Critical Thinking

1. What are the ideas that are actually being asserted, whether explicitly or implicitly?
   • Some people make their ideas their identity. You don't have to be this person, and you can be more than the sum of your ideas. Don't take someone applying this process to your ideas and assertions personally.
   • Be aware that these people exist and are common. If you attack their ideas, they will take it personally. These people aren't worth expending mental or emotional energy on, and it's best to ignore what they are saying and disengage.
   • Some people will also make assertions that they themselves don't believe in to produce a behavioural change in other people. These people should be treated the same as the previous paragraph.
   • Some people's worldview, and thus the ideas that they assert, are based on how that worldview makes them feel; these worldviews usually develop in a Filter Bubble or Echo Chambers and aren't based in reality. These worldviews are unsuitable for integration into your own, and you should generally ignore any ideas that derive from these worldviews.
   • Ideologues are rarely useful sources of knowledge to integrate into your own worldview, but they may be useful sources for understanding other people's worldview.
2. What do you personally know about these topics? If you have limited or no knowledge of the subject, you cannot pretend (even to yourself) that you do.
   • Be aware that just because something seems intuitive, it may not be.
   • You may be able to draw lateral inferences with the previous caveat.
   • Be very cautious about overfitting your mental model on limited useful information. Things may seem to make sense, but they are based on a house of cards of faulty assumptions and knowledge gaps.
   • Just because you, or someone else, has an opinion, does not mean that you are qualified to hold that opinion or that anyone should entertain it seriously.
3. What are the underlying assumptions of these asserted ideas? Which ones are linchpins - e.g. if this assumption is actually false, the asserted idea is wrong? Focus on the linchpins.
   • Avoid falling into the trap of getting hemmed in by phrasing. Don't let other people try to get your to use their terminology, but rather use your own. You need to understand the ideas in your own terms.
   • Avoid playing the game of the overly-politically correct "euphemism mutual admiration society". There's a far less polite way to phrase this, but I'm trying to avoid that here.
   • Mark these differences in terminology, so you can recognize them later to improve your understanding of what people actually mean.
   • Understand where your terminology is wrong, and potentially shaping your thinking in the wrong way.
   • Avoid hyperbole (the 5-star effect).
4. Identify and prioritize the importance of the relevant parts.
5. Apply your relevant knowledge to the ideas and assumptions.
   • You can choose some combination of acceptance, rejection, ignoring, and investigation.
     • Acceptance means you alter your worldview. The ideas can be considered processed (e.g. in the Zettelkasten sense).
     • Reject means that you make a conscious decision not to alter your worldview. The ideas can be considered processed (e.g. in the Zettelkasten sense).
     • Ignoring means that you have decided not to continue or to defer processing the ideas. This may be due to a lack of connections with the rest of your knowledge.
     • Investigation means that you have decided to ignore the ideas for now, but they merit following up on, and building out your own knowledge until you are able make informed inferences.
   • If you have a large degree of knowledge gaps or a lack of relevant knowledge or usable connections, you probably should ignore or investigate.
   • Apply common sense. If a doctor is telling you something directly related to your own health, it's unlikely you're going to reject it outright. Maybe.
6. Integrate your conclusions into your worldview.
   • The conclusion might be that the source of the asserted ideas is an untrusted source, and you mark further assertions from this source as untrustworthy (implicitly reject) without further investigation or agreement from knowledge sources that you do trust.

• Headline Worldviews
• Passive Information Consumers

Anecdata only goes so far, but here are some examples I've seen.

• People freaking out about the end of the world being nigh over heavy HFGCS comms traffic or military exercises, without understanding what it is or the history. In this case, very few people (almost no one without military experience, for example) are qualified to hold serious opinions. See, for example, all the conspiracy theories people have seeing military vehicles loaded on trains (e.g., Jade Helm syndrome).

• Anyone watching a thirty second police body camera clip. What rarely gets discussed are

  • The events leading up to that clip.
  • The 911 call that came in, for example.
  • The history of the person in the clip (for example, most criminals are repeat offenders).
  • How these events unfold, and what the right process is for dealing with them.

  I will use as an example how my opinions changed on seeing the UC Davis pepper spray incident. At first, it sparked outage in me. Later on, I would realize there were only a few possible outcomes here:

  1. The police just let the students continue to defy lawful orders to disperse, in which case you no longer have rule of law. The cops should just pack it in and go home at this point.
  2. The police have to use non-lethal deterrents, such as pepper spray or tear gas, to force the students to disperse. I had to be pepper sprayed while in the Academy, and it was one of the single worst incidents of my life in the moment. Within an hour it was cleared up.
  3. The police have to resort to physical violence, such as batons. This is going to hurt a lot more, and the effects will last a lot longer.
  4. The police shoot the protesters. The world might be a better place for it, but it is too extreme a measure for this scenario.

  The decision by the school to fire the officer is one of the reasons I never joined law enforcement, despite offers after completing the Academy.