're all on the same page and that's incredibly helpful. Also, and this is incredibly important, we've got to turn these clarifying questions on ourselves without mercy. Chances are, there are an abundance of unclarified terms and unclarified positions in our own thinking that are worth clearing up. And interrogating ourselves with these clarifying questions will help to resolve this. We'll come back to this general rule of thumb, but a lot of critical thinking in my experience is holding ourselves up to the same standards that we would hold someone who vehemently disagrees with us. So, one way you can learn to do this is imagining that you disagree with your own position and asking for clarity while doing your best to inhabit this character. That can be a pretty good strategy and it can help you get out of your own head a little, which is, you know, just a very hard thing to do.

I also think that this is where topic specific knowledge comes in real handy as will become yet another theme of this video. I'm a little bit skeptical of critical thinking conceived of as one skill in the abstract separate from any material knowledge of a given area. Knowing where possible ambiguities arise and thus knowing what clarifying questions you ought to ask will require a certain attitude towards thinking. But it will also require knowing something about the area under discussion. So I can ask pretty good clarifying questions in philosophical topics, especially topics that I'm more familiar with. But I'd be far less able to ask good clarifying questions in a discussion around chemistry because I know next to nothing about chemistry. It's a complete and total black box as far as I'm concerned. But ultimately, these clarifying questions are really just a preliminary exercise. In fact, on the channel before, I've referred to this as pre-arguing. So, let's move on to the meat of the issue.

Two, reasons and persons. People don't just believe things in isolation. Beliefs are part of a structure that interact with every other belief that a person holds. And understanding a person's wider belief structure is essential for thinking critically about their viewpoint. And to remind us all here people very much includes us. I really like an image from Quin here which is the web of beliefs. Quin imagines our beliefs as a huge interconnecting web with our more central beliefs rather appropriately near the center and our more loosely held beliefs at the periphery. So take me for example. A belief that I hold incredibly dearly, almost more dearly than anything else I can think of is the law of non-contradiction. In principle, I could revise this belief. And indeed, certain philosophers like Graham Priest would like me to do just that. But it's used to justify so many of my other beliefs. And I'm also so much more certain of it than any of my other beliefs that I would need to be presented with absolutely overwhelming evidence before I cease to believe in the law of non-contradiction. By contrast, one of my more loosely held positions is compatibilism about free will. Before you roast me in the comments, I've linked an article I wrote defending this position in the description. I am very open to changing this compatibilist position, and not many of my other views depend on it. that is, it's on the edge of my web of beliefs.

When someone has come to a considered conclusion about something, they are supporting it on the basis of beliefs that they hold more strongly than the beliefs in question. This can sound complicated, but it's really quite intuitive. I can support my belief in the existence of caffeine in my coffee by my experience of feeling caffeinated. But I can't support my belief in feeling caffeinated by my belief that the coffee is caffeinated because I believe more in the accuracy of how I perceive my own phenomenology than in what the barista has told me about the caffeine content of my coffee. This is what would then allow me to go up and ask if they'd given me decaf by mistake if I didn't feel that familiar buzz. This is all a quite long-winded and maybe overly philosophical way of saying that in critical thinking we need to figure out what the more strongly held reasons are for why someone believes in whatever belief is under discussion. Often times the actual kind of prime source of the disagreements just isn't that obvious because it occurs one or two levels up from the topic under discussion.

For example, I don't believe in God, as I've said on the channel many times, but this isn't actually because of any particular issues I have with the concept of God's existence. I've argued before that the problem of evil, for example, is just not particularly that big of a deal for a sufficiently committed theist. My reason for being an agnostic is that I don't think that we need to introduce a full-blown theistic god to explain the existence of certain features of the world. So if you were looking to challenge my position, which is eminently challengeable, you would need to challenge that underlying reason for the position. If you were to respond to my unbelief by saying something like, "You obviously think that God would be evil, but in fact there are good reasons to reject the problem of evil," then your response would in this case miss the mark, but it might hit the mark in someone else's case.

