A book by Riel Miller, 2018. It isn’t just a book review, it is also a review of a concept. The book introduces the concept of future literacy, a discipline, a concept, and an idea promoted by UNESCO. This concept should help people to think about their future more productively. In turn it should help to make a better decision and create a better future. The books consists of a number of articles about different aspects of future literacy.

As people often think too positively about their own plans, these plans may fail due to unforeseen issues. There are also a number of cognitive biases related to planning: normalcy bias, optimism bias, and planning fallacy. But I can add even more, because almost every bias can influence people’s decision making. Fortunately people invented a number of methods to make better plans. One of these methods consists of imagining what can go wrong before making any decision or acting on a plan.

You may know about the following method to help you to do or not to do something. You need to have a sheet of paper, or an appropriate electronic tool to write down the benefits and disadvantages of doing this thing. Even in this very simple way it can be very helpful for decisions which require some analysis. Sometimes simple heuristics can’t help you or you may want to check the results of using heuristics with another tool.

Sometimes you can make a decision in a situation without involving other people. For example you are going for a trip in the wilderness and you need to find a place to stay. Your decision would unlikely affect other people. But besides decisions like these many decisions still involve some people. It may mean that some people are interested in the situation you need to make a decision. As a result, these people, who are usually called stakeholders, can react to your decision in different ways.

Both words, “critical” and “crisis” have their roots in the same Ancient Greek word κρῑ́νω, which means “I separate, judge”. “Crisis” itself has a number of meanings, it can be an unstable situation, a turning point, a sudden change. People can expect something certain after a turning point, if they have expected this turning point. But an unstable situation and a sudden change can bring many unexpected things. An unexpected turning point can do the same.

People can use different heuristics to make decisions. Gigerenzer and his colleagues have found that in some cases heuristics can save time and get better results than more complex algorithmic decision-making processes1. But in some areas your heuristics can lead to worse decisions. How can we choose, what approach should we use? Known situations are more likely to have good working heuristics. So if you need to decide on something other people are deciding every day you have good chances to find a useful heuristic.

A recent article1 describes using the “veil of ignorance” concept to help with decision making. The concept in question was proposed by John Rawls in his work about justice2. Justice is related to decision making and Rawls used the idea of the veil to help people make just decisions about society. He proposed that a decision maker can be randomly put in place of any person he makes a decision. If the decision maker is aware of this, he would make better decisions, according to Rawls.

Language learners need to master different aspects of a foreign language. They should know linguistic conventions and how to use them. They should understand their audience and choose an appropriate way of communication. They also should understand their aims, why they want to communicate in the first place? It actually works for any language, foreign and native. Native language communication may look easier, but only because people have more experience with their native language.

I often see people from different educational institutions talk about using and applying critical thinking. They usually mention incorporating critical thinking into different disciplines. It may be not so good compared to a separate critical thinking course, but it is still better than a common course in this discipline without critical thinking. But an article by Kane and Otto I found recently1 shows that educators may have different definitions of critical thinking and some of these definitions may lack important skills.

Many events around us are chaotic. It happens because these events are created by chaotic systems. But what exactly are chaotic systems? And how can we live in the chaotic world? Let’s use the mathematical definition of chaotic systems. These systems can be deterministic, but even the deterministic nature doesn’t make them predictable. Actually, mathematicians often work with deterministic systems which display chaotic behavior, because small variations of initial conditions can greatly change their state after some time or several iterations.

It is a kind of selection bias, when we can observe only a part of the population because only this part survived a process or an event. For example, if we look at successful companies to study how to build a successful company we would miss not so successful and closed companies. So we wouldn’t take into account probably useful information about reasons which led to their lack of success.

Actually, it isn’t. Well, if you compare thinking to not-thinking, the first one is somehow more costly and harder. But let’s look at these statements one by one. Is a complex thinking costly? Humans have big brains, but if you aren’t really starving you don’t need to save energy by thinking less. At the same time a person can even motivate himself that active thinking burns some energy from food. One only needs to avoid extremes like “I’d though hard, now I can eat cake or ten.

You may have heard about how people create wonderful worlds in their minds. Some of them are writers, movie directors, and other creative people. Also some of them are patients of psychiatric hospitals. The first group can create imaginary worlds, for example, because they like the process or the results. The second group often create such worlds to escape from reality. And I can understand people from the second group. The real world can be a pretty scary place.

