Random Thought

[dr_tectonic]

Thought:

The way to get a trait to spread throughout a population is with selection pressure: making those who have the trait more successful than those who do not. Positive or negative selection will both work.

If you want to teach people something, put them in a situation where they need to know it to accomplish some goal. They *will* figure it out.

"Critical thinking" seems to be the trait that is most needed by our modern citizenry, if we want to make the world a better place.

So we just need to figure out some way of making basic critical thinking skills correlate with success in some widely desirable context... Right?

EDIT: Please note, I'm not talking about removing "stupid" from the gene pool -- that's something that other people brought up in the comments section, and frankly, although I made a couple jokes about it, it's a lousy idea on a number of fronts. All I said was, it seems to me like we need more "critical thinking" going on, and the way to get that is to somehow reward that with success. Okay? Okay.

Comments

[thetarnishedowl.livejournal.com]

Hear hear!!!

[redbeardedblond.livejournal.com]

This all goes along with my theory of what is wrong with Americans and how it came about. It came about through a flawed educational model where we are taught to listen to what is said and regurgitate the knowledge back as fact. This model is flawed and we realize that. However the repurcussions are only barely being seen now. You see, we're not taught to reason on our own from facts, just regurgitate what others say.

Now we have people lying their asses off and saying it's fact and other people believing them and regurgitating it back as fact and getting pissed off when someone who is logical and reasoning will not bend under their relentless verbal attacks because they make so sense.

This is something that our society has brought upon itself and is not something that can be turned around easily without bringing back natural selection by removing all the warning labels off of all products and killing all the lawyers.

That is my plan.

Thank you.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

A fine plan -- as long as we can exempt the couple lawyers I know personally.

What if we just introduced new forms of natural selection? We could solve several endangered species problems at the same time! All we need to do is release cybernetically-enhanced wolves (and other large predators) into major urban areas. Two birds, one stone!

Ooo, extra bonus: it would also give people some perspective. "How was your day, honey?" "Well, I wasn't eaten by wolves while walking to my car, so not bad, really."

[redbeardedblond.livejournal.com]

OOOO OOOO!!! I like this!

Well, I have to admit I don't mean EVERY lawyer.

But these cybernetic wolves are a great idea. We could fix them so they can sense people with reasoning abilities and leave them alone.

Then we could train them to stalk the Wal-Mart parking lot and pay particular attention to grimey minivans full of screaming white trash! :)

[kung-fu-monkey.livejournal.com]

Don't target minivans. I drive one. If I'm ever surrounded by cybernetic wolves because of what I drive, we will need to have a talk, sir.

[redbeardedblond.livejournal.com]

no no... you see I did qualify it with "full of screaming white trash."

You, obviously don't fit that mold. :)

[toosuto.livejournal.com]

But what if he's loaded up the van in an effor to take out the white trash? Will the wolves have some sort of bagged white trash recognizing algorithm? I mean because J. is a man who gets things done.

[redbeardedblond.livejournal.com]

Of course!

You see, their intelligence will be greater than the majority of people...

It won't go after "you know who's."

white trash

[stowellian.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why people's socio-economic class makes them acceptable targets for our ire. Should we just kill all of the poor people while we're at it? That'd solve the poverty problem and rid us of the unpleasant reality of seeing them there on the street. Targeting people because they don't share your cultural values is a dangerous game to play; targeting people who have never had a chance to share those values is even more dangerous. Is the problem with America really that not enough people have critical thinking skills? I for one say that's probably not issue one.
However, I'm all in favor of spreading CT skills. If we can think of a better way than awarding grades based on demonstrated CT skills and making college degrees dependent on those grades, well, we'll have gone a long way towards correlating CT skills with success. It's not too easy to make a big success of yourself these days without a college degree. I dare say that the correlation is pretty strong. The problem, perhaps, is simply that the idea of a "rewards" system implies that we are all rational actors. Last time I checked, that wasn't even entirely true of me, and I'm the most educated critical thinker I know. The other problem is that holding a college degree like a big carrot/stick doesn't work for people who don't even see college as an option for whatever variety of reasons. Perhaps that's what we need to work on the most.

If this thread is about improving our education system, then I'm cool with that. But all of this elitist nonsense has got to go. I mean, really. Wolves to eat the less critically minded? Educated people are better than that, even in their jokes. They tell funny ones, like the one about the Holy Roman Empire. You know, it's neither Holy, nor.....

Re: white trash

[kung-fu-monkey.livejournal.com]

Thank you. My "ghost" post this morning was attempting to explain that, but I think I really lost my cool trying to get there. Some people just have not had the chance to realize that critical thinking is what's really needed to make them more aware of situations. The promise of wiping out a caste of people doesn't really help show that we've got anything on them. I dunno. I'm getting upset again. I think I'll stop now.

[stowellian.livejournal.com]

What two "birds" are killed with this one stone? If I had MY druthers, I'd release the wolves into major SUBURBAN areas. I think that's the perils of this sort of thinking.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a fine idea! Encourage people to move into the urban core.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

Actually, you're mistaking the purpose for a flaw.

No, really. Dewey— the primary creator of the school system we have today— repeatedly stated that his educational purpose was to turn out component-style worker people to fit into the mold of the worker class of the Industrial Revolution. In other words, he deliberately promoted a style of education to turn out perfect factory workers. "Public" education was intended to be a benefit to the worker class; it was assumed that the upper classes would have recourse to private education in the traditional university style.

