Progressives 2021: Stop critical thinking!

I almost couldn't believe this article when I read it. From (you guessed it) The New York Times:

Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole

For an academic, Michael Caulfield has an odd request: Stop overthinking what you see online.

“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”

So what does he want us to do instead?

Influenced by the research of Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford, and Sarah McGrew, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Mr. Caulfield argued that the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading.

So what does this mean? He uses the example of investigating claims by anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy...

He probed deeper into the method to find better coverage by copying the main claim in Mr. Kennedy’s post and pasting that into a Google search. The first two results came from Agence France-Presse’s fact-check website and the National Institutes of Health. His quick searches showed a pattern: Mr. Kennedy’s claims were outside the consensus — a sign they were motivated by something other than science.

In other words, DON'T CRITICALLY THINK! Simply go to the nearest establishment consensus, and sign up with that. not thinking required.

It's really sad that this is where we are now.

 

Indeed.

Donald Trump: 'What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening'
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-44959340

 

Is believing a perspective, just because it's contrarian to the generally accepted view, really a better way to claim
"critical thinking"?

Really?

"I'm a critical thinker because I immediately jump to the 20th page of a Google search rather than the first page ..."

Sort of the "flat earth must be the answer because the generally accepted view is that the earth is round," approach to
critical thinking.

 

The gist of the article was to not do any critical thinking and just accept whatever consensus the establishment has at the moment. Now, you may think that's a quick shortcut to knowing what you should believe, particularly if you trust experts and think the establishment is almost always right, but it's not critical thinking. It's the opposite.

 

Trump derangement syndrome in full flower.

You remind me of Carl Bernstein, who can't shake loose of Nixon and equates every single news event to Nixon and Watergate. Years from now on your deathbed, I predict your last words will be "Drumpf-bud" and a snow globe with Trump's face will fall out of your hands, rolling across the floor, as your Jamaican care givers try to figure out what you were talking about as you passed.

 

If you dismiss the experts simply because they are experts, is that REALLY critical thinking - or are you just following
the small herd of people who think that the experts are always wrong? And your post also assumes that the
expert don't criticize themselves - that there is no type of peer review ongoing in their fields.

You are basically taking the internet post of one or two people and claiming that their opinion is your opinion. I prefer to take
into consideration thousands of opinions as having more weight (not that they're absolutely right) just that they
hold a more likely consensus.

Now you can always find outliers that prove to be true, but taking the outlier as your initial stance just because it's an outlier
isn't really the "critical thinking" you think it to be.

 

I think this statement is a great example of confirming my point in the OP. If you feel that critical thinking is best done by experts so they can baby bird feed you the "truth" than I'm not going to argue that point, you be you boo.

However...I honestly expected the forum progressives to take the opposite tact, that of course we have to think for ourselves and make our own judgements based on the availability of facts available to us. That's why I included "Progressives 2021" in the subject line. I think in previous years progressives might have strenuously argued against believing what you're told simply because that's what you're told, but here you are, right out of the gate...

 

That isn't what he's saying either. What he is saying is to look at the info presented by both and see where it leads. That's critical thinking. It most definitely is not auto assuming that the so-called experts are always right or that the outlier is always right. Investigstion of new ideas is always called for, at the very least you locate a line not worth pursuing.

 

190th rule of acquisition...hear all, trust nothing

 

This comes to mind, right away....(they all believe it, shouldn't you?)

 

Wow! Didn’t take long for a gratuitous Trump reference to appear!

 

It's a game we play here, like "where's Waldo"....it may take awhile but rest assured, he is in EVERY thread on this board. It can be a cooking or hiking thread, it matters not.

 

So if we are talking say, astrophysics, and you don't believe what any of the specialist in astrophysics tell you because
you don't want to be "spoon-fed" their truth ... but you don't have access to the tools, or the knowledge to use, the equations
and labs used to conduct the experiments to prove theorems in astrophysics, do you just ignore astrophysicists?

 

Don't trust the scientist! Sean Hannity is the god of truth! Trust only your Q Masters!

 

Yes, because we all ponder the intricacies of astrophysics in our daily lives with the flood of info we receive daily. Analogy fail on an astronomical level bud.

 

You are presenting an extremely weak argument. If you want to go about disproving the consensus, no one is stopping you. Go back to college, study the topic, do field research, write papers on your findings, submit it for peer review, and then you too would be considered an expert in about 10 to 20 years.

Most people won't do that, which is why we rely on the consensus of experts in that field. Of course, it is always your choice whether to believe the one or two contrarians or the rest. Always, your choice.

 

Why did you leave out this part from the article?

"1. Stop.

2. Investigate the source.

3. Find better coverage.

4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.

Otherwise known as SIFT."

This method sounds pretty reasonable to me, especially part 4. When I am in doubt, I always try to find the original source or quote.

 

And when there is no real consensus beyond we really aren't sure? In my experience your average astrophysicist is a hell of a lot more trust worthy phd in sociology.

 

That's about as bad as an example as you could have picked. You might have noticed that there are no major physics battles across the social and political landscape. Their isn't a divide between say, people who believe in string theory and people who don't among politicians and newspaper opinion writers. Al Gore isn't supporting string theory while Pat Buchanan opposes it.

Next up on CNN, Don Lemon discusses Black Holes and the Federal Budget...

"Q Masters"

Sad.

 

The underlying assumption is that the "experts" have a pretty good track record. That's why we can trust them to run the economy and decide our trade, foreign policy, and which wars we fight, or don't. Because they know better.

 

Because in the Robert Kennedy Jr example, that's not what he did. He went to two mainstream sites and assumed they were right because they were...two mainstream sites.

Number 4 is actually good advice and I end up having to do that often but the author is not really doing that.

 

Kind of like how so many fell for the Trump’s lie that it won the election. Or what about all those times it told its fawning flock that only it could do things it does, how it has been the greatest, bestest president ever, how it has been a great businessman, how it has a great big brain, a very stable genius. The insurrection attempt was just a peaceful protest. All the violence came from the antifa pretending to be MAGA.

Or better yet, the current right-wing effort to paint Joe Biden as senile and racist. Short in reality, long on propaganda.

 

We hear right-wing rhetoric on a regular basis. The idea of critical thinking, considering the positions so many conservatives take, is not what one usually associates with conservative thought.

 

There is no credible physicist who denies the mechanism by which the release of carbon based molecules into the atmosphere causes an average atmospheric temperature rise. Yet there is a whole section of our country, a whole political party, a whole ideology who deny such a mechanism. Many rather forcefully. Many of who are completely ignorant of said mechanism.

 

You have it all ass backward. The author advises the exact opposite of what you are claiming.