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 world around us is very complex. To reduce its complexity people use models: they look at a part of the world and create a description how it behaves. To further reduce the complexity of these processes ontology modeling can be used. Ontology has a number of meanings, for example it can be a philosophical study. But it can be a practical tool, which can be called applied ontology. An ontology provides a means to describe models in a consistent way.

Groups of people have some emergent properties which separate people don’t have. As a result groups and organizations may have goals that may conflict with the goals of individuals. Organizations may form more complicated systems with emergent processes to support its own stability. As an example I can mention a form of evolution when an organization which distributes its attitudes the most aggressively to recruit new members. Thus it can win in the long term among other organizations.

Many jobs require people to have domain-specific knowledge. They can become more effective gaining more such knowledge and domain-specific skills. So if you want to become a better carpenter you need more training and experience as a carpenter. It is possible that a person would be so focused on developing as a carpenter that he could stop doing anything not related to his main job. For example a highly trained carpenter would forget how to cook food so he would only go to restaurants, he would also forget how to clean so he would hire cleaning services.

Many things in life are simple. For example, if you drop something it drops down. If you put a hand in cold water you feel cold. If you wonder about flows in your cup of tea, you can prove that a smooth flow exists here using Navier–Stokes equations. Well, the last one maybe is not so simple… There are also a number of things that are complicated, very complicated, and insanely complicated.

Programmers need to work with information in different forms: they need to analyze information themselves and they need to write programs which also work with information. A number of skills from critical thinking are useful to work with information, so these skills can help programmers to do their job better. Some dispositions can also help. Programmers and developers often need to look for different solutions, sometimes for something novel for them.

The word “meditation” has different definitions and while some of them may be related to spiritual stuff, other definitions actually describe more general mental states and processes. It isn’t the only word to describe mental processes, but you can find it in some texts about critical thinking. At the same time people may be prone to the halo effect and may think that anything described by word “meditation” is related somehow to spirituality.

Some people may not like using lists to organize things. They may have several arguments against lists, like lists take time to create, lists may hinder your creativity because you would be less spontaneous, lists aren’t widely used by people around us. While there may be some truth in these statements, lists appear to be a very useful tool if one uses them purposefully. Lists are good for planning. Basically you can use them to compliment your short-term memory and your ability to focus on things valuable in the long-term.

People tend to forget that most of the news media don’t need to deliver valuable information to help people make better decisions. Usually the news media made to earn money, so they will deliver entertaining news, not useful or valuable. I recommend to think of any news media as a business enterprise, they will basically publish anything which earn them more money and which isn’t against the law. Does that mean that we can’t get any useful information from big media corporations?

People may use critical thinking while doing politically related things. It may be harder than using critical thinking in science because we have to consider human relationships which may be harder to define. But there is also a particularity of politics related to polarization and choosing sides. Consider Democratic and Republican parties of US, if you stick to one of them and if you support some of their principles, you are expected to support the rest of them.

Marketers want to promote their products and increase sales. Consumers want to buy products which are good for them: they may want cheaper products, more high-quality products or products with special features. Although it may be hard to choose something because there are too many kinds of products. Many people tend to reduce the amount of thinking if they can, it was probably a useful trait for our ancestors. Human brain uses a lot of energy for such a small organ, but contemporary people starve less often than our ancestors, so we don’t have to constantly reduce brain activity.

Probably the most fashion magazines and other fashion media get their money from advertisements. Only this fact means that any person should be very careful while listening to their advice. But there is another problem: many media that don’t get money from fashion advertisement still copy facts and recommendations from the paid media. I hope you are more sceptical to any fashion advice now then before, so let’s analyse some of them.

There are many guides and books about how to spend money, how to buy less expensive things, how to save money. Many of them can miss important things, also many of them may tell about the author’s personal experience and useful heuristics. But what critical thinking can offer if we analyse a situation when a person needs to buy something. First of all why people buy things? If you want to buy anything you expect that the thing you want to buy has a bigger value for you than the money the thing costs.

To be responsible a person needs to understand how his acts would lead to consequences. He also better know how to make good decisions, so his acts would have expected results. I can say that to be responsible a person needs to make good plans, good decisions, and be able to simulate how events can unfold. So an irresponsible person probably fails if he wants to plan or to simulate something.

Some people say that our parents can’t teach us anything bad. Or that we should just listen to everything they say and behave accordingly. These could be good parents and they can wish only good things but even in this case we shouldn’t use their words to guide us. We can listen to them and critically analyse this information. There are a number of reasons we should behave like this.

