Critical Thinking

[ebbomega]

Originally Posted by Ragga_Wh0re

^ so terance youre saying that critical thought can only be properly learned or executed if youve learned it from a masonic institution?

because that what the school system is, a masonic institution.

That's not what he said at all.

What he said is that those who don't learn from an accredited (albeit masonic) institution are prone to making gaping errors that those who are educated to recognize such errors don't. Not that that's the only way to learn it.

It's probably the only consistent way to learn it, which is why anybody who's going to consider themselves an authority on it should probably have the credentials from such an institution to back it up. If they already know all they need to know regarding critical thinking, then getting that education should be easy, no?

Remember: Education (particularly post-secondary) is not about learning, it's about proving that you know.

[Revolver]

Originally Posted by ebbomega

Remember: Education is not about learning, it's about proving that you know.

now that was good!

[tiedye]

Dope. I'll definitely check that book out, Dave.

[Ragga_Wh0re]

Originally Posted by ebbomega

That's not what he said at all.

What he said is that those who don't learn from an accredited (albeit masonic) institution are prone to making gaping errors that those who are educated to recognize such errors don't. Not that that's the only way to learn it.

It's probably the only consistent way to learn it, which is why anybody who's going to consider themselves an authority on it should probably have the credentials from such an institution to back it up. If they already know all they need to know regarding critical thinking, then getting that education should be easy, no?

Remember: Education (particularly post-secondary) is not about learning, it's about proving that you know.

That pretty much was what he said, the whole "education" remark was the kicker...and thats basically what youre saying too in a round about way.

I take huge issue with the infrastructure of the traditional school system and how fucking archaic it is.Lets learn old knowledge to form the same opinions that everyone else who came before us had, in the same way that everyone else who came before us did. Kind of totalitarian no?The context in which the information is given and received is ultimate and absolute and that is where the error is made,because it is not. You are told and so you beleive,I think the education system is hardly a legitimate outlet to reference based on the history of the institution itself.

like i said, completely subjective. however because I do not hold any degrees my opinions arent relevant or legitimate according to your rebuttal.

[dj_soo]

Originally Posted by Revolver

^you should really be posting that in another thread right now.

meh. I could also bang my head against a brick wall repeatedly and it would end up amounting to the same thing.

Originally Posted by Revolver

sometimes its actually those 9/11 truth people who tend to be more critical thinkers

really? I'd love to read anything from these truthers that contains even a plausible hypothesis let alone any proof ranging outside of the circumstantial. Then again half these guys seem to think a movie on the internet with ominous music and a serious-sounding narrator is proof enough for them.

oh wait, maybe i'm not thinking outside the box enough.

[Revolver]

Originally Posted by dj_soo

meh. I could also bang my head against a brick wall repeatedly and it would end up amounting to the same thing.

dude, trust....i know

Originally Posted by dj_soo

really? I'd love to read anything from these truthers that contains even a plausible hypothesis let alone any proof ranging outside of the circumstantial. Then again half these guys seem to think a movie on the internet with ominous music and a serious-sounding narrator is proof enough for them.

oh wait, maybe i'm not thinking outside the box enough.

really? actually i find the purposed evidence in all those 9/11 truth docs fascinating and extremely compelling.

maybey your not thinking INSIDE the box enough?

[ebbomega]

Originally Posted by Ragga_Wh0re

I take huge issue with the infrastructure of the traditional school system and how fucking archaic it is.Lets learn old knowledge to form the same opinions that everyone else who came before us had, in the same way that everyone else who came before us did. Kind of totalitarian no?The context in which the information is given and received is ultimate and absolute and that is where the error is made,because it is not. You are told and so you beleive,I think the education system is hardly a legitimate outlet to reference based on the history of the institution itself.

Huh? Have you ever gone to a university? That's not what happens there at all.

In university you are encouraged to study in whatever field you so damn please. You're not forced to learn from the course material, as long as you can show your instructors that you understand the course material. In fact, most profs will applaud you if you use mostly material outside the regular source work.

