Voltaire once wrote that “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.” How can we avoid believing absurdities? One answer is the notion of critical thinking. It’s thinking about thinking with the goal of thinking clearly and objectively. The goal of critical thinking is to improve our thinking.
Critical thinking is also thinking about knowing. How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we know is true? What kind of evidence do we need to conclude that something is true? In many cases, we can’t prove that something is true. In such cases, how do we decide when to act and when to hold back? It’s a messy world out there. How do we make good decisions even in the absence of good information?
Critical thinking is also about culture. Some cultures believe that human inequality is inherent in society and, therefore, desirable. Other cultures believe that inequality is immoral and, therefore, should be minimized, if not eliminated. If people from such different cultures apply the same principles of critical thinking to the same question, will they arrive at the same answer? Should they?
Critical thinking is also about good management. Most companies and government organizations are run by well-educated managers who have good intentions. Yet they often fall into decision-making traps and create full-blown debacles. Studying critical thinking — as the New York Times reports — can make you a better manager.
Critical thinking is also about professions and the quality of professional advice. How do doctors think? It’s a good question and a good book. Do doctors think differently than, say, mathematicians or economists? Do designers think differently than engineers? Why would professions think differently and how do those differences affect the way we see the world?
Posts on Critical Thinking:
- A No Nonsense Guide to NFTs
- Pascal’s Wager and Face Masks
- Spot The Fallacy
- Walking Up The Economic Ladder
- What Good Is History?
- Spotting Random Fraud
- Temporary Skills versus Durable Skills
- Making Friends in Nine Minutes
- Decision Theater
- Scanning The Future From Singapore
- Finally! A Way To Measure Corporate Culture.
- Whom Do You Trust? America or Facebook?
- What’s Walking Good For?
- Will AI Be The End Of Men?
- It’s Social Science. We’re Screwed.
- Critical Thinking — Ripped From The Headlines!
- Clembama Redux
- False Consensus and Preference Falsification
- Using A Razor To Whittle Your Choices
- That’s Irrelevant!
- Knowledge Neglect — Scots In Saris
- Ideas and Free Throws
- One-Day Seminars – Fall 2018
- FOMO/JOMO. Be Here Now.
- Information Avoidance and Persuasion
- Concept Creep and Pessimism
- Delayed Intuition – How To Hire Better
- Why Study Critical Thinking?
- RAND’s Truth Decay
- Egotism and The Awe Drought
- Digital Taylorism and Dumb Humans
- What Happens When You Anesthetize A Plant?
- Jewelry and Perverse Incentives
- Is Loneliness Driving Political Polarization?
- Big Daddy/Big Data
- What We Don’t Know and Don’t See
- How Many Cognitive Biases Are There?
- Veni, Vidi, Da Vinci
- Are Machines Better Than Judges?
- The Dying Grandmother Gambit
- Designing A Life — Fate and Gravity
- How To Save Democracy
- Why Do Smarter People Live Longer?
- Tetris On The Brain
- Managing Agreement: The Abilene Paradox.
- Debiasing and Corporate Performance
- Failure Is An Option
- Physics Versus Rhetoric
- Preparing Persuasive Presentations
- Too Much Rhetoric? Or Not Enough?
- Are Men Bigger Risk Takers Than Women?
- Happiness and Creativity
- Cherry Creek Parks Itself
- Trumping The Press
- Factory-Installed Biases
- Emotions And Critical Thinking
- You Too Can Be A Revered Leader!
- Innovating The Innovations
- Luck, Skill, and Clembama
- Will Corruption Skyrocket In Sweden?
- Unbelievable Memories
- Pre-Suasion: Influence Before Influence
- The Cost of Bad Writing
- Your Commonplace Or Mine?
- Us Versus Them
- Enclothed Cognition
- Perverse Incentives and Wells Fargo
- Altruism and Sex
- Another Reason For Female Executives
- Healing Architecture
- Jevons Paradox and The Future of Employment
- Politics — Lying Versus Bullshitting
- Corporate Culture: Counting The Uncountable
- Is Critical Thinking The Ultimate Job Skill?