Should a person follow what others are doing or should he find another way? There are a number of cognitive biases that may influence people to follow the example of others. For example people can show the confirmation bias and support whatever ideas and beliefs they have already. If actions of other people don’t contradict one’s belief there would be no reason to change it. And even if there is a contradiction, due to the confirmation bias people tend to ignore it.

Other people have some goals. Their goals may be congruent with yours, or they may not. Also other people may declare some goals that are congruent with yours, but these people may also have other goals that are not congruent. I don’t want to state “everybody lies” or something like that, but people may not truthfully speak about their goals and needs. Why does it matter? Our goals dictate our actions.

This book by Douglas W. Hubbard isn’t exactly a critical thinking textbook. But it is a good text about measurements, probabilities, and evaluation. Imagine that you have a goal. You create a plan how to reach this goal, but how can you be sure that the goal is reached? You can make your goal measurable, then you can measure it and compare real results with expected results. And according to the author it can be any goal because you can measure anything.

For a number of critical thinking skills people need to decouple their thinking from their perception. Decoupling enables people to run simulations of alternative hypotheses, future outcomes, and events people haven’t witnessed themselves. A recent study1 have found a correlation between how good people in running simulations and how creative they are. The correlation goes in both ways: people who create vivid simulations are also good in creative tasks, also creative experts are better in creating simulations than a control group.

Doctors and researchers use critical thinking in the evidence-based medicine, this approach to medicine needs many skills and disposition critical thinking has. But you may think that if you aren’t a doctor you don’t need critical thinking because doctors are certified professionals and they have all the necessary skills to deal with diseases. Doctors may be certified professionals, but not all doctor education curricula include critical thinking courses. Doctors may also make bad decisions due to lack of time, information, or desire to reduce the mental load.

News channels like to talk about crimes and terrorism because these topics create strong emotions. But strong emotions can lead to anxiety, anxiety can lead to depression, depression can lead to death. Note a slippery slope bias here. Actually it still can happen, but the chances are pretty small. But if anxiety doesn’t usually lead to immediate death, it creates smaller problems for people. Fortunately we can use risk analysis to counter sources of anxiety like news about terrorism.

Only one person fights organized crime, others prefer to sit and suffer. It is also shown as a bad thing because this person is basically an outlaw vigilante, but considering others doing nothing, it is a hypocritic position. As an example, a hero plays video games and drinks alcohol, he is also visibly fatter than five years ago. Another got a daughter, he also stopped any heroics—this daughter will be shown as a liability later in the movie.

People have a number of risks from different sources. We have culture risks, because our culture beliefs can be harmful. We have cognitive biases risks, they may lead to bad decisions. We have education risks, because education can be useless and outdated. We have risks of changes because our environment can change unexpectedly for us. Each possible risk has at least two unknown features: probability of happening and a cost. Fortunately for us there are methods to evaluate risks and make decisions considering them.

First of all many characters don’t use their abilities fully. Dr. Strange doesn’t use his magic stone: he only makes predictions near the end, he also doesn’t make time loops. Time loops helped him before to defeat a very powerful adversary. As a result the movie teaches to ignore own skills and abilities, to avoid looking for alternatives. Basically Dr. Strange is the only person who actively looks for alternatives, but he does it late enough to make a sequel possible.

The Matrix as shown in the movie with the same name, is a good metaphor of an illusory world people can’t leave. Similar concepts appeared in a number of stories, but probably one of the oldest one is the concept of Maya as the illusion we perceive instead of the real world. There are a number of old and new concepts, but all of them have several details in common: we can’t directly perceive the real world due to some limitations, instead we have a subjective or virtual reality we live in.

Popular science can inform people about scientific discoveries thus making a work of scientists more understandable and closer to a perceived reality of the general public. But I believe it can actually do more, it can show the scientific method and its applications, it can involve people to use this method in their lives. And it is good because the scientific method uses the same tools critical thinking uses, so people can become critical thinkers or improve their skills related to critical thinking.

https://app.tophat.com/e/455176/assigned/ You can access the link without registration choosing Enter as Guest option. This course or book was created by David Manley. In essence it is a critical thinking online textbook, but with integrated exercises. Other educators, who use the same platform, can change the text according to their purposes. But even if you don’t work to register you can just read it as a regular book. The book covers a number of topics: how the human mind works, different mindsets and point of view on reasoning, how to achieve clarity with good arguments, how to understand different forms of argument, what to do with evidence and how to apply a probabilistic approach to hypotheses, how to use generalization and what kind of errors may appear during this process, how to understand causation and relate it to evidence, how new information should change our beliefs, how to formulate theories and hypotheses correctly, how to make decisions.

