What is Critical Thinking
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Critical thinking are the steps people take to assess any potentially tricky situation. There are many forms of higher thinking that are not nessisary for critical thinking, what is most important is your recognition of the potential trick.
Something humans are unbelievably prone to is getting tricked. People’s minds are actually quite lazy, and go about life assuming their first thought is correct. This is actually a great survival tool, you don’t want to be caught wondering if that thing you see in the distance is a tiger, you should just get away.
It takes a fairly difficult problem to help our minds wake up and actually start thinking.
So the first step is to learn when to wake up your “thinking” brain. Things that make you want to buy something, or trust information.
However, some people fail at the next step as well. This is where processing comes into play.
The first major point, is that the more math you know, the harder you will be to trick, not always and it’s not consistent across the board, but in general your odds of being fooled go down when you know statistics, growth, calculus, fractions.
Next is deduction, working out the most likely answer from a limited pool of knowledge. The key here is to use one bit of information to rule out other bits of information you don’t have. You see this in murder shows, if it was raining, why did the victim leave without an umbrella? A person who was running for their life wouldn’t do xyz. These can be very useful, but should be reserved as a tool to recognize when more information is needed, not as a platform to come to conclusions.
Then comes research of logical fallacies. People have been lying and cheating for a very long time and have explained the most common tactics and how to think around them. These can be very useful in a discussion with either deliberately manipulative people or your run of the mill idiot who is repeating things they heard.
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