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Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is asking yourself, “Do I believe this? Why do I believe this? Am I just taking this on trust? Might this person be trying to manipulate me in some way or blandish me in some way?” So, critical thinking is simply keeping your wits about you and keeping your guard up with the recognition that there are a lot of people who are trying to convince you of things that they believe or that they believe you ought to believe, whether or not they’re true.
It seems to me that in all walks of life, not just in politics and in merchandising and advertising, there are people out there who are trying to persuade you of things. I’m trying to persuade you of things. Everybody’s trying to persuade each other of things. The only rational, reasonable, and safe way of dealing with this is to keep your guard up a little bit. That doesn’t mean being belligerent, that doesn’t mean being unfriendly, it just means having in the back of your mind all the time, “Wait a minute, am I so sure this is right?” And very often this is hard to do because what the person is telling you is something you want to be true. And you should remember what your mother told you. You know, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.” And so we should be particularly critical of the ideas that we hope are true because we can do ourselves a lot of harm otherwise.
Intuition Pumps
I coined the term “intuition pump” as a general term for thought experiments, formal arguments, and little scenarios people use to persuade people to get them to have a particular intuition. An intuition pump is something that’s been designed, well or ill, to get the audience to say, “That’s got to be right. Wow, yeah, I get it, I get it.” There are lots of good intuition pumps and there’s lots of bad ones. Once you have the concept of an intuition pump, you can start identifying them and then you can start treating them the same way you treat any gadget you find for sale in the hardware store. Is this a good one or is this one that’s been designed to exploit me and maybe take my money?
There’s lots of second-rate intuition pumps out there which can bamboozle you. And the way to find them is a bit of advice I learned from my friend and co-author and colleague Doug Hofstadter. He says you want to turn all the knobs on an intuition pump to see what’s making it work. Sometimes you find that some detail which seemed to you would be inadvertent or inessential is what’s doing all the work. If you encounter an intuition pump, vary it, change all of the circumstances one by one, and see if the effect depends on something other than what you thought it did.
The people who put forward these novel ideas usually are well-equipped with intuition pumps. That’s what, that’s what they do. They tell you a story. They tell you an account. They offer you a sketch of an explanation saying, “See, look, this is how it all works.” It’s like somebody explaining a magic trick, saying, “I know how they do it. I know how they do it. This is how they do it.” Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.
The “Surely” Alarm
In my book Intuition Pumps, I introduce something I call the “surely” alarm. I said every time you see the word “surely” in an argument, a little bell should ring, ding, because that’s very likely to be the weakest point in the argument. The reason it is is because whoever is making the argument doesn’t think it goes without saying, but they’re not bothering to defend it. They’re just going nudge, nudge, “surely.” It’s not a perfect guide, but it’s one useful alarm that you should have in your kit.
And every time you see that word “surely,” you should say, “Wait a minute, let’s check that one out and see if it’s as sure as the author says.”