[IWTL] How do I become more of a critical thinker?

Actually, I disagree with this. Questioning things is certainly part of what makes one a good critical thinker, but it's not the fundamental quality. I've met plenty of people who question everything incessantly - EVERYTHING - because they don't understand what they should be questioning, and what they should accept. Questioning absolutely everything is a waste of time, annoying as hell, and certainly does not make you a critical thinker. A lot of critical thinking is knowing what questions to ask, not just questioning everything.

Also, it's not crucial to have a good understanding of real science. It helps, for sure., but one can be a critical thinker in something that has absolutely nothing to do with science, so how could that be the "root" of good critical thinking?

So how does one know what questions to ask?

Critical thinking is all about the process. It's about how you interpret information coming your way. It's about how you determine what's relevant and what's not. Many people don't consciously do this, but critical thinkers do.

Think of a word problem you might see in a fifth grade math class:

Johnny and Sally went to the store to buy some eggs for dinner. But they had forgotten the recipe at home! They knew that one of the dishes called for at least 3 eggs, and the other dish called for at least 4 eggs. They need to make twice the recipe because their friends Jenna and Kyle are coming over for dinner. How many packs of six eggs do Johnny and Sally have to buy in order to make sure they have enough eggs?

The words in bold are pretty much all I read in order to answer the question; I decided that everything else is more or less irrelevant. That's actually basic critical thinking - being able to distinguish between important information and unimportant crap. Most real-world problems (whether they involve math or not) have tons of variables, names, and numbers that may or may not actually matter in trying to find a solution, and many people struggle to make out the valuable from the worthless.

I'll use another example that most of us have probably encountered in school. Many of my teachers, especially History teachers, would challenge the students to "think critically" by asking questions about what we've read. They were really basic, but bear with me. Imagine you just read about World War 2:

  • Who were the main actors in the war?
  • What were the main reasons the Allies won the war?
  • What events could be considered turning points in the war?
  • How did the entry of the US in the war affect its outcome?
  • What did the Allied countries have in common? What were their differences? What about the Axis countries?

Pretty basic questions, and the answers to some of them could probably be found in the book. But the point of the questions is to try to teach you how to think about this massive war, why it played out as it did, and the relationships between the countries. They're trying to point you to what to think about. Many of them have no one right answer, but there are definitely rights and wrongs about them.

Another integral part of the process of critical thinking is visualizing connections. If you sat down to write an essay about World War 2, your first thought would probably be where the hell do I start? This topic is massive. So, you have to choose an aspect of it to think about. To do this, you have to be able to think about the war in terms of its different aspects, trying to separate things into categories. Examples:

  • The economics of the war
  • The leaders involved
  • Military battles
  • Technology during the war
  • Long-term impacts of the war

You could easily take one of these categories and narrow it down further. How about focusing on the long-term impacts of the war...on technology? What technological advancements happened because of World War 2? Would our medical technology be five years behind where it is now if not for the war? These questions are about specific aspects of the war, and they are arrived at by making connections between different fields of study and different causal relationships. With critical thinking. By the way, I know so little about WW2 it's painful, so I apologize for not coming up with anything better. It's the process that's important anyways.

Tl;DR Critical thinking is a process by which one interprets information. It is not as simple as asking questions about everything. In this little essay I tried to illustrate some of the ways a critical thinker would interpret information.

/r/IWantToLearn Thread