Now, you might think this point is obvious, and to a certain extent, of course it is. But I put it to you that we're actually pretty prone to assuming the reasons why someone believes what they believe and moreover assuming them in not necessarily that accurate of a way. Take an exchange that I saw online the other day which I have anonymized and edited slightly. "I think that stoicism is inseparable from a belief in the divine logos." "You only think that because you haven't read much stoicism and you don't like modern stoics." This exchange actually happened between two people I really respect and who are both much much cleverer than I am. So my point is this really can happen to anyone because the second speaker here has without knowing it refused to engage with the reasons that the other person might believe in the first proposition. Rather than hearing them out they have substituted in a particular causal and justificatory story for their beliefs. Now, this might be because they've encountered people that believe that proposition for those reasons in the past, but as a result of this move, the second speaker has cut themselves off from really learning anything from the interaction. You could call this a kind of straw manning, but I like to call it the argument from storytelling. It occurs when we come up with a really nice sounding and intuitive story for how someone came to have their beliefs. and then we, you know, almost by habit assume that those are the genuine reasons that that person believes in whatever thing we're challenging them about. I really wouldn't underestimate our ability to do this sort of thing when we encounter someone we disagree with and of not noticing that we're doing it. I'm certainly not innocent here. I've done this an awful lot in the past. and all it did was prevent me from being exposed to the reasons why someone might actually disagree with me and thus learning more, which on the whole I'm I'm quite in favor of.

In a discussion context, you might want to trace the reasons for the disagreement back until you find its source. In a moral argument, this might look something like this. "I think that euthanasia is permissible." "I think it's impermissible." "Why?" "Well, I think that we should have control over our own lives." "I think that as well. But surely you think that someone having the right to control their own lives extends to the action of dying." "That's where we disagree. I don't think that the right to control your own life extends as far as you think it does. This is because we also have duties towards other people who will remain alive and such duties rely on us being alive to fulfill them. So in this case, we don't have the right to die." This is a bit of an idealized scenario obviously, but you get the idea. The two people here have identified where their disagreement about euthanasia's permissibility comes from. And now they can begin to hash that out at a way that they wouldn't be able to do if they just focused on the euthanasia disagreement.

To challenge someone's reasons for believing something, you can then broadly use two approaches. You can show that it conflicts with something else that they believe just as strongly, or you can show that it implies something that they themselves are unable to accept. Let's continue with the above example. "So you think we have a duty to stay alive based on our duties towards others?" "Yes." "But that would imply that someone in unimaginable pain must stay alive in order to fulfill their duties towards others." "That's right." "But don't we also have duties towards ourselves including the overriding duty to protect ourselves from unimaginable pain?" "I do think that." "In which case you are caught in an inconsistency." Alternatively, it could go as follows. "So, you believe that someone has the total right to die if they see fit?" "I do." "Does that not imply that actions we standardly take to prevent people from ending their lives, like sectioning them under the Mental Health Act, are unethical and should be bad?" "No, I don't think that." "Then you too are caught in a contradiction." Here, a consequence of someone's beliefs has been brought out and then used to challenge the belief that it stemmed from.

We can also do this with our own web of beliefs and it's very much worth doing so. We can trace our implicit and explicit reasoning processes back so that we have a good understanding of what we think justifies our own viewpoints. Especially helpful, at least for me, is to note where our own reasons diverge from the reasons that other people give for the same position. that is what are the more wide-ranging disagreements that we have with others over things like ethical principles or sources of reliable information. And finally, if you're really keen, you can try to trace your belief structures back to the point where you come across something like a first principle or a hinge proposition, a thing that you just must assume but can't be proven with reference to other beliefs. I've already given one potential first principle or hinge proposition in my thinking, which is the law of non-contradiction. because I can't imagine what would disprove it even if I can accept that in principle yes I could abandon this belief and again I really want to emphasize that topic specific knowledge is borderline essential here while you can tell what the merely logical consequences of a belief are by just deducing it out formally that is just not the only kind of reasoning we use to support our positions we also use things like induction so inferring from empirical evidence and abduction, which is inferring to the best explanation. But each of these will involve knowing a lot more than just abstract critical thinking skills. For example, we would need to be able to tell whether a given study in a given area is relevant to the current debate. And that involves knowing some things about study design, but also about other findings in that field and whether they exist and whether they contradict this study's findings. Evaluating a good reason for belief goes well beyond just simple formal structures or abstract philosophical logic. And I just don't think you can be an excellent critical thinker about a given area without knowing so much about that area. And again, this is my skepticism about abstractly conceived critical thinking as a skill in and of itself.

