One of the core premises which drives my belief in the idea of The Socratic Web (a web where every webpage or piece of content is directly connected to the best critique of that webpage/content) is that repeated exposure to critical analyses will naturally teach critical thinking skills to the people who read them.

As an old student of Biology, having read The Selfish Gene, and then The Meme Machine back when I was at university, I can’t help but think of humans as copying machines. We learn from watching what others do. We learn from what happens around us. We mirror the society we grow up in.

Being taught critical thinking when we live in a world devoid of critical thinking is as useful as being taught how to fix a broken toaster in a world of disposable toasters. Unless we see the skills being plied on a regular basis we won’t apply them and we will never actually develop them. We need to see them in action in order to remind us to use them! We need to see them in action to remember how to apply them! We need to see them in action to remember what tools are available in the massive collection of tricks and hacks which come under the ‘critical thinking’ banner.

I was just reading this article: Critical thinking skills are more important than IQ for making good decisions in life, and came to this paragraph:

For example, a typical critical thinking question might require participants to explain whether they would want preschool to be mandatory for all children if research had shown that kids who attend preschool are more likely to excel at school (note this specific question wasn’t used in the test). Successful critical thinking would include recognising that correlation is not causation and reflecting on other possible explanations, and rating as valuable further information such as the income disparity between parents who send their children to preschool and other parents.

It reminded me how much my belief in the power of The Socratic Web to create a world of critical thinkers comes directly from my personal experience of living inside rbutr for a few years.

“Successful critical thinking would include recognising that correlation is not causation” — You know this concept already don’t you? Correlation is not causation. I think that most people know this phrase, but how many times a day do you see it used to call out faulty causation? How frequently do you get to see the tool being used? How often do you get to watch this simple yet valuable tool of critical thinking being used, challenged, championed, questioned, and discussed within an applicable context in day to day life?

My bet is that it doesn’t happen very often. And this particular tool of critical thinking is one of the better known ones (by my reckoning). There are probably hundreds of other tools which could be used all the time which aren’t visible more than once or twice a year if we’re lucky and hanging out with very switched on critical thinkers.

However, my personal experience while working on rbutr was quite different. I have read more rebuttals and critiques across a massive diversity of topics than most people read in a lifetime. I get an email of every rebuttal that is submitted to the platform, and have had to read many, many rebuttals in order to prepare the Best of rbutr emails I made, and frequent social media posts I have put together over the years.

I have no illusions that this makes me more clever than anyone else, necessarily more knowledgeable than anyone else, nor even a master critical thinker — but I absolutely do believe that I have been given the massive advantage of normalising the application of critical thinking skills to things I see around me every day. I believe that with that comes the increased ability to notice when something probably should be treated with increased skepticism, and better ability to identify what tools are available to do just that.

I probably don’t even know the name of all of the tools I wield now, but when someone makes a claim, I will immediately wonder about their source. I will wonder whether the causal relationship is established. I will wonder whether the data has been cherry picked. I will wonder whether the chosen metric is the most appropriate metric to concern ourselves with in this context, or whether it has been chosen to drive a specific agenda. I will wonder whether the population studied was genuinely random, or a self-selected biased group.

These aren’t necessarily things I have been ‘taught’ to think. These are just things I think now because I have seen so many people use them to successfully counter bad arguments. They are natural reflexes now. Critical thinking has become normalised in my world.

Just one example of how data can be abused to push an agenda.

Researching the ‘Critical Thinking By Osmosis’ hypothesis

Of course I realise that my single anecdotal experience is not a great reason to accept my belief as true. My brain is just as severely flawed and biased as anyone else’s, and this is either a fluke or simply a delusion on my behalf. So instead I have started working on designing experiments to test my hypotheses.

Just while I mention how flawed and biased my brain is, everyone should listen to this podcast: https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/

I first wrote about this idea back in March this year. That article connected me with Adrian Holzer, a researcher in Human Computer Interface at EPFL Switzerland. He, Nava Tintarev, (U. Delft, Netherlands, who was already working with us at rbutr) and I have brainstormed a few experimental design ideas together, and started work on a few simple ones.

There are a lot of variables to control for in the experiments though, and it will take us some time to test each of the smaller conditions before finally building up to the ultimate experiment that I wish we could run. If Facebook wanted to participate in the study though, with real people, wow, the data we could collect. Please Facebook — work with us on this research!

I am excited about conducting research on this subject, and always happy to work with anyone else interested in the space, or anyone who wants to help fund the research.

Correlating things is fun.

Testing Individual Critical Thinking Tools

Thinking back to the critical thinking study referenced above which said “Successful critical thinking would include recognising that correlation is not causation”; one of the experiments I would like to do would be to expose subjects to a series of articles in which that sort of critical analysis was present, and then ask them to analyse another article for which that critique would be valid.

Does exposure to successful application of the “correlation is not causation” tool (used within articles across unrelated topics) give people access to that tool when they need it?

The answer seems to be obviously true to me. But obvious truths are exactly what we need to experiment on first.

A secondary study would be to compare the results of a short time frame experiment to a long time frame experiment. For example, give someone 4 articles to read and 1 to assess in a 30min time frame, and then repeat the experiment by showing someone one article a day for 4 days, then getting them to assess another article on the fifth day. Or perhaps once a week.

I’d like to establish whether this idea is true or not, so let’s get some research done!