Relying on Experience of Others

There are many guidelines on how to do something. You can find guidelines about solving math problems, fixing a phone, and starting a business. Some topics have a very large number of guidelines, other topics have only a few of them. But anyway it looks good because it can help other people to do something interesting or useful for them. Guidelines can be especially helpful if a person has limited practical knowledge in some field, but he still wants to do something.

The great number of different guidelines can raise a question, does a person need critical thinking to improve his practical knowledge? Why doesn’t he just follow a good guideline? I can think of several issues with this approach.

First of all guidelines have a limited scope. Some may consider a greater number of cases, others can consider only some cases, but as a result a person can have a case which isn’t covered by a particular guideline. Even if it looks like the case is covered, because the case may be similar to ones in the guideline, but it still has some important differences. A person can combine a number of different guidelines to understand how to treat his case better. But as the person seeks guidelines because he has limited practical knowledge, he may combine incorrectly.

Another option is to use different guidelines one after another. It may work for cases like practicing drawing, although the process would be slow. But cases with bigger stakes would also have a risk of failure. So using difference guideline without analyzing them looks bad because the overall risk would increase.

Critical thinking can help to analyze a guideline of a number of them. As a result, a person can decrease risks and better understand what he is going to do. Different methods and skills from critical thinking can help here, for example we can check how good is a source and should we trust a particular author. We can check the logic structure of a guideline and look for presuppositions to better understand a situation described in the guideline. We can create several hypotheses about outcomes of following different guidelines then look for evidence before beginning performing any action. It would take more time but it would also increase our chances of success.