- Innovation In Our Refrigerator
- Questions, Proxies, and Health
- Male Chauvinist Machines
- The Art Of Transformation
- Do Nudges Work? Should We Use Them?
- Consciousness Is A Verb
- The United States of Mind
- Context Effects: PayPal and Brexit
- Want A Good Ad? Conceal The Premise.
- Self-Herding At Breakfast
- Heard of Self-Herding?
- Innovation’s Speech Impediment
- Chocolate or Sex?
- Chocolate Brain
- From AI to UBI
- Human 2.0
- Donald, Bernie, and Belittlement
- Posture, Attitude, and Amy Cuddy
- How Many Friends Can You Have?
- Conned By The Force
- Questions or Answers?
- You Become What You Believe
- Disrupting the Bankers
- The Dreaded iHunch
- Sending A Memo To Your Future Self
- Surviving The Survivorship Bias
- Why Don’t We Smile At Art Museums?
- Creating A Design Culture
- Ethics And The Self-Driving Car
- Business School And The Swimmer’s Body Fallacy
- Seeing With Your Eyes
- Designing Minds
- Reminiscence Bumps and Helicopter Parents
- Curmudgeons and Critical Thinking
- Rabies and Burglaries
- Equal Opportunity Idea Generation
- Making Peace
- Willpower Is A Muscle. Happiness Is A Skill. Empathy Is A Choice.
- When Uncertainty Is Certain
- All Alone By Yourself
- Critical Thinking and VUCA
- I’m A Better Person In Spanish
- Greek Game Theory
- When Irrational Behavior Is Rational
- I Like You. I Do You A Favor.
- Men. Why?
- Egotism and Awe
- Intuition — Wicked and Kind
- How To Kill The Lottery
- How Long Does It Take (To Have A Good Idea)?
- Hate, Happiness, Imagination
- Somatopsychic Chewing Gum
- McKinsey and The Decision Villains
- Three Decision Philosophies
- Maps, Isms, and Assumptions
- Improving Self-Control
- Self-Esteem or Self-Control?
- Donna Shalala and The Boom Boom Theory
- Are Women Better Spycatchers?
- Habit Forming, Compulsive Products
- Chief Stereotyping Officer
- My Brain Is Ripening
- The Hedonic Treadmill and Brain Health
- Do Smartphones Make Us Smarter, Dumber, Or Happier?
- Aristotle, Cyberpunk, and Extended Minds
- Prospero’s Precepts – Thinking About Thnking
- Naive Realism and Open Mindedness
- So Good, I’m Bad
- Hedgehogs, Foxes, and The Future
- Just Add Women
- What Is Consciousness Good For?
- Placebo, Nocebo — Worried Sick.
- Brian Williams and Core Priorities
- Seldom Right. Never In Doubt.
- Have We Got It All Backwards?
- Good Decisions, Bad Outcomes
- Happiness and High Dudgeon
- Just Imagine You’re Doing It
- The Mother Of All Fallacies
- Fallacy of Fallacies
- Thinking About Thinking
- Creativity and Sex
- The Doctor Won’t See You Now
- Serial Thinking
- Defining Reality
- Building Your Baloney Detector
- Arguments and Sunk Costs
- Mind and Body
- Reality Is A Conspiracy
- Ebola and Availability Cascades
- Are We Done Yet?
- Now You See It, But You Don’t
- Observation and Innovation
- Two Brains. So What?
- Questions To Improve Decisions
- Facts Behaving Badly
- How We Think And What It Means
- Thinking Under Pressure
- Should You Trust Your Gut?
- System 1 And The Credit Card
- Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow
- Thinking, Feeling, Wanting
- Are You The Boss Of Your Money?
- Should You Talk To Yourself?
- Coincidence? I Think Not.
