How to NOT Think Critically

“There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

Introduction

While I was getting my master's in general psychology, I was frequently frustrated with what I perceived as the lack of intellectual honesty, open-mindedness, and analysis. I would present an idea or empirical fact to a professor or colleague and I'd often be met with rhetorical heuristics that allowed them to bypass my point without contending with it. It was disappointing to say the least, and part of me becomes cynical as I think that these people are the current and future bearers of scientific and philosophical thought. As a thinker, academic, philosopher, or scientist, there's a few things that you want to do. First, you want to pursue the truth. Second, you want to notice that you have a particular narrative through which you approach the truth. Third, you want to notice any ways in which your narrative inhibits your pursuit of the truth and rectify them. This narrative, this lens through which you decipher and filter information, is necessary. One alternative is to serially go through every piece of information, but this is untenable. Prior to engaging with information, we use heuristics or shortcuts to decide which information we will attend to. It's the same with political news. Prior to engaging with the news from a specific channel, there are things such as personality or social pressures that bias you to pick one news channel over another. What I want to do in this paper is talk about three heuristics that I encountered in graduate school that, in my opinion, are faulty ways of trying to get to the truth.

"That's Pop Science"

Many of the people I spoke with in graduate school took pride in their intellect. However, it was inevitably the case, from their perspective, that their intellect was not met with adequate social and public adoration. Coming from the Marine Corps and corporate America, I was very much going to graduate school from "the public realm". While in the public realm, and still so today, I read philosophy and psychology books that are "popular". James Clear's Atomic Habits may be an example of a pop book. I have no problem with so-called pop books. I think many of them have great theories and principles that can help people learn to live a better life, and I would hope that's what most of us, as content creators and intellectuals, are trying to achieve. There would be times where I would bring up a point, and some people would immediately devalue the point simply because I cited a pop book. It's as if the fact that the book sold millions of copies and is accessible to the layperson necessarily makes everything in it unscientific or pseudo-science. The number of copies that a book has sold has no bearing on the value and validity of the information within it, and to use that heuristic as a means of avoiding contending with certain ideas is to inappropriately judge information, empirical facts, and interpretive theories.

"That's Old Data"

Here's another technique that some of my colleagues and professors would use. I would say something like, "This researcher established this empirical fact in 1990," as I'm making a broader argument. They would say something like, "1990? That finding is obviously outdated and therefore cannot be used to support your argument." It's the assumption of "if something is old, then it is outdated," that can lead to muddled thinking. First, notice that the other person does not contend with the fact in and of itself. Second, given that they likely are not familiar with my specific empirical evidence, how could they know that new research has been done which either replicates or fails to replicate the initial experiment? Third, from what position do they feel credible in asserting that "old" data does not need attending to? There are plenty of "old" research findings that not only have been replicated and further validated over the decades, but the initial papers would be solid enough on their own, at least compared to more recent papers of equal rigor that we would accept as valid. It's not even that this temporal heuristic is necessarily invalid, like the "pop-science" one. It could very well be the case that an older paper has been invalidated because of newer research. However, you don't get to make that leap so quickly. You should wrestle with the claim as it stands on its own, then you can peel back the onion and see what has been established in the succeeding years.

"I'm not familiar, so it must not be valid"

This heuristic, to me, indicates pure laziness. I once spoke to a neuropsychologist about the neuropsychology of anxiety. I was even citing the book The Neuropsychology of Anxiety by Jeffrey Gray and Neil McNaughton. This neuropsychologist clearly was not familiar with this text. Rather than offering other theories, asking questions about the ideas I presented, or pointing to errors in my articulation of the ideas, this professor simply dismissed them by saying, "I disagree." This professor could not give a specific reason why they disagreed. If you encounter an idea that you aren't familiar with, it's unwise to deny it's validity outright. It's okay to remain neutral or in a state of ignorance where you don't have an opinion on the idea. That actually shows humility and puts you in a better state to learn. I understand that many professors are busy. Many of them have a full teaching load, run research labs, work in clinics or private practices, and then also have families. They may not want to update their theories of the world as their current knowledge structures are good enough to enable them to do what they need to do. However, that is not an excuse to judge an idea or theory without understanding it.

Conclusion

There is too much information in the world. This is true for the average person scrolling social media, listening to podcasts, and watching different news channels. The same is true for the philosopher, the scientist, and the academic. So, we have two options as we try to acquire information, discern what's valid and what isn't, and try to learn. We can try to engage with ALL of the information that's available, or we can use heuristics and shortcuts to filter out information a priori. Most of us do the latter. There are better and worse ways of filtering your information. In the scientific community, we have things like peer review, ranked lists of academic journals, and data on the reputation and credibility of various researchers. It's not unreasonable to say, "While I'm learning about topic X, I'm going to prioritize information found in peer review journals over information that hasn't been peer reviewed." To the degree that peer review is valid, this heuristic can help you make more efficient use of your time. However, it isn't reasonable to say, "I'm not going to read Freud, Darwin, or William James because they are outdated." Faulty shortcuts like those will only stifle your search for the truth.