Thinking critically

Why is critical thinking important? To me, it's the flipside of creativity & imagination. All those great new ideas need testing. And all those current ideas and notion need a good poke too. Some of them will be solid, some of them rotten underneath a shiny surface of efficacy. But we won't know which until we poke them.

Lets kick off with some definitions: Richard Paul describes CR as "critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you’re thinking in order to make your thinking better". Alec Fisher goes into some more detail on the history.

Now this is all good stuff. And frankly sounds like "mindfulness" with added logic. And we at EngineersWithoutFears are big fans of mindfulness. And logic.

However most of the material I have read on CR is very dry. And a tinsy bit meta. Because it's written by thinkers. And it strikes me there's a post here about critical thinking for non-thinkers. Because there's an awful lot of us out there, like.

So apart from following the various critical thinking methods (and they are good, so give them a go), what can you do outside your head to encourage critical thinking?

1. Get out more. And it's here that critical thinking and innovation overlap. Diversity of viewpoints is good for both discovery and verification/falsification (google Vienna Circle / Popper*). I love reading writings by right-wing, utopian technophiles and the day I stop reading this stuff is the day I die (intellectually).

2. Practice. My little brother is a blackbelt in jujitsu. Now this simply makes him a tiny bit more awesome than he is already (and a lot harder to bully) but he's spent a decade getting slammed into dojo mats to get to that level. Practicing his moves, his muscle memory, until he doesn't have to think when someone comes at him tooled-up. And we have to do the same with our critical faculties. Wax on, wax off with those fallacies.

3. Fuggetaboutit. Seriously. Those ideas of yours. They're all rubbish. And you know the scandalous thing? It doesn't matter. Really. Once I realised how unimportant my ideas were, everything became so much easier. Let go. Write them down and then burn them. N.B. Books are meant for burning. They're just rocket fuel. Let go.

Triggered by posts to the onlinefacilitation group.

*Our Karl has had mixed reviews. I remember being an wet-behind-the-ears undergrad in 1995 shortly after his death and one eminent philosopher of science said to the seminar room: "I'm glad the bastard's dead". I like KP's writings but then I never had to have the guy to dinner.