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/critical-reasoning-beginners http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/critical-reasoning-romp-through-foothills-logic This is a pretty old series of lectures by Marianne Talbot, Critical Reasoning for Beginners. And there is a newer series Critical Reasoning: A Romp Through the Foothills of Logic. The first course is six hours and forty five minutes long. It is a course for beginners, most likely you don’t need any critical thinking training to watch it. As the videos are recordings from lectures, you can hear some questions from the audience.

How a person can construct an ideal world? Very easy, he only needs to read and watch news he likes. We can thank the availability heuristic, because if we don’t know something it is usually doesn’t exist for us. Often people put themselves into information bubbles, contemporary search engines and social networks are very good to help people create such bubbles. Anything that happens outside an individual bubble doesn’t exists.

When people are choosing between short-term and long-term goals it is pretty straightforward. They succumb to their impulses or they follow their plans for delayed gratification. Often it is a matter of training and awareness to control oneself when you have a choice like this. Also these choices often can be compared to the choices of other people, so you can observe their choices and consequences of such choices. But sometimes people have choices between long-term and mid-term goals.

Many people want to decide what would be best for them: entrepreneurship or employment. What critical thinking can advice here? Probably, the main and the most important advice is that there is a false dichotomy here. It may appear there are only two options, but actually there are two main roads and a number of directions between them. So if you are considering this question yourself, think about the third, the fourth and other options you can imagine.

https://www.edx.org/course/teaching-critical-thinking-through-art-with-the-national-gallery-of-art This course has some interesting points which differ it from other critical thinking courses. First, it is aimed at educators, not at regular folks who want to learn critical thinking. Second, it focuses on art related disciplines and studying art pieces. Quite an unusual combination is here. The course is brought to you by the Smithsonian Institution, but the initial idea was developed in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Can critical thinking improve our social interactions? Or should we use some other method? Critical thinking doesn’t have a section about social stuff, but as a metacognitive discipline it can help to use other methods more effectively. Of course many people can easily and effectively work with other people even without critical thinking. They probably don’t need to apply critical thinking in this area, but they may use it in other areas.

If critical thinking is so good for people why don’t every educational institution offer mandatory or at least optional courses on this topic? I can find several reasons. Let’s start with the fact that not every person knows about critical thinking. So if teachers and administration of an institution don’t know, they can’t introduce such a course. Also some institutions can have conflicting agenda and courses. For example if an institution wants to promote compliance to authority, obedience, and all-or-nothing thinking, it surely doesn’t need any open-mindedness that may appear from learning critical thinking.

Writers and producers can probably create books and movies with smart and interesting characters. But I don’t see many characters like this around. Many characters tend to make silly errors, even if they proclaim that they are smart. Of course silly characters fit well into comedies, but I still can see many of they in other genres. I can find a number of reasons for this and many of them wouldn’t be related to critical thinking.

10th edition of 2012 and 11th edition of 2014 There is an even newer edition published, but I do not have it. In the same time I can compare two previous editions to look for their differences. After that I can conclude what can we expect from the 12th edition and is it worth buying if you have an older edition. This is a good textbook for learning critical thinking. It can be used as a sole source of information of with a number or other books and courses.

The word is originated from the older name of a congregation of the Roman Curia, Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Their simplified Latin name was Propaganda Fide. The congregation is responsible for missionary work and related activities. So the word had got a special meaning related to the work of the congregation, now it means a set of messages aimed at influencing large number of people. You can find many resources about propaganda, how does it work and how it was used in past.

One may think that to be successful in life a person needs only a vocational education and also some schooling to get into a vocational program. After that a person can find a job and has a stable future. There is only one issue, our future is not stable. Human history does have periods when things changed only a little. During these periods of time it was possible for whole families had the same job for generations.

Thoughts and actions can lead to emotions. If you can observe your thoughts processes, these processes can also be analysed. After that you can make predictions how emotions appear and you can establish some control over them. A similar method is used in cognitive behavior therapy. This discipline investigates connections between thoughts, believes, and attitudes from one side, and emotions from another side. All of these also can be connected to other things like behavior.