Nobody gives a shit about you in uni. The only learning you ever do is the learning that you push yourself to do. All the profs in uni care about is that you can show that you know the material. If you can do that and skip every class the entire semester, odds are you'll still get a good grade.

The learning that occurs in universities is ever-changing because it's basically an open forum for anybody to express their ideas, theories and allow for it to be critically tested by those who have already asserted that they can stand their arguments against the knowledge base - otherwise known as defending a thesis.

Any university that doesn't allow for its students to challenge any pre-existing notion presented to them is a poor university.

like i said, completely subjective. however because I do not hold any degrees my opinions arent relevant or legitimate according to your rebuttal.

Not necessarily true at all, again. All you really need to do to get a PhD is to get a thesis published in an academic journal. But in order to be able to do so, you need to know what kind of tests are going to be thrown at you by the peer-review process that is required before publishing in an academic journal. But the thing is that people are not born with this inherent knowledge, and so people go to Grad School.

That's not to say there aren't people that haven't earned their degrees just by walking up to the faculty and saying "Look, I think I can prove to you that I can think critically about this and here's my paper that shows it." It's been done before. But the problem is that you need to be ready to face the testing. And the people who are responsible for that testing have been shown to be VERY GOOD at critical thinking, so you'd be really surprised at how easily they can poke holes into a seemingly sound theory. And if you make assertions that fall due to those holes, the journals will not publish you and the university will tell you to screw off, stop wasting their time and go take some classes while you learn how to think critically.

If you think that your critical thinking skills are beyond that of someone with a degree, then challenge the degree. But what you'll learn is that that's a billion times easier said than done. Not impossible, but I HIGHLY doubt you'd be able to pull it off. It takes an exceptional type of genius to be able to do that.

[Revolver]

this thread is pretty good.

how would religion fit into critical thinking?

would preists be deemed less intellectual then a agnostic with a lib. arts degree?

[ebbomega]

Not really, because most priests have liberal arts degrees. =)

My mother has a BA in Literature and an M.Div. w/ Honours. She is ordained in the United Church Of Canada.

Also understand that there are actually two types of degrees offered by Theology schools. Masters of Divinity are those that are trained a lot more in psychology and the concept of "pastoral care" - a lot of how to help out people going through the best and worst times of their lives, basically how to encourage people's faith. Masters of Theology are lot more like historians and is a lot more of an academic discipline. Those are the people who look into the religious texts and try to understand what exactly it is these texts are saying. As a result there's a lot of linguists (people who can actively speak Latin and Hebrew, for example) and historians that take up this one. You'd be surprised at the number of agnostics that pursue that route.

[Revolver]

Originally Posted by ebbomega

Not really, because most priests have liberal arts degrees. =)

My mother has a BA in Literature and an M.Div. w/ Honours. She is ordained in the United Church Of Canada.

Also understand that there are actually two types of degrees offered by Theology schools. Masters of Divinity are those that are trained a lot more in psychology and the concept of "pastoral care" - a lot of how to help out people going through the best and worst times of their lives, basically how to encourage people's faith. Masters of Theology are lot more like historians and is a lot more of an academic discipline. Those are the people who look into the religious texts and try to understand what exactly it is these texts are saying. As a result there's a lot of linguists (people who can actively speak Latin and Hebrew, for example) and historians that take up this one. You'd be surprised at the number of agnostics that pursue that route.

AHH shit you know i thought that was the case!..about preists have .lib degrees. didnt want to edit it though so i let it stand.

i guess critical thinking and faith should rightfully be kept seperate

lol...pwn.

[ebbomega]

Actually no. I think they should be one and the same. Anyone who does not look at his faith critically has nothing to have faith in.

[Revolver]

Originally Posted by ebbomega

Actually no. I think they should be one and the same. Anyone who does not look at his faith critically has nothing to have faith in.

what? you mean that anyone who takes the 7 day creation literally and not critically has nothing to have faith in?

or the millions more who take religious doctrine literally
rather then critically?....