Naturally, an educational style geared toward the Industrial Age is of little use in the Infomation Age. The decline of education, such as it is, directly correlates to the rise of a different world. The old system is unsuited to the new challenges, and teachers— themselves educated under the old— are unable to break the mold imposed on them of what a teacher should be.

[redbeardedblond.livejournal.com]

You are one my new favorite people! Thank you for putting me right. I will say that my university experience is what taught me to think for myself.

Reform, reform, reform....... :\

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

*smile*

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

I forget where I saw this recently:

A Chinese Proverb on Education:

Tell me, I will forget
Show me, I may remember
Involve me, and I will understand

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

This is why I get to make educational computer games! =)

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

If there aren't already selection pressures for critical thinking, there's probably a good reason for that.

I mean, really. We have "lousy" critical thinking skills and we're still damn good at surviving. That says something about human skill, but also something about critical thinking.

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

Dude. Cheater! You already said this as a comment on one of my posts. Recycling comments as posts. I swear. What kind of world is this coming to?!

Of course, that being said, neither of us had any good ideas as to how to teach critical thinking skills when you asked it before. And I still don't. One of your other commenters makes the good point that critical thinking doesn't correlate well to survival or success in this world. Just to what you and I consider "right thinking".

Actually, we're pretty close to the world where critical thinking will become a survival skill. As Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) continues to proliferate on the Internet, and as the Internet becomes the primary source of information for people, those that can learn to sift through the crap and find good information will have more success. Good information carnivores. People that take what they're told at face value will end up following a lot of bad advice, and suffer for it.

We can hope, at least.

teaching

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

"...neither of us had any good ideas as to how to teach critical thinking skills when you asked it before."

I was a teacher for a whole 6 weeks at a private school that was really freaky. I came away from that realizing that in my mind, education consists of giving students facts, technique, creativity, and critical thinking. The head of the school said, "You can't teach creativity and critical thinking."

I completely disagree. The problem is in an approach to teaching. To teach these skills you need to give students the opportunities to utilize them. You need to work on the process through which they approach these tasks--not with the idea of forming them into a specific "best practice" but giving them a variety of different tools to use, and making sure they try each tool at least once. The important part is not a specific outcome, but an outcome that shows qualities associated with a thoughtful, intentional process of creativity or problem solving.

Giving kids many opportunities to do this, and encouraging them through successes, is how you teach these skills, and it is not only possible, but once you start working with this, it becomes hard to remember why you didn't do it that way all along.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

You can teach critical thinking skills; it just takes a hell of a lot of work.

The more important thing to do, however, is to teach the child how to obtain information on his own. The simplest way to do this is to never answer questions. Child asks, "Why is the sky blue?" and you say, "I'll show you how you find out." Then you point the child towards appropriate references, and ask then to tell you why the sky is blue.

Admittedly, that's a bad example; before the age of seven or eight a child's brain is actually geared toward rote learning, since that is the information acquisition stage. (In other words, evolutionarily, it's a bad idea for young children to be finding things out on their own, because that's when they want to eat the poison mushrooms.) But as they get older, work that "Cool!" factor big time, and encourage them to find out more about things they're interested in.

Critical thinking starts with skepticism, so if you can find contradictory sources (especially from the Internet) and discuss why people might lie or be simply wrong, and then talk about how to tell when that is the case, and you'll have a good start.

[stowellian.livejournal.com]

I like this idea alot. While teachers maybe do too much "roting" (though I defend that more than most people), students also end up with the attitude that the teacher is there to answer their questions, and it's not their responsibility to seek out answers. I know my teaching sometimes creates that dependency by not allowing enough room for students to grow. Must...trust...students....

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of using contradictory sources as a starting point - I hadn't thought about it but you're right that skepticism is really the beginning of critical thinking. As soon as you have an unquestionable standard, whether it's a textbook or a teacher, you have to shut down critical thinking and questioning. So maybe encourage kids to find errata in textbooks. Introduce mistakes into one's work as a teacher and reward kids that notice the mistakes. Take the teacher off the pedestal. An interesting idea, certainly.

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

Easy, just stop giving huge cash awards to stupid people, and go back to letting stupidity be lethal.

[hapaxeslegomena.livejournal.com]

Can we have like a “best of five” on the lethality? I’d hate to be culled on the one stupid day I have over the course of a month.

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

Good idea, actually. We want to remove the continuing "the gummint will protect me, so I don't have to be careful or think" kind of stupidity, not the random mistakes we all make.

lethal?

[baronet.livejournal.com]

It doesn't have to be lethal (unless it was *really* stupid, it probably wouldn't be), it just has to be crippling when maintained. So if being stupid meant that you occasionally lost half your wages, then there would be a strong dis-incentive to breed with stupid people. Except that stupid people tend to breed themselves. Humm. Not sure what to do about that.

[dpolicar]

So we just need to figure out some way of making basic critical thinking skills correlate with success in some widely desirable context... Right?
One possibility -- set up some kind of a network whereby people could analyze published data about various economic entities and rank those entities based on those data. We could set it up as a kind of competitive thing, where you compare your ranking to other people's rankings, and if you're more accurate than they are you get prizes and stuff. Like, we could give the winners various kinds of broth which they could exchange for money... beef, chicken, vegetable, etc. We could call it a broth market...

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

Sir, most selective pressure in life comes during events that call for quick, decisive thinking, not critical thinking. Not sure it's feasible to overcome this, sir!

[stowellian.livejournal.com]

I find the entire cut of this conversation's jib to be offensive.

EIT

[baronet.livejournal.com]

In the words of my people, or at least his people,
EIT