Critical Thinking Gains
A moment to celebrate something that has not (and still does not) come easy to me: I just employed critical thinking in a conversation.
As I've said before, I spent a good chunk of my life aggressively immersed in fantasy. While that developed my ability to tell a story, it did not do much to teach me how to reason through an argument or consider a statement critically. I was ridiculously credulous and any argument delivered with passion, or one that made a lot of good-sounding points, had to be right. The fact that I could be swayed to the opposite argument by the same sort of delivery disturbed me, but I concluded there wasn't really anything I could do about it except refrain from participating in such arguments or making any kind of real stand. I would just keep my ill-founded opinions to myself unless asked, and if asked I would admit my thoughts with all kinds of asterisks about how little I understood the topic.
As I started dating my husband, I often listened to him and his best friend debate all sorts of topics. I had nothing at all to contribute to such conversations and I didn't like it, but I had no idea what to do about it. Clearly my deficits ran deeper than brushing up on the current political climate could fix. The sort of conversations they held were clearly ones where they were thinking about the statements they made and assessing the truth of the sources they'd absorbed, poking holes in what someone said and favoring what their actions revealed. I wanted that. I wanted to be able to think critically.
I had no idea where to start. How do you change the way you think? The way you process information? How do you break yourself of believing surface level statements when they always sound perfectly reasonable in your ears? How do you learn critical thinking? This was a question I asked about six or seven years ago, and I never got a satisfactory answer.
A couple nights ago, I was having a conversation with Sergey. I can't remember what the conversation was about, but I remember that I thought through one of the statements he brought up and came up with a reasonable counter-argument. He told me I made a good point and conceded.
Wide-eyed, I asked, "Did I just do a critical thinking?" When he said yes, I squealed long and loud. My apologies to his eardrums.
Then the answer to my old question came to me. How do you learn critical thinking? Well, one method that works well for people who love to read is this: sponge-read as much as you can for years. Since I started reading non-fiction seriously, I've read about seventy-five titles, some of them several times as they became comforting favorites. On that note, you have extra confirmation that your brain is weird if it finds a read-through of Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics to be familiar and comforting. But in the process of sponge-reading for several years, what I wanted has come about almost through osmosis.
In the first two to three years of this process, I learned to distinguish the voice of a writer who reasoned things out fairly well, versus a writer who skipped logical building blocks in favor of reaching their conclusion faster or side-stepped uncomfortable contradictions to their argument. I found, very quickly, that I do not like polemics, although sometimes that's all I have to work with if I want to hear one side's argument (hello, Beyond Chutzpah. *sigh*). The calm, rational writer with no more than a touch of cynicism or a slight bite of anger is my preferred read. Once I found those voices, I would plunge into more of their work. If said writer was still alive, I would watch interviews with them, or follow their podcast, learning even more as I embroidered or crocheted.
The other thing I did was argue badly. I did this most often with Sergey (someone I trust not to ridicule me or mow me down), expressing ideas as they came to me. I could only do this with someone I trusted and who knew how convoluted my thinking can get. Sometimes he would help me articulate the conclusion I was trying to reach and sometimes there was just no way to get there for either of us. I made sense and I made nonsense, but I tried over and over. I practiced articulating my ideas, objections, and conclusions whether they were good or bad or incomprehensible, and I believe they have been getting more comprehensible and cohesive over time.
It is an exciting thing to realize I'm on track to a mindset of critical thinking already. Critical thinking, like exercise, has taken me years to even begin to get good at, but when I get little flashes of insight on my progress, I am overjoyed. I am nowhere near competent enough to engage in an argument with someone who vehemently believes the opposite things I do, but that is okay. I don't think I want to show anyone up anyway. I just want to know where I stand, and I want to be able to keep standing there if the opinion coming at me doesn't have a legitimately good argument backing it.