Having said all of that, we've so far been avoiding a pretty obvious topic, our own biases. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider subscribing either to the channel or if you're feeling incredibly generous and want to gain access to exclusive content, including my slow motion, bookbybook, bookshelf tour, then consider subscribing to the Patreon, though it's absolutely no pressure. The links are in the description.

Three, biases and sources. Biases are like Everyone has them, but we don't often see our own unless we encounter a problem and someone else is examining it. I'm honestly skeptical that any of us will be able to take a full stock of our own biases, but I do think that it can be helpful to be aware of some key factors about them. The first thing that I want to note is that biases are not in and of themselves bad things. It is helpful, for example, to have a bias towards things that more neatly slot in with our current beliefs because provided that we form those beliefs on a reasonable basis, and clearly we believe we do, this will be a relatively reliable heruristic. If nothing else, it seems to be a requirement of consistency. From your own perspective, having a bias towards things that are more in line with your beliefs is the same thing as having a bias towards things that are already believed to be true or slot in with things that are already believed to be true. And I'm not sure that we can or should get around this bias.

However, the problem comes when biases like these get out of control. There's a difference between being more instinctively trusting of information that is supported by what you already believe and taking all information you agree with at face value while disbelieving any information that contradicts your current beliefs. It's a matter of degree at one level. We only have our own pre-existing beliefs with which to judge the plausibility of any ideas that we encounter. But this can tip over into dogmatism where we just refuse to consider that any of our current beliefs might be wrong. An example might help because I do think that it's a blurry line. Say that you were to believe that the earth is flat and you're shown a video of a curved horizon. This contradicts your current belief set. So it's normal to have some reticence to it. After all, the photo might be doctorred. And if you have a high level of credence towards your own flat earth theory, well then it might not actually be rational to abandon it simply on the case of this one piece of evidence. However, what it should do is lower your level of belief in the Earth's being flat to some degree. If, like some flatearthers were a while ago, you were flown out to Antarctica to see the 24-hour passage of the sun, this is much stronger evidence that the Earth is not flat. It should make you significantly more doubtful in the flat earth theory. You would have to either disbelieve in your own senses in a major way or come up with some seriously ad hoc hypothesis to account for this discrepancy. To refuse to revise your belief in this case would in my opinion be a clear case of dogmatism.

So one thing to be aware of is that we do all have a bias towards making incoming information fit with what we already believe to be true. And if our current belief set is seriously wrong, then this has the potential to have huge ripple effects for what else we might mistakenly think to be the case. This is another reason for being aware of how the structure of your web of beliefs is laid out. It helps you better judge your own cognitive biases. This is also where the skill of taking alternative perspectives is so very important when thinking critically. It's how we temporarily inhabit a different belief set and see roughly what the world would look like with those assumptions. And arguably a more complex skill is to spot other people's biases. There's no foolproof way to do this, and I highly doubt there ever will be. But an analogy that I once got from one of my professors was incredibly helpful here. And his advice was to think of this less like trying to psychoanalyze someone or guess their emotional predispositions and look at it more like you're a historian evaluating a written source. At least according to him, when historians do this, they tend to ask a few key questions of the particular document that they're looking at. I asked a few of my historian friends about this when I was at my old university, and these are the main questions they used, and they're the ones that I found very helpful.