[ebbomega]

Originally Posted by Revolver

what? you mean that anyone who takes the 7 day creation literally and not critically has nothing to have faith in?

or the millions more who take religious doctrine literally
rather then critically?....

That's exactly what I mean.

[ebbomega]

Let me elaborate:

Basically anybody who believes the magical man in the sky who built the world in 7 days then made Eve out of Adam's rib - and that was the beginning of humanity - might as well believe that the magical man is Joe Pesci.

My faith is still a belief in God - I'm neither atheistic nor agnostic - but there are no absolutes to it, except for in how things apply to me.

Follow those who seek truth, be wary of those who claim to have found it.

[Ragga_Wh0re]

Originally Posted by ebbomega

Huh? Have you ever gone to a university? That's not what happens there at all.

In university you are encouraged to study in whatever field you so damn please. You're not forced to learn from the course material, as long as you can show your instructors that you understand the course material. In fact, most profs will applaud you if you use mostly material outside the regular source work.

Nobody gives a shit about you in uni. The only learning you ever do is the learning that you push yourself to do. All the profs in uni care about is that you can show that you know the material. If you can do that and skip every class the entire semester, odds are you'll still get a good grade.

The learning that occurs in universities is ever-changing because it's basically an open forum for anybody to express their ideas, theories and allow for it to be critically tested by those who have already asserted that they can stand their arguments against the knowledge base - otherwise known as defending a thesis.

Any university that doesn't allow for its students to challenge any pre-existing notion presented to them is a poor university.



Not necessarily true at all, again. All you really need to do to get a PhD is to get a thesis published in an academic journal. But in order to be able to do so, you need to know what kind of tests are going to be thrown at you by the peer-review process that is required before publishing in an academic journal. But the thing is that people are not born with this inherent knowledge, and so people go to Grad School.

That's not to say there aren't people that haven't earned their degrees just by walking up to the faculty and saying "Look, I think I can prove to you that I can think critically about this and here's my paper that shows it." It's been done before. But the problem is that you need to be ready to face the testing. And the people who are responsible for that testing have been shown to be VERY GOOD at critical thinking, so you'd be really surprised at how easily they can poke holes into a seemingly sound theory. And if you make assertions that fall due to those holes, the journals will not publish you and the university will tell you to screw off, stop wasting their time and go take some classes while you learn how to think critically.

If you think that your critical thinking skills are beyond that of someone with a degree, then challenge the degree. But what you'll learn is that that's a billion times easier said than done. Not impossible, but I HIGHLY doubt you'd be able to pull it off. It takes an exceptional type of genius to be able to do that.

I didnt say post sec, i said the school system.Sorry for being vague!In the foundations of education youre generally not taught to question, and critical thought generally is not fostered OR it is encouraged within reason and following a strict set of guidelines. as for the curriculum, its old knowledge and basically comprised of a bunch of useless bullshit youre probabally never going to use anyways unless youre a geek in the literal context.

My head is in the foundations of education as my daughter will be going off to learn in a few short years and im faced with the dilemna of what im going to do for her schooling needs.

[rawb]

Originally Posted by Ragga_Wh0re

My head is in the foundations of education as my daughter will be going off to learn in a few short years and im faced with the dilemna of what im going to do for her schooling needs.

WOLVES RAISED ME FINE, BEST WAY TO GROW UP IMO

[dj_soo]

Originally Posted by Ragga_Wh0re

I didnt say post sec, i said the school system.Sorry for being vague!In the foundations of education youre generally not taught to question, and critical thought generally is not fostered OR it is encouraged within reason and following a strict set of guidelines. as for the curriculum, its old knowledge and basically comprised of a bunch of useless bullshit youre probabally never going to use anyways unless youre a geek in the literal context.

My head is in the foundations of education as my daughter will be going off to learn in a few short years and im faced with the dilemna of what im going to do for her schooling needs.

