Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?

Eli Goldratt developed some thinking tools that I have found work great for me.

You can start by reading: "It wasn't luck" by Goldratt it's a business novel where the protagonist has to think deeply about his different companies.

If you like it, then you can move to the whole textbook: "H. William Dettmer The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving"

Apart from that: "thinking in bets" is a really good book for better decision making.

Find people who think critically and listen to them criticize stuff.

Hint: There are an awful lot to be found on podcasts.

Speaking about independent thoughts, I think it's crucial to NOT trust anything one heard and do one's own research, especially those fed by news agencies. By saying "research" I mean a rigorous research that not only includes newspaper, magazine and other light reading materials, but also drill deep into books and (most important) official documents if applicable.

I also found it useful to build up a framework of analysis to remove some weight of the research. After all one cannot take that research methodology to everything one would like to research into, so by getting a framework one knows which material to avoid.

My advice would be to study mathematics. Or to find some other way to teach yourself to exclusively say or write things that are true. Then I think you will also more easily recognize when others do not.

I am also trying to get better at this. I find that a lot of my own non-critical thinking hinges on assumptions I've treated almost as axioms. So perhaps a good place to start would be working on identifying the underlying assumptions in a statement or argument.

Thinking is carefully controllef by PR and marketing techniques for profits.

Learning how it is done might make you somewhat immune to it. I highly recommend the following to better understand what is going on:

- Book: Propaganda by Edward Bernays, the father of PR

- Book: The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

- Article: The Submarine by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Another thing to do is listen to exactly those people who are supposedly "evil", "immoral" or otherwise bad in some way. Think about the political ideology opposite to what you were brought up as... or religious ideology which you were taught was bad. And of course, listen to people who are silenced (set showdead=yes on your profile on HackerNews, for example).

Learn to play poker. Against humans and not online.

you answered your own question

seeking for any more answers would just go against critical thinking ;)

there you go buddy

Gather a list of techniques to illuminate people who are trying to sell you a red herring. We do critical thinking all the time in a basic way when we try and determine if an advertisement for a product is 'bull ship' or not. It's likely you are going to do a lot of automatic and basic critical thinking on the answers in this thread.

The same principle is used to filter your own mental direction, thoughts and assumptions. It's like panning for gold. Panning for gold involves sifting through a river of dirt to find specks of gold in your sieve. You're training your thinking to analyze out all the words and meanings that could trap you and find the specks of gold.

Critical thinking and analysis is very helpful for programming problems you find hard and/or debugging some nightmare you've accidentally created. Challenging your own historical reasoning, thoughts and assumptions helps save you from your own programming hubris.

It's possible to become reactionary to new information or too closed off, if you over-analyze everything. You might not notice the real things you need to analyze in life until much later. Analysis isn't protected from your personal beliefs, they will be a soft spot for jumping to conclusions. It's a narrow path and the answers you find might not be the ones you wanted when you started.

Alan Kay's lectures on youtube are mostly about (critical) thinking and how to educate your own thinking. Each of his talks is aimed at a different audience but all address your question. For our HN audience the 1997 OOPSLA talk [1] is a place to start, or the "How to Invent the Future I - Stanford CS183F: Startup School" talks [2].

There are many recommendations of books to read to develop your thinking.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ

First, understand the meaning of the word "critical". It is unbiased in it's meaning, it means to examine something without any consideration where the conclusions lead. In common use it carries a negative connotation, to be critical means to reexamine something and come to different conclusions, because it's when we are wrong that it is most often useful.

Second, become very good at articulating your thoughts and ideas. If you can't explain something you don't understand it. So expand your vocabulary, watch your grammar, split hairs, use analogy. This takes practice and is always an ongoing process.

Finally, hold nothing as sacred, nothing. You must be willing to accept that even your most cherished, deeply held views are wrong. You must be willing to entertain ideas you find reprehensible. You must adopt and throw away ideas when your faculty of reason tells you that you are wrong, and you must be unemotional about it. You cannot coddle your worldview. This is very hard, which is why most people can't do it.

I had written a comment but thought this article conveyed my thoughts better:

Just the idea of 'independent thought' itself is a contradiction:

Independent thinking connotes the idea of being able to think on your own, to convince oneself on the truthfulness or validity of information received, rather than being swayed by the opinion of others.

However, the premise on which the prevailing conception of independent thought is constructed is faulty.

A Thought is interconnected; no disassociated thinker lives on an island all by themselves.