Can a person become like Sherlock Holmes with the powers of critical thinking? Surely it is possible. First of all, Holmes has a number of skills that are part of critical thinking skill set. Of course, he is good at logic. He checks his sources and information he gets. He also relies on hard evidence, often acquired by himself. He is probably good at controlling his mind, so he may apply metacognition in his work.

Critical thinking is a metacognitive process1, when a person reflects about his own thinking. It means that mastering critical thinking can help you fight cognitive biases. Using metacognitive approach you can trace how cognitive biases influence your thought processes and understand how to reduce their influence. Of course one can reduce influence of cognitive biases without understanding what they do, and it will work. The problem is that this approach would be limited in its application, because many cognitive biases influence different thought processes, so in different situations the same cognitive bias may need different approaches.

Could a person practice both critical thinking and astrology? I believe one can, but only for a short time. Here is why: if you study and practice critical thinking methodically, you are going to apply it to most of aspects of your life. So you will apply it to methods and principles of astrology. What happens next depends on your view of astrology and how do you use it. One of principles of critical thinking is a following disposition: one should change his belief when he faces a sufficient number of new facts.

Can computers help you think? They can, but they may also cause some issues. Basically computers can serve as extensions of our mind, storing and processing information. Before computers people used other media to store information and sometimes to process it. They uses notebooks, books, abaci, and other things. As our memory is limited, especially our short-term memory, even such a simple devices can improve human cognitive abilities. Computers can do even more.

Creativity and critical thinking have something in common, for example if we look for individual skills from creative thinking we may find skills similar to critical thinking. Open-minded thinking, considering alternatives, problem solving and related to it decision making, all of this can be considered skills from both areas. And I can probably find some more examples of such skills. Open-minded thinking may not be a skill, but a thinking disposition.

Can critical thinking help you to write better? Or I can rephrase this question, should a person read a critical thinking book instead of a book about writing craft? I personally recommend read both, because critical thinking focuses on a number of aspects related to understanding texts, for example logical construction of a text and biases that can mangle the intended meaning. But books on writing focus on other aspects outside of critical thinking, which are useful for a writer.

The question is: if a person reads a number of books about decision making or go to courses on this topic, does he need critical thinking too? The short answer: it depends. One of the reasons to learn critical thinking is to become a better decision maker. A number of skills, methods, techniques and dispositions are used to improve different aspects of decision making. So you can’t learn an ultimate method and become the best.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/news-literacy There is actually a critical thinking course under this title. The authors want to teach several aspects of critical thinking related to understanding and analysing news. The course is created by people from two universities: The University of Hong Kong and The State University of New York, more specifically Stony Brook University School of Journalism. It is six weeks long and it requires commitment from 2 to 3 hours per week.

Some things are things you know about. For example, if you are an accountant you know about some kinds of financial documents, they are well known things to you. You surely have other things that is known unknown. If we use an example with financial documents, there are certain documents that an accountant has only vague idea about. I can also say that for known unknowns you have only partial information.

Can a person learn critical thinking only using some texts, for example from textbooks? Or one needs interactive courses with video lectures, online exercises, and other things? I personally tried both methods and both can be used. But both have their vices and virtues. You can probably also find a course with a real tutor, for example via videoconferencing or even take a real class somewhere, it is similar to online courses but also have its specific sides.

Or are you too old? But is there any actual limitations for learning critical thinking? For example, can a primary school student learn it? Can elderly people start using it? There are a number of skills inside critical thinking. Some of them require background knowledge. So to use these skills you need to got this knowledge somewhere. It can be a school, or it can be a specialized course. For example, inductive reasoning needs some probability theory, so a critical thinking syllabus can be build assuming students know it already, or elements of probability theory can be integrated into the syllabus.

https://www.udemy.com/critical-thinker-academy/ This course is created by Kevin deLaplante, an independent educator from Ottawa, Canada. Before becoming independent he served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University from 2009 to 2013, though he wrote on his personal site1 that it was from 2008 to 2012. The course is a big one, it has about 14 hours of video lectures and PDF supplemental text of 600 pages total.

Some people argue that higher-order thinking like critical thinking uses too much resources of human mind and it could be inefficient to use critical thinking every time. It may be true because critical thinking uses slower processes of human mind and in some situations you may have to make very fast decisions. One of the solutions is to train a skill to quickly decide do you need to begin thinking critically or you can use a fast automatic response.