I was referring specifically to post-sec. I don't think most schooling systems really teach much, if any critical thinking. Although I did have some good experiences in the IB programs I took in high school...

Not to say a lot of post-sec institutions don't also get stuck in dogma and tradition, but there is definitely more emphasis on questioning established norms and teaching students how to properly back up their arguments (i.e. not relying on youtube videos as their sources). Also the good courses at least teach you *why* some of the norms are the norms rather than expecting people to take it at face value. And if you can find flaws in the reasoning... well.. generally you get applauded rather than told to shut up and read.

[ebbomega]

Originally Posted by Ragga_Wh0re

I didnt say post sec, i said the school system.Sorry for being vague!In the foundations of education youre generally not taught to question, and critical thought generally is not fostered OR it is encouraged within reason and following a strict set of guidelines. as for the curriculum, its old knowledge and basically comprised of a bunch of useless bullshit youre probabally never going to use anyways unless youre a geek in the literal context.

My head is in the foundations of education as my daughter will be going off to learn in a few short years and im faced with the dilemna of what im going to do for her schooling needs.

If you're not talking post-secondary then we're basically debating apples and oranges.

Critical thinking isn't really taught in high schools. Some teachers might touch on it but it definitely isn't part of any BC curriculum.

[ebbomega]

BTW: Ragga, I'd honestly recommend throwing your kid into a French-Immersion program if you can find one nearby. Getting those language brain cells working at a young age has been proven to help with higher-level cognitive skills later in life.

I grew up in the public school system and did three years in private school before graduating. The main advantage that private school gave me was that there were much better programs that I could use and exploit - IF I was willing to take those opportunities. If kids don't get motivated to do the work, private school is essentially a waste of money.

Don't send your kids to private school against their volition. They will simply resent you for it and try their hardest to get expelled.

[rawb]

AWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MOTHERFUCKER AWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO l

[NinjaBoy]

Originally Posted by Ragga_Wh0re

My head is in the foundations of education as my daughter will be going off to learn in a few short years and im faced with the dilemna of what im going to do for her schooling needs.

I pray that one of your dilemma's does not involve if you should home school her or not.

PS- DON'T WORRY ABOUT EDUCATION, SHE CAN LEARN EVERYTHING FROM WIKIEPEDIA!

[decypher]

Wouldn't needing a degree be a social convention that says that you need a piece of paper to do this and that. That's how society has been structured. Just like how when people judge others on what their clothing signifies. Are you going to hire the bum or the guy who is nicely dressed and conveys an image of having his shit together. These constraints push and pull us much like socioeconomic status, gender, physical disabilities, race etc.

I think it's a bit harsh to assume everyone sitting in the lecture hall is taking the professors words like their prophetic. Sure a lot of people want to just regurgitate what the prof is saying, get their degree, and plugin to a job. They have different motives and goals. They want to get from A to B, and that's their right to do so. The constraints of family and wanting to continue what people believe is the perfect life and supporting the fam pushes you in that direction obviously. It's a vicious cycle that isn't going to end anytime soon. But there is too much pluralism here to just put people into one group. That's the same way free-market capitalists or psychological behaviorists do in an attempt to have this universal way of describing people and their "natural" traits. In reality there are many contingencies and variables and structure us.

Also i feel one opinion on the "school system" is being lumped under one umbrella here. You have to understand there are different pedagogies that are effected and structured by the local cultures that they inhabit. Politics of small towns often effect what books are used, how kids are taught and what type of things they learn. Also the teachers personal beliefs and experiences play into what lesson plan they decide to omit and which ones they decide to include. Also the persons upbringing, religion and family life effect what things they decide to believe and disregard.

In uni you have aging profs who use their power to attempt to mold your brain into their own archaic modernist view of how the world works. When you speak up it's more their personal power that makes them turn you down, not the institution itself.