One, what information would this person have access to and do they have the ability to evaluate it properly? Two, what is in their best interests to believe? Three, what is the context in which they're speaking? Are they trying to convince someone? Is it a personal diary, an academic text? Four, does this conflict with what any other more reliable sources say? There are obviously many, many more questions you can ask, but as I said, these are just the ones that I found most helpful. The idea here is not just to sort people or sources of information into being good and bad since someone can be extremely reliable in one domain and less reliable in others. This can even occur within domains that seem like they'd be pretty close together. My favorite example of this is actually Steven Hawking, who was undeniably a mathematical genius who has an awful lot of incredibly valuable things to say about physics. And yet, if you read some of his comments on the implications of Girdle's incompleteness theorems, well, it's clear that he might not be so reliable on matters of mathematical logic. Again, this is despite the fact that he is almost certainly a far greater mathematical mind than 99% of logicians and 99.9999% of the general population. It's just that to telegraph a theme that we'll come back to a lot and have said before, expertise in one area might not translate into others, even others that look quite similar at a distance.

Personally, I like to classify sources, including people, across two different axes relative to a given topic. On one axis, there will be the extent to which they are just informed about the topic, while the other axis will be the extent to which this source is motivated to mislead, even if it's motivated unintentionally. This can include evidence of outright dishonesty, but it doesn't need to. It could also be that their material interests are just heavily aligned with believing a given thing. I want to write a whole article about this at some point, but I think that the whole division of sources of information into two totally separate camps, one of which we label grifters who don't honestly believe what they say, and the other of which we label non-grifters who do honestly believe what they say, is a little bit simplistic and a little bit unhelpful. I think that it just really underestimates the very reliable finding that we humans tend to believe things once we say them and take actions that would only make sense based on their truth. And personally, I found hunting for grifters a little less helpful than just asking whether they have motivations to form particular opinions regardless of what I think about their personal character, which is quite difficult to assess without knowing them anyway.

And as always, any questions we can ask of a source, we can also ask of ourselves. What are the kind of things that we are motivated to believe due to our own interests? A lot of critical thinking is attempting to get the outside view on ourselves, which is just very difficult. But a good place to start is to try to evaluate yourself without taking into account your own introspective evidence and knowledge of yourself at all. We can certainly add in this introspective evidence later since it is very helpful. We have a pretty unique access to our own thoughts and feelings. But I also think that it's useful to imagine that we ask someone else and ask what they would say you were well placed to know and what interfering incentives they would identify with your particular position. Because just as we can know a lot about ourselves, it's also incredibly easy to fool ourselves with our own internal propaganda for one of a better word. And again to reiterate one of our central themes, taking the outside view in a lot of cases requires having some prior material knowledge of the topic at hand. Take one of the key questions above. How wellplaced is this person to know about the subject. Evaluating that requires you having at least a passing acquaintance with the topic yourself. What sounds like an impressive academic credential could in fact signal membership to a notorious think tank with clear material interests in coming to a given conclusion on a question. And as always, just because a given source is biased doesn't in itself mean that it's wrong. All it does is signal that it's worth subjecting the viewpoint to greater scrutiny.

And so far, our guide has largely been based around which questions to ask both of yourself and your sources or your interlocutor. But next, I want to bring some of this together and talk about a really interesting philosophical topic, epistemic virtues.

Four, epistemic virtues. I've talked about virtue epistemology a couple of times on this channel. It's not an area that I know an awful lot about, but I do think that just the basics of this field do an absolutely wonderful job at clarifying the kinds of skills and characteristics that are well worth developing to become a better thinker. By the way, almost everything I say here is sort of a a simplified version of material in chapter 2 of Jason Bear's The Inquiring Mind. And I highly encourage you to pick that book up. Bear puts forward a rough picture of what it takes to be a virtuous knower in sort of the same way that Aristotle puts forward a picture of a virtuous person in the Nikomeian ethics. We won't go through all of his virtues here because they are many and varied and complex, but there are some that are directly relevant to our topic of critical thinking today.

Firstly, a virtuous knower must ideally have virtuous motivations. There's a big difference between an inquirer who goes into their inquiry with open curiosity and someone who is already aiming to find a particular conclusion before they've even started. We touched on this quite a bit in the last section, so we won't dwell on it too much here, but we can just reaffirm the value of that old Socratic dictim, know thyself. While we may think that we are being open and curious, it's very easy for our egos to get in the way. And I'm speaking from painful personal experience here.