Critical thinking nudge people to use it in all areas an critically consider everything. It means that you should critically analyze also main dispositions of critical thinking. One of these dispositions is that one should critically analyze everything. And you probably can start doubting of this one. So does it mean that there should be some things that you shouldn’t analyze at all, instead take at face value without any doubt?

Can critical thinking be used for moral reasoning? Or maybe critical thinking and moral thinking aren’t compatible? As a matter of fact moral reasoning often use rules of formal logic to make specific conclusions. And if we consider logical thinking as one of critical thinking skills, we can say that moral reasoning uses tools from critical thinking. But first let’s define what moral reasoning is. It is a process of making a decision or conclusion using moral principles.

You may know about idea of modeling human mind as having two parts. For example Daniel Kahneman used this model in his book1 and numerous articles, calling it Systems 1 and 2. Other researchers have similar concepts, although they may call it in different way. Stanovich and Evans have a good review of dual process theories2. They also have several points of reasonable criticism. For example, dual-process theorists use multiple and vague definitions.

Is critical thinking needed if you want to think about politics? Politics may mean making decisions regarding different aspects of one’s social life, in this case authors of 1 argue that critical thinking is essential. If we think about it a bit we can make the same conclusion. If a person needs to make a decision related to his social like, this decision may lead to a number of different consequences.

I know there is a system of teaching critical thinking named as this post’s title, but it is a topic for a separate discussion. I would like to discuss how critical thinking can be used to improve one’s writing and reading. Critical thinking for reading isn’t only a text analysis tool. You can use it to understand texts better and faster without a careful analysis. If you know how to identify biases and fallacies, how to check and evaluate arguments, how to look for final conclusions and for initial premises, you can look for specific clues in a text.

I participated in this workshop on the 15th of December, 2018. The workshop was organized and moderated by Victor Gorbatov, a senior lecturer in Higher School of Economics of Moscow. We had a presentation by Evgeny Volkov, a professor in Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod. He spoke about ontological foundations of critical thinking. According to Evgeny Volkov we need to create an ontological basis for complicated areas like critical thinking when we are going to learn them.

You may ask if the second language can improve your thinking, or even your critical thinking. I think it may be possible so let’s consider what skills and dispositions can be improved if a person knows more that one language. One of the most important dispositions is alternative seeking. With this disposition a person looks for other explanations, theories, facts, and pieces of information. The second language can help here in different ways.

I addressed a question of getting lean with critical thinking1 and this topic is related to what food we should eat and what food we should not. I can analyse all possible food products, but I better provide an example of a product and give some advices about directing your attention while thinking about this particular topic. So let’s start with some basic things. Even the best and the healthiest food can harm a person if he will eat only this kind of food.

This course doesn’t aim to be a complete critical thinking course, instead it focuses on different aspect of decision making. The course is taught by Rob Stone from University of California, Irvine Extension. It is also a part of Career Success specialisation, created by the same university. The specialisation is focused on skills like project management, productivity, finance management, communication, business writing, negotiations, and entrepreneurship. The course can teach you how to apply appropriate methods of problem solving and decision making, how to identify common obstacles, how to take into account a human factor.

Many people ask how can they lose weight, it is a frequent request in search engines. People want to lose fat, become lean, and hopefully do that without eating less. But can critical thinking help here? I believe it can, because we can apply some methods from critical thinking. First, we should reevaluate the goals: is losing weight the real goal? Probably the main goal should be a healthier life, so a person can improve his own health.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/critical-thinking-skills The main focus of this course is preparation for a university. The course is taught by Katherine Olston and Luke Alexander from the University of Sydney. The authors give a number of critical thinking disposition, for example inquisitiveness, truth-seeking, and self-confidence. After that a student can understand better what critical thinking is. The authors also discuss formal and informal argumentation methods, how to ask questions to get a desired answer.

Sometimes people can easily understand each other. For example, if two persons have similar frames to exchange information, they would make fewer mistakes. But if they operate in different frames and have different background knowledge, they may use the same words for different things. In this case they may have difficulties to correctly understand each other. The second example can be called curse of knowledge, it is a cognitive bias when people mistakenly assume that other people have necessary background to understand them.

According to K. Stanovich1 there is a process in our brain which is used to decouple internal model of reality from reality. It takes some effort to use this process, because our brain needs to pass several stages to activate a simulation. First, an autonomous mind should notice need to pause its processes and pass control to higher functions. The autonomous mind is what other researchers call system 1 or slow mind.