Sometimes you get that young prof who has taught 10 classes and is still working on his dissertation who steps up to bat and goes "yes i'm a biased white anglosaxon male who is going to show you varying perspectives and i want you to take that and run with it." He lets you know that even the lecture hall is acoustically setup to influence hierarchies of power where one dude talks, is heard, and others speak and are dampened. So instead different pedagogies have to be used to get people to participate and to think critically. And yes it's important to read the classics because how would you understand where your thoughts came from and how to evolve them? Most of the arguments people use to be harsh on society, media, and politics are just rehashed modernist arguments from before and during the industrial age. They do more to maintain the status-quo than change it. Viewing the human race as the passive dupe is far older than the pop-culture references we extrapolated them from. We just consumed it and used it to be apathetic.

I'm not saying you need to pump money into the system and get a fancy degree, some people can pick up a book and figure this out themselves but not everyone. Just like some people can rise out of the ghetto and be a capitalist success but the majority is held back by real constrictions such as gender and race etc. The American dream is just a fairy tale to keep the consumers consuming.

Being able to realize these biases, where they came from and think about how you can change them is where it's at.

Taking those evolved ideas, turning them into a structured viewpoint and pushing them on people is a power and socially related construct. You can't blame the institution.

[ebbomega]

That's very insightful Kam, except for one thing:

There are very few jobs in this world that require a degree (diploma yes, degree no).

Really the only ones you'll need a degree for - and with good reason:
- engineer
- medical doctor (& psychiatrists, dentists, etc.)
- heavy science work (astrophysics, NASA type work, particle acceleration, etc.)
- teacher / university professor

One can even become a lawyer without a law degree. You just probably won't be very successful at it. I suppose you could add "Ordained Minister" there, because a minister is technically a bible scholar.

Everything else doesn't really need a degree. They'll say "Requires x degree or equivalent experience". And most of the time if a degree will help you out in a job, they don't even care what the degree is in. You can go into marketing with an Arts degree, or you could become a therapist with a physiology degree (like Dr. Laura). All that people normally care about is that you have _a_ degree, meaning you're willing to put the commitment and intellectual investment into getting one. This says a lot more about your character than the fact that you spent four years discussing why Descartes was an idiot.

[SEAN!]

Originally Posted by ebbomega

any first year psychology or philosophy course at any accredited university.

will teach you pretty much all you need to know.

nah dude, when you get deep in the game that shit it'll blow your mind.

i figure if you did an honours degree in phil or soci with out turning into a raving lunatic or a commie, you'll be on some next level shit as far as critical thinking skills are.

i didn't really refine mine until doing seminar joints in 4th year, but i had a few good profs. but for real man, first year and second year, to me, were just a lead up to the totally fucked up shit i learnt in my last two years, i felt it was a huge jump.

and now im finishing up all my accounting undergrad courses, i really appreciate my liberal arts undergrad, in the higher level courses you are taught professional judgement pertaining to your given profession but it is no replacement critical thinking. Alot of the people i meet are babes in the woods, though i think its a bit of a diploma mill because alot of these people dont know a god damn thing about even the profession they want to pursue.

i guess thats my reflection on university students, alot of confused mother fuckers who are smart as hell but dont know what the fuck is going on career wise.

[ebbomega]

Also:

Originally Posted by decypher

In uni you have aging profs who use their power to attempt to mold your brain into their own archaic modernist view of how the world works. When you speak up it's more their personal power that makes them turn you down, not the institution itself.

I think this is a bit of a myth. For a few reasons. Namely

1) Most of the old professors I've met WANT you to challenge their ideas. They will shoot you down, of course, but the idea is that if you can hold your own in an argument against them, they will respect you far more than a yes-man who just recites everything that they're fed. Yes, you do get some profs who are so set in their own ways that they refuse to listen to anybody else, but I find that these are few and far between.
2) Most of the time, in university, particularly at the lower levels, the professor doesn't really do ANYTHING except design your assignments and tests and show up for lectures. The people marking your tests and papers are usually TAs, grad students and other people who are trying just as hard as you are to get THEIR challenges heard by the faculties.