timtyler comments on Reflections on Pre-Rationality - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Wei_Dai 09 November 2009 09:42PM

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Comment author: timtyler 10 November 2009 07:46:35PM *  0 points [-]

Re: why are there so few rationality researchers? Why aren't there hordes of people interested in these issues

Rationality is not on the curriculum. People typically learn about it through osmosis in the science classes. Along with critical thinking, it has been considered to be too simple to be a subject in its own right. So, it fell somewhere between the science and math stools - and got lost down there.

Comment author: DanArmak 10 November 2009 10:13:31PM *  1 point [-]

I should say that people typically fail to learn about it through osmosis.

(Too simple a subject, indeed. What a prime example of a statement that's Not Even Wrong. Perhaps "too removed from ordinary human experience" is a better description.)

Comment author: timtyler 10 November 2009 10:53:42PM *  0 points [-]

Simple - at least compared to science or maths, surely. If you look at the school curriculum, you often have to be a big and complex subject to get your own dedicated slot.

I'm not denigrating the subject - just trying to see what happened to its timetable in the context of the school curriculum.

Comment author: DanArmak 10 November 2009 10:57:36PM 0 points [-]

Well, it depends on the definition of "rationality" used. Many components are taught formally and are anything but simple - such as probability theory.

Comment author: timtyler 10 November 2009 11:25:31PM 0 points [-]

Probability theory is a pretty small subset of maths - plus it is probably already being taught anyway in the maths curriculum.

Comment author: CronoDAS 11 November 2009 08:58:40PM *  -2 points [-]

"Content-independent" critical thinking skills don't exist.

Comment author: satt 15 April 2012 01:19:57PM 1 point [-]

That article's now moved to a new URL. (In case it moves again in future, it's Daniel T. Willingham's "Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?", published in the summer 2007 American Educator.)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 November 2009 09:26:19PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, they do. The average user exposed to them may not apply them that way, but they certainly exist.

Comment author: CronoDAS 12 November 2009 06:52:46AM *  1 point [-]

I think I made a statement that is too strong.

I'll quote from the article instead:

One issue is that the common conception of critical thinking or scientific thinking (or historical thinking) as a set of skills is not accurate. Critical thinking does not have certain characteristics normally associated with skills—in particular, being able to use that skill at any time. If I told you that I learned to read music, for example, you would expect, correctly, that I could use my new skill (i.e., read music) whenever I wanted. But critical thinking is very different. As we saw in the discussion of conditional probabilities, people can engage in some types of critical thinking without training, but even with extensive training, they will sometimes fail to think critically. This understanding that critical thinking is not a skill is vital. ‡

‡ Although this is not highly relevant for K-12 teachers, it is important to note that for people with extensive training, such as Ph.D.-level scientists, critical thinking does have some skill-like characteristics. In particular, they are better able to deploy critical reasoning with a wide variety of content, even that with which they are not very familiar. But, of course, this does not mean that they will never make mistakes.

And another quote:

Unfortunately, metacognitive strategies can only take you so far. Although they suggest what you ought to do, they don’t provide the knowledge necessary to implement the strategy. For example, when experimenters told subjects working on the band problem that it was similar to the garden problem, more subjects solved the problem (35 percent compared to 19 percent without the hint), but most subjects, even when told what to do, weren’t able to do it. Likewise, you may know that you ought not accept the first reasonable-sounding solution to a problem, but that doesn’t mean you know how to come up with alternative solutions or weigh how reasonable each one is. That requires domain knowledge and practice in putting that knowledge to work.

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