Article 2: How you think is better than what you think

I have found myself frustrated with dissenting opinions as of late. During this month of March I have traveled twice for about a week each trip, dealt with my truck breaking down and getting it repaired, and the same with my phone among other ordeals. In between the cracks of my busy schedule, I dabble in intellectual skirmishes on my social media. These debates rarely change people’s minds and mostly serve to sharpen my skills in the sport. Rarely do I get worked up, so when I did the first reaction I had was to slow down and do a bit of introspection.

I came to the understanding that ideas contrary to my own are not the problem and haven’t been the problem in the past. The source of my frustration is the perception that their faulty thinking has lead them to conclusions that are contrary to my own, conclusions which I arrived at legitimately! …or at least I think I have? That begs the question, “how does one arrive at conclusions properly”? Part of this question is answered in Article 1. The second question that comes to mind is, “is following a legitimate thinking process superior to conclusions obtained irrespective of how one arrived there”? That is the question I will attempt to answer in this article.

Critical thinking is the process and set of tools used to arrive at a conclusion (as mentioned in Article 1). The conclusion itself without the process that lead you there is untethered knowledge. The former is reusable and becomes sharper the more you use it while the latter is finite. The relationship between the two is similar to a saying I heard as a child, “it is better to teach someone how to fish so that they may continue to fish on their own than it is to provide them a fish and they remain incapable of obtaining another fish on their own”.

Part of the reason why many people have difficulty with proper modes of thinking may lie in educational systems that promote the value of knowing right answers over teaching students the tools necessary for getting to the right answers. Apart from eroding away at critical thinking, this destroys creativity as “thinking outside the box” is seen as dissident behavior. You either give a specific “right answer” or you are wrong.

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

— Christopher Hitchens

This is something that seems to have pervaded our politics. If you agree with policy “A”, then you are an evil person who hates babies. If you disagree with policy “B”, then you must be racist. No amount of persuasion is sufficient to convince the person that you are actually on the same side of the argument, but disagree in a small portion of their overall position. These people do not care how you arrived at your conclusions, nor do they care about how they have arrived at theirs. What is important to them is that you said something that sounds like RED team and they are on team BLUE (and vice versa) which makes you their bitter rival. They don’t know the meaning of the word nuance. Everything to them is black and white. You’re either with them or against them.

This is what I have been struggling with recently and it is damn frustrating for someone that gives a shit about critical thinking. Sometimes I feel like I care more about people thinking properly than about what they actually think. My reasoning is that it is dishonest and not useful beyond what you know to be true. In other words, believing in the “right answer” without knowing how to arrive at that conclusion is untethered knowledge like an island disconnected from the mainland. Since you don’t know how you got there in the first place it is very difficult for you to branch out from that point in a useful way. For example, if I know that Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States simply because I read that on the back of a snapple lid…how does that help me know who was the president that went before him? The answer is that it doesn’t.

Now, that is not to say that I am perfect or that I expect the whole world to be. I welcome constructive criticism and I am not afraid of being wrong. If I am wrong and someone corrects me then I have grown and become that much more better than the day before. I see that intellectual growth is contingent upon the propensity at which you are proven wrong. Therefore, the more often you put your ideas out there, the higher your chances are for someone to correct you and therefore improve.