Beyond irrationality.

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-Learning skills help us towards self-reliance.
-Critical thinking: Evaluating information and our own thoughts in a disciplined way.
-Evaluating our thoughts helps us refine our own thought processes.
-It gives us the ability to identify and reject false ideas and ideologies.
-The need to pinpoint any biasing influences on our thoughts.
-To pinpoint and minimize influences from culture and upbringing.
-To seek out and be guided by knowledge and evidence that fits with reality, even if it refutes our cherished beliefs.
-If a belief is unfounded, a change of position is an appropriate response.
-Explanations must actually explain and be testable to be worthy of serious consideration.
-Critical thinking embraces scepticism.
-Scepticism doesn't mean indiscriminate rejection of ideas, it involves doubting and suspending our judgement about claims with which we are presented and we don't simply accept claims which might be unjustified but first take the time to understand them, examining the reasoning and possible assumptions and biases behind them.
-The reasoning behind factual claims should be based on sound consistent logic, not on emotions and social pressure.
-The truth of factual claims is not determined by: the emotion that accompanies them or the fact that they may be believed by certain social groups.
-What will increase our understanding? Dismissing reason or looking honesty at the flaws?
-A lack of respect for reason or evidence will sabotage one's capacity for critical thought.
-One of the barriers to critical thinking is the unwillingness to see complex issues in anything other than black and white terms.
-If one sees only 2 options where more exist, this constitutes a false dichotomy.
-If we think in false dichotomies, we will draw false conclusions.
-Black and white thinking often reflects underlying intolerance of ambiguity.
-Leaping to flawed conclusions because you can't tolerate the ambiguity of not knowing is not about truth or curiosity, but comfort.
-A critical thinker can handle uncertainty, prefers to be aware of their areas of ignorance, and they can wait for valid evidence-based answers.
Critical thinking moves us away from: rash conclusions, mystification, reluctance to question received wisdom, authority, tradition and moves us towards intellectual discipline, clear expression of ideas, and the acceptance of personal responsibility for our own thinking.



https://youtu.be/6OLPL5p0fMg

Metacognition:

Groupthink:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/groupthink

There seems to be very little thought in present day discussions. It is just a regurgitation of other peoples words (talking heads) without any subjected analysis or critical thinking. Generally any critical responses only produces an array of logic fallacies. Pepe, I will recommend a book for you if you haven't read it already. The book is called:

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in the World Increasingly Full of Fake
by Dr. Steven Novella

Cognitive bias:

In my entire journey on the internet, I have only once come across a poster who meticulously spent the time defining definitions and parameters before the discussion began.
It was in a philosophy forum I was flirting with joining.
How could something so simple be so under-utilised?

Part of the problem seems to be a lack of critical thinking in the mainstream,
An environment which is dominated by emotional needs, social posturing, alpha-maledom, alpha-femaledom, the agendas of social justice warriors, and so forth.
All of the above energies dedicated to serving the more primitive aspects of the human brain.

"Rationality" is *not* the default setting of most human beings.
"Rationality", in defiance of our more primitive urges/instincts, is usually the result of hard-won life experience and (ironically) the "desire" for self-improvement/independence.

Obviously, the problem also stems from the education system, which seems to be failing the majority of students in many parts of the world.
I suspect this is in part due to an elitist mindset by some of our social architects who apparently embrace the belief: "We need relatively few leaders to govern/shepherd the proletariate".
I have known one particular Prime Minister, who fitted the bill.
And yes, he was a conservative.

Thank you for the "Dr. Steven Novella" lead.

Cheers m8,

Evidence is emerging that limiting time on social media helps kids improve their grades. Five years ago, it came out that Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley greats were actually low tech parents. Whether they encouraged others to do so or not, the tech billionaires recognized and avoided the dangers for their own kids.

But what exactly are the dangers? What’s different today from the cafeteria gossip mills of the past? In an excerpt from his upcoming book, The Social Media Upheaval (May 28, 2019), University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains why he considers Twitter, in particular, a virus of the mind:

Social media is addictive by design. The companies involved put enormous amounts of thought and effort into making it that way, so that people will be glued to their screens. As much as they’re selling anything, they’re selling the ‘dopamine hit’ that people experience when they get a ‘like’ or a ‘share’ or some other response to their action. We’ve reached the point where there are not merely articles in places like Psychology Today and The Washington Post on dealing with ‘social media addiction’, but even scholarly papers in medical journals, with titles like ‘The relationship between addictive use of social media and video games and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large scale cross-sectional study’. One of the consulting companies in the business of making applications addictive is even named Dopamine Labs, making no bones about what’s going on.

Using engineering terminology, he makes the point that, whereas the blogosphere has been a loosely coupled system where craziness in one venue had little impact on another, new social media are tightly coupled systems, prone to maximal disruption:

The ‘retweet’, ‘comment’, and ‘like’ buttons are immediate. A retweet sends a posting, no matter how angry or misinformed, to all the retweeter’s followers, who can then do the same to their followers, and so on, in a runaway chain reaction. Unlike blogs, little to no thought is required, and in practice very few people even follow the link (