How to think critically

As a person a certain fact needs to be faced in order to achieve critical thinking skills in general – We have been propegated a world view by our surroundings till the moment we develop the skill to evaluate ideas critically.

From childhood our parents, friends, games, toys, news and teachers etc. have been teaching us how to think, speak and act. But more importantly what is true and what isn’t. At a certain point in your life you need to develop a framework of how to think in order to find the “truth”. Question everything and find an answer on your own with a solid understanding on how to think and a framework to back it up. This not only applies on how to evaluate problems in your given field, but also on general subjects, for example; politics, moral theologie and ethics.

As engineers, mathematicians or even consultants solve complex problems, we need to have a mental framework that encorperates the important aspects of problemsolving – structured thinking.

Here I am going to list how I personally evaluate ideas.

Mental framework

we have two aspects to effectively evaluate ideas – strategy to evaluate ideas and being unbiased.

Strategy to evaluate ideas

In order to find out what you really think about a subject it is important to have a solid understanding of the question or statement you really want to know the answer to. After carefully formulating this statement you essentially make two ‘sides’ – one for the statement and one against. By doing this you can have a dialog with yourself and take the bias you may have for the statement partially out of the equation.

The first step now is to make as many arguments as possible for the statement, be carefull not to use any fallacies like the modal fallacy or a strawman. once you have completed a list you go to the opposing side and try to refute the arguments to the best of your ability and try to come up with arguments against the statement. Now the first round is done and you go back to the supporting side and repeat the cycle till you can’t come up with anything or can’t refute anything anymore. Then you evaluate what you are left with and base your oppinion on that information.

Being unbiased

Biggest challange with this method is being able to be completely unbiased. You will find out that on topics such as politics or even moral systems you might have an extreme preference of one over the other without having done substantial thinking on the subject. By creating the two sides we alleviate some of this, but the biggest antidote is being okay with being wrong. By accepting the truth at the very start of this page you will understand that we rarely are logic or coherent in our argumentation before embarking on this journey of critical thinking, and the possibility that we are wrong is very real.

Further testing

There is, however, a problem with just having this framework. You, and no one else, has complete knowledge. So it is extremely important to not be adamant of the ’truth’ you have found, but be open to having your mind changed after dialog with other people as they may posess knowledge that you didn’t know.

Sounds very logical and simple, but in my experience people rarely possess this skill.