There are also just simple cognitive skills. A key one is focus. It's difficult to conduct any kind of sustained inquiry without focus and concentration. But other skills might include mental flexibility and also mental endurance. These will cover a wide range of subsidiary skills like the ability to process information relatively quickly, think creatively, and also to push through the difficult parts of a subject so that you can learn it in its true depth. These could easily be the topic of a whole video in itself. So again, we won't go into too much detail here, but I do think they're worth mentioning.

Another key epistemic virtue is consistency. At one level, we obviously don't want to believe in outright contradictions, and this is obviously not conducive to thinking critically. But this general banner includes other types of consistency as well, such as being consistent in your application of rigor and standards to incoming information. We shouldn't accept information just because it agrees with us. And likewise, we shouldn't hold dissenting information to standards that we would never ordinarily subject something to. You see this sometimes online where someone won't really interrogate a source if it agrees with them. But when they encounter contradictory information, all of a sudden they're a kind of mock Pyonian skeptic and nothing aside from absolute ironclad certainty could possibly convince them. This is also inconsistency. It's just inconsistency of a different kind. It is the inconsistent application of standards rather than believing in two inconsistent propositions. This doesn't mean that you have to approach all incoming information in the same way. Just that we shouldn't unjustly discriminate between two incoming sources of information that are the same in all other ways apart from the fact that they either agree with our current worldview or disagree with our current worldview. Personally, I think this can get a bit more nuanced because, as I said in the last section, often times the only tools we have to judge an incoming bit of information's plausibility is our prior set of beliefs. And we sort of are bound by a different kind of consistency into thinking that these are already true. But nonetheless, I think that consistency in subjecting incoming information to similar or the same standards is a good general rule of thumb, even if I don't think that it's ironclad.

And the final epistemic virtue that we will look at today, though not the final one that Bear looks at, is intellectual integrity. This is sort of your epistemic moral compass. It means that you hold yourself to the same standards that you would hold others to and that you approach questions in good faith. Part of this is resisting the impulse to straw man people and to work hard to take the most charitable interpretation of opposing views that you can. It also involves knowing your own limits. And this is where I can talk about what is in my view the most underrated quality online today. Epistemic humility. Epistemic humility is the skill of knowing how much you don't know. At its best, it is the antidote for getting your ego too involved in a discussion or an inquiry. Epistemic humility is also just really hard for a lot of people because we quite understandably and quite naturally want to be right and we often want to appear clever and knowledgeable and for other people to recognize us as clever and knowledgeable. It's just also quite difficult to admit to ourselves just how little we know in the grand scheme of things because it makes it much harder to assure ourselves of our own intellectual superiority and to just get rid of uncertainty. And in a sort of redditified internet for want of a better term where there's this general wish to flaunt your knowledge for all to see, it's become even more difficult to be epistemically humble. Nonetheless, I still think this is probably one of the most important skills there is for critical thinking. A major part of our aim in thinking critically, at least in my view, is to maximize our true beliefs and minimize our false beliefs. Epistemic humility allows us to do this on two fronts. It means that we are more open to learning new things about a topic which will help us maximize our true beliefs. And it will also help us recognize when we are wrong because we will hold our beliefs with just that little bit less confidence and we won't get our ego attached to them which will help us to minimize our false beliefs.

That being said, most of us probably recognize that epistemic humility is at least broadly speaking quite a helpful thing to have uh intellectually if not rhetorically. But how do we develop it? Well, I can't promise that this will work for everyone, but something that I did to increase my own intellectual humility, and something that I still often do when I catch myself getting too big for my boots, is to commit to pretending that I know 20% less than I do about any topic for a week. So, if someone were to ask me a question about something or if I am presenting my view, I will commit to sort of acting like I know a fifth less about the subject than I'd think that I do. If a lot of epistemic arrogance is driven by this internal need to appear clever, then this exercise effectively just prevents you from being able to show off. It forces you into a slightly more humble posture. And the thing is, once I'd done this for a while, I actually found that I preferred presenting as knowing a little bit less because then I would ask more questions. questions that I mistakenly thought that I already knew the answer to, but it turned out that I had missed something or that the particular person that I was asking the question to would put an already familiar idea in a new and enlightening way. It also just makes you realize, and I really can't stress this enough, no one cares how clever you are. Really, no one does. There is no one when I was performing this exercise thought that I was stupid or looked down on me. In fact, they were just very happy to answer my naive seeming questions, and I learned an awful lot from it. So, there really is very little downside to trying to train your epistemic humility in this way, apart from that it might be a knock to the ego, and a knock to the ego isn't normally the worst thing in the world anyway.