- Stress And The Nerve Curve
- Inference, Frequentism, and Sex
- My Good Judgment
- How To Have A Good Idea – Part 1
- When Should You Name Your Baby?
- How Are You? Your Keyboard Knows.
- Are You The Boss Of You?
- Turing, Flynn, and Numbskull
- My Microbiome Made Me Do It
- Effect and Cause
- My iPod Is Conscious
- Rats, Lice, and Innovation
- Success and Serendipity
- Social Media and Empty Calories
- Sitting Still In a Room
- Crosswords, Wu-Wei, and Flow
- Linearly Nonlinear
- Survivorship Bias
- Memo To Self
- Are Your Kith Couth?
- The Brighter Side of Spite
- Liar, Liar, Confabulator
- Are Computers Funny?
- Laughtivism
- Men, Women, Laughter, and Love
- Laughter, Love, and Longevity
- Don’t Beat Yourself Up (Too Much)
- Keeping An Open Mindset
- Beauty and Success
- Happiness, Brand, and Innovation
- Eighteen Debacles
- Immoral Afternoons
- Hawthorne, Heisenberg, and Me
- Good For Bad
- Meaningless Means
- Recruiting and The Triple Package
- Better Decisions for Your Company – 2
- Better Decisions for Your Company – 1
- Braess’s Paradox and The Super Bowl
- Aristotle and Economics
- Stemming the STEM Tide
- Good News on Dementia?
- Design As A Competitive Weapon
- Groups Get It Wrong (All Too Often)
- Seeing And Observing Sherlock
- Red Wine and Best-of-Breed Education
- Delivering Student-Centric, Best-of-Breed Education
- Best of Breed Education
- Popping The Filter Bubble
- Don’t Call Me Surely
- Disgustology
- Diets Make You Dumb
- Creativity Templates – 1
- Bananas, Bagels, and Inattentional Blindness
- Brain Networks – Part 2
- Brain Networks At The Office
- Will Social Media Make You Crazy?
- Brain Porn
- False Smile, Real Purchase
- The Beauty of Long Division
- Thinking and Health
- Daydreaming, Default Networks, and Creativity
- Inventing Tradition
- Seeing Without Seeing
- Culture – Virtue and Truth
- Critical Thinking Standards
- Critical Thinking and the Job Market
- Appreciative Inquiry
- Perverse Incentives
- MOOCs and Me – 2
- Is Happiness Authentic?
- Epistemological Modesty
- How Does It Feel To Commit Prematurely?
- Social Animals and Systems 1 and 2
- Verbal, Vocal, Visual – Body Language and You
- Smart People Doing Stupid Things
- Why Your Dog Is Happier Than You Are
- Want a Good Decision? Go to Trial.
- My Strategic Pause
- How Many Intelligences Do You Need?
- How Do You Know If Something Is True?
- When You Have a Heart Attack, Don’t Do It in a Crowd
- Sinkholes, Icy Roads, and Chenesium
- Can You Frame Yourself?
- Culture — I versus We
- Pascal’s Wager and the Mediterranean Diet
- Culture — Would You Laugh At Your Boss?
- Critical Thinking. What’s That?
- The Structure of Predictions
- Thinking Outside the Frame
- Premature Commitment. It’s a Guy Thing.
- Computers Are Useless. They Only Give You Answers.
- A Joke About Your Mind’s Eye
- Systems Thinking versus Design Thinking
- Critical Thinking Through the Ages
- Librarian, Farmer, Debacle
- Thinking With Your Body
- The Last of Thumb Thinking
- The Anatomy of Debacles
- Strategy: What If Health Care Costs Go Down?
- Golf and Logic
- More Thinking on Your Thumbs
- Christmas – Deadliest Day of the Year
- Thinking With Your Thumbs – Part 1
- Thinking: System 1 and System 2
- As we become more energy efficient, do we use less energy?
- The Art of the Wrong View
- Sources of Argumentation – Beating Writer’s Block