HR department does many things in a company, but let’s consider the process of hiring employees. You may know that even if you know about cognitive biases you may still be a victim of these biases. So I suspect that many HR specialists may be victims of a halo effect. There are a number of recommendations regarding job interviews and many of them advise the same things: dress well, don’t be late, speak confidently.

You may not know it, but all texts have a goal. When a writer creates it, or a speaker talks, they knowingly or not knowingly have something they want us to do. I mentioned speakers because they often have prepared speeches and even if they don’t we can write down their words and work with it. So one of the main ideas about texts from critical thinking is that we need to determine possible reasons the author had in mind.

If critical thinking is a universal method of improving human thinking it should help in different areas of human life. But in the same time it can not do that, because critical thinking can’t replace the whole amount of human knowledge with a number of skills, rules and dispositions. So it probably can help with thinking in scientific domains, for example, but not for X we are talking about. How can we solve this paradox?

https://www.edx.org/course/science-everyday-thinking-uqx-think101x-6 This course is created by The University of Queensland, and one of the authors is from there, Jason Tangen. Another one, Matthew Thompson is from Murdoch University. The third author is Emma MacKenzie, she is also from The University of Queensland. The authors have a syllabus that is practical enough. They discuss the psychology of everyday thinking using topics like placebo, miracles and paranormal. You can study how people form and change their beliefs, and how to make better decisions.

One of the main ideas of critical thinking is alternative thinking. Basically you need to look for alternatives in many cases. For example, when you are making decisions, when you look for explanation or create hypotheses. So in critical thinking you need to look for different alternative often, but is it worth your energy and time. Can we look at this process critically? Critical thinking isn’t against critically checking its own concepts and methods.

https://www.edx.org/course/philosophy-and-critical-thinking This course has a subtitle, META101x: Thinking about thinking. It sounds good because it catches one of the main ideas of critical thinking, that it is a kind of thinking directed to other thinking. It is created in the University of Queensland by Deborah Brown and Peter Ellerton. According to the description the course is based on philosophy and it is primarily aimed on analysing and understanding arguments. Of course it isn’t the comprehensive course about critical thinking, it is more likely an introduction to the topic from a philosophical point of view.

I would like to define mindfulness not as a mystical phenomenon but as a scientific approach to achieve thinking directed to one’s own cognitive processes. This topic is well researched by Adrian Wells, who is a clinical psychologist. In simple terms metacognitive therapy attract attention to patients’ internal problems and helps them to resolve these problem. I can also say it that metacognition is the main aspect of critical thinking, because critical thinking is mostly directed to one’s own thinking.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware/ This course is taught by Richard E. Nisbett, the author of Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking and a number of academic articles. The book is pretty interesting and useful by itself and like the course it isn’t exactly about critical thinking. At least the author haven’t stated that, but in the same time the course teaches many things you can find in critical thinking handbook and courses. As a student you can get some knowledge about statistics and its application in different areas, also about designing experiments and using correlation correctly.

I can say that the main area of critical thinking is decision making. You can find a number of books and articles how to do that. There are also many researches supporting making decisions with critical thinking. This broad approach isn’t bad, because we can reduce many problem to decision making. But unfortunately there aren’t many resources about specific examples of using critical thinking. I can even say it isn’t a good for promoting critical thinking because people love to see detailed and concise guides how to solve specific problems.

We organized a critical thinking course in the end of November 2017. It was our first course so we announced it as a testing one. We wanted to make test runs of exercises and lectures topic, also test overall organization of the course. The course was free of charge for participants, but we often asked for feedback about every part of the course. Unfortunately not all participants were disciplined enough to give all feedback we asked for.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-theory https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-science https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-practice There are three courses with the same core idea: intellectual humility. As intellectual humility is one of critical thinking attitudes, I can say that these courses can improve your critical thinking skills. Authors say that intellectual humility is an opposite to intellectual arrogance, which can lead to biases and inefficient thinking practices. Intellectual humility is better way to think because people with this attitude change their beliefs more easily and generally more open-minded.

Practically critical thinking can be defined by means of skills or dispositions. While these skills and dispositions are known, there are still several difficulties in teaching and learning critical thinking. Different people may define critical thinking in different ways, so different educators can teach different skills under the same banner. Also some people tend to equate critical thinking and any criticism. It may create a negative image of critical thinking.