But finally, I want to draw some of these threads together and argue why I think we should rethink how we conceive of critical thinking itself.

Five, the myth of critical thinking. I sometimes see people talk about critical thinking as if it's a kind of onoff ability. Either someone has critical thinking skills or they don't. And I think this is a really unhelpful way to approach critical thought for a number of reasons. The first is that as we've seen, critical thinking isn't really one skill. It's more like an amalgam of a whole different set of skills, including clarity of thought, self-nowledge, and the ability to evaluate chains of reasoning. And it's perfectly possible for someone to be incredibly highly skilled at one of these, but not at the others. Someone might know how to ask really penetrating, clarifying questions, but be totally unable to see their own biases, or vice versa. Just talking about critical thinking as a whole obscures these differences. And if we just think of ourselves as good or bad critical thinkers, then we'll be unable to isolate the particular areas that we can improve upon. And I do think that it is a matter of gradual improvement. Critical thinking is clearly not something you just have or don't have. Each of the areas we looked at today are things that can be improved over time and are also things that we can always get better at no matter how much we think we've already mastered them. They're sort of asytoic in that way. It is only through practicing them that we can learn our own specific weak points and then learn how to bring them up. No one can do that for us because no one can know our weak points in advance. There will be all kinds of little tailorade tips and tricks and tweaks that are just for you and you will pick up on them and learn to craft them as you build on your own experiences. For example, I used to have a real habit of assuming reasons why people believed what they did, which is why I panged on about it so much earlier. So, I know to keep a close eye on this when I am examining a position myself. You might have slightly different pre-existing propensities. So, you might need slightly different angles and approaches, and it's only firsterson experience that can get you these.

The other reason that I'm quite skeptical about focusing on critical thinking in the abstract is because, as I've said throughout this video, a lot of critical thinking will be area specific. This came up a bit in my interview with the psychologist Shane Litil, where he pointed out that we're often susceptible to being fooled regarding fields about which we just don't have as much material knowledge. And this is quite an intuitive finding. I don't think that that is a radically unintuitive thing to say. So critical thinking isn't something that we can learn about separate from learning about the world itself and all of the areas that we want to think critically about. I do think that there are general themes to critical thinking in any area like being aware of our biases, seeking clarity, not straw manning, and attempting to cultivate certain epistemic virtues. But also as a meta skill, we should be aware of the limits of these broader critical thinking abilities when we are using them in an unfamiliar area. Otherwise, at least in my view, we would not be showing the appropriate level of epistemic humility considering our level of knowledge in the topic.

So, aside from all the particular points that I found helpful in my own thinking and that I've shared with you today, I hope that if you take away one thing from this video, it is this. If in doubt, it is almost always better to approach something with curiosity and intellectual humility rather than assuming that you already have the right answer. This may sound obvious and it's maybe a little bit tright, but I think that it does bear repeating over and over and over again because it's incredibly easy to say and almost no one will disagree with it, but it's also incredibly hard to act out. But in striving to act it out, I think that I can reasonably promise that you will become a better thinker. And although we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves and think that these attitudinal changes and abstract skills are a substitute for material knowledge of the subject at hand, I do think it will put us in a good place to learn more about it. And in my view, that is worth far more than looking a bit clever.

But if you do want to see another example where I think that our normal approach to a topic may have gone badly wrong and may have led us astray, then click here to watch why I have real problems with the question, what is the meaning of life? Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful day.