On Critical Thinking: My Mind Is Made Up! Don't confuse by asking me to think ...

Five Infuriating Examples of Facts Making People Dumber - Chris Mooney, Mother Jones

On Monday, I reported on the latest study to take a bite out of the idea of human rationality. In a paper just published in Pediatrics, Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth University and his colleagues showed that presenting people with information confirming the safety of vaccines triggered a "backfire effect," in which people who already distrusted vaccines actually became less likely to say they would vaccinate their kids.

In that regard, here's Barbara Ehrenreich

“When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on 'happiness' and 'positive psychology,' the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of *critical* thinking, and critical thinking is inherently skeptical. The best students -- and in good colleges, also the most successful -- are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of making a professor momentarily uncomfortable. Whether the subject is literature or engineering, graduates should be capable of challenging authority figures, going against the views of their classmates, and defending novel points of view.”  

In the absence of doing your homework, you let someone else give you talking points and acting points ... things you can say or do that at first glance seem to work for you.

You don't question, search, ponder or pray ... you just start talking and acting according to someone else's coaching.

Like so many who appear in the sensational stories of broadcast media ... you don't fully know or understand what you are talking about.

By merely mouthing someone else's opinion (which honesty requires you acknowledge rather than pretend that you thought of it yourself) you remove all doubt as to whether or not you know what you are talking about. Anyone with even a passing practice of critical thinking will see that - even in the tavern where BS flows at the same rate as the beer.

Take it from someone who has by experience learned that fact the hard way.

Do your homework before you open your mouth or write your piece.

Study things out in your mind, take time to learn and understand what you want to speak to ... and own up to it when you have mis-spoken or written something that is not true.

Then compose your own expressions of how you feel. No matter how well or poorly you speak and write, the more you write and speak, the better you'll get at it.

Let real honesty govern what you say ... your honesty.

Not the grandstand honesty coached by someone telling you how.

Ponder this quote from a sitting American President in 1958.

"It is difficult indeed to maintain a reasoned and accurately informed understanding of our defense situation on the part of our citizenry when many prominent officials, possessing no standing or expertness as they themselves claim it, attempt to further their own ideas or interests by resorting to statements more distinguished by stridency than by accuracy."- *Dwight Eisenhower