Can we truly think on our own, independently, in the purest sense of the term? Aren’t our thoughts inevitably contaminated by the ideas, philosophies, and biases we have deliberately and subconsciously imbibed over the course of our lifetime?

Besides, it is hard or impossible to evaluate how “independent” our thoughts truly are, for the simple reason thoughts represent the accumulation of our lived and learned experiences.

Yes, imagination is an important component of thought; yet we do not imagine in a vacuum — we merely adapt and rearrange familiar realities to compose new patterns and entities.

Or to put it more charitably, don’t we all stand on the shoulders of giants — the teachers under whom we studied at their feet; the parents, families, and communities with whom we imbibed their cultural ethos?

Granted, some of the more enlightened among us might experience the occasional “quantum leap” in thought processes, thereby giving birth to innovative approaches to solving problems.

Likewise, when you scratch any of these “independent” thought sequences with the tip of a pencil, underneath you’ll find it is nothing more than existing knowledge repurposed by identifying and combining different patterns and connecting the dots.

Source of the excerpt above: https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/how-independent-th...

Some useful books and links:

Naval Ravikant: Let us Not talk Falsely Now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euzoOkBUzsQ

List of Cognitive Biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/...

How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life Paperback – March 5, 1993 by Thomas Gilovich

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Reading most articles from lesswrong.com or slatestarcodex.com

Slightly unrelated: You analyzing yourself in such critical way reminds me of myself.

The only persistent solution to this was meditation using Sam Harris waking up app (it's free if you email them).

https://wakingup.com/

Explore gut feelings and thoughts back in the head. Learn when to rely on hope/belief and when to change certain facts/assumptions and reevaluate situation. Try approaching situation top to bottom, starting from basic facts about the situation. Think from all sides, build a model of what's going on and see if models fit with reality. Imagine explaining current situation to someone and see if it sounds obviously flawed when spoken out.

This may be ridiculous advice but go find lots of media that shows experts being wrong. Go find videos of cops beating up innocent people. Go look through the news from 10 20 or 30 years and find people saying things they were sure about that they were wrong about or that they said would be good but ended up causing a lot of problems.

Keep doing this until you have ingrained in yourself

1) People that sound smart often don't know what they are talking about

2) Authority figures often don't have your best interests at heart

3) and learn the specific smells of what these kind of statements tend to look and sound like

And I guess eventually you could build up an intuition for when people are full of shit.

You can also do the opposite and try to build up intuition for when people were right about things that sounded like bullshit to you.

And if you want to get meta about it, listen to this philosopher talk about bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk&t=1s

Critical Thinking is not something you turn on and off. It is a way of life.

Like any other attainable skill, it becomes better with practice.

First, start reading descent novels- any kind of novel that you will. It can be Stephen King-type, Tolkien-type, Dune-type- anything.

Start your critical thinking practice with humans. Empathize with them. Also become a little cynical. Try to find out someone's motives, background, etc. behind what they do and tell.

This is way you can practice critical thinking a lot. Never judge anyone. Judgmental mentality clouds clear thinking.

Try to understand where the character of a novel comes from, why they do what they do. What would you have done? These lead to better situation-reading for any situation.

Then, do anything that requires critical thinking. Play chess. Learn HS/college level math. Solve a lot of problems yourselves.

Look at past questions from coding competitions. Do not worry about the time. Solve them.

To be good at critical thinking, just practice thinking.

I also suggest maintaining a journal/blog. Here you write your heart out, simply walk the steps that you have traveled while solving a problem. If there is a thought clouding, just write is down clearly. Do not worry about writing quality. Just write.

Writing makes thinking mamy times better. And I do not say that lightly.

Maintain habits where you practice critical thinking.

Make predictions, record them, and then honestly evaluate how accurate they were.

A good place to start is by reading the books and memos of Howard Marks.

His analysis of the stock market and investing is a prime example of critical thinking.

I would start by taking the answers given here with a hefty portion of salt.

It is fairly shameful to answer this question with authority, so largely you are selecting for shamelessness among the answerers. I am revealing my own shamelessness then, now, by answering you.

To start with, the main thing that is required for my process is an emotional investment. This isn't dispassionate analysis. Truly critical thought requires, in my experience, a strong fear of being wrong. I do not believe there is a shortcut to this. Fear is a powerful motivator, and if you are not afraid of being wrong, then why do you care at all?

The fear drives an internal adversary that tries to find flaws in all encountered beliefs. Preempting the arguments that could be used against you if you were to hold them. So afraid are you then of being wrong, that you will change your mind. You will do this even if it means you will disagree with people you don't want to disagree with. You will fear being wrong more than not agreeing with them.

This fear should be relentless, but it does not have to be unpleasant, and by submitting to it completely, you can gain true confidence in your beliefs. The adversarial process does not always converge upon the truth, but it does at least converge on something that is hard to refute.

I have one more piece of advice, but I'm not sure how applicable it is to everyone. There is no such thing as true or false for beliefs. Or rather, you should not act as if there is. Whether a belief is true or false is one of the less usefull things about it. Instead, you should consider beliefs as resting on top of each other, in a sort of jenga tower. Since you have committed to potentially changing your mind about anything, it is far more important to keep track of why you believe things, than that you believe them. If you then do change your mind, you can be less wrong in a lot of other ways for free just by letting the jenga tower above it fall down.

Read books - that's really the only consistent way that I know of and which I always recommend to others, especially to young people. Aim to read one book a week - that'd be 500 books in 10 years. Stay away from absorbing information through internet/screen - they tend to be shallow even when they are correct.

Eventually you'll read a book that you agree with a lot and come out with an opinion on a topic. Later down the road, you'll read another book with a very different take on the same topic which also is very plausible and will have to try to consolidate the different interpretations of things.

When you begin to appreciate how nuanced and complex even the most seemingly simple things are, I think that's when you'll know you're on the right path.

There are a lot of approaches, and some I agree with are mentioned in the comments. One additional thing that's important is trying to always assess the quality of the information you come across, as a first step.

Even the smartest person can make bad judgements if they're relying on inaccurate information. Thus, anything like critical thinking about a topic has to start with some kind of test. One thing to look for (and this is a very math-centric way of looking at it) is to look for inconsistencies, i.e. if two pieces of information are claimed to be reliable but they appear mutually exclusive, then there is probably a problem with either one or both pieces.

There's a web page listing many similar useful logical tests for the quality of information (and arguments) that's been around for a long time. Going through the list is a good exercise.

http://www.nizkor.com/features/fallacies/

Example: Description of Biased Sample

This fallacy is committed when a person draws a conclusion about a population based on a sample that is biased or prejudiced in some manner. It has the following form:

    Sample S, which is biased, is taken from population P.
    Conclusion C is drawn about Population P based on S. 

The person committing the fallacy is misusing the following type of reasoning, which is known variously as Inductive Generalization, Generalization, and Statistical Generalization:

    X% of all observed A's are B's.
    Therefore X% of all A's are Bs. 

The fallacy is committed when the sample of A's is likely to be biased in some manner. A sample is biased or loaded when the method used to take the sample is likely to result in a sample that does not adequately represent the population from which it is drawn.

Here's a practical critical thinking heuristic. When you want to practice your critical thinking, try these five words:

- READY? Center yourself (that means notice and acknowledge your emotional state which might be pushing you toward one conclusion; then counter that); Consider whether you are qualified and prepared to think critically on the subject at hand.

- HUH? Say "huh?" to yourself as a reminder that you might not understand the matter at hand. You might be miscomprehending the words entirely. Check that understandinf.

- REALLY? As to any matter of alleged fact, ask how we know it is true?

- AND? Whatever is being alleged, start wondering what ELSE is true that you have NOT been told? Sometimes errors of thinking are related to errors of scope and perspective.

- SO? Ask how the matter at hand is important. What difference does it make? Who cares?

These five words are a sort of mental swiss army knife for me when I have to critique my own thinking or someone else's.

The basic idea of Critical Thinking has already been provided by the Stoics, here is Epictetus' Discourses;

In the first place, do not allow yourself to be carried away by [the] intensity [of your impression]: but say, ‘Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are, and what you represent. Let me test you.’ Then, afterwards, do not allow it to draw you on by picturing what may come next, for if you do, it will lead you wherever it pleases. (Discourses 2.18.24–5, trans. Hard)

The third area of study has to do with assent, and what is plausible and attractive. For, just as Socrates used to say that we are not to lead an unexamined life, so neither are we to accept an unexamined impression, but to say, ‘Stop, let me see what you are, and where you come from’, just as the night-watch say, ‘Show me your token.’ (Discourses 3.12.14–15, trans. Hard)

Make it your study then to confront every harsh impression with the words, ‘You are but an impression, and not at all what you seem to be’. Then test it by those rules that you possess; and first by this–the chief test of all–’Is it concerned with what is in our power or with what is not in our power?’ And if it is concerned with what is not in our power, be ready with the answer that it is nothing to you. (Handbook 1.5, trans. Matheson)

Reference: https://iep.utm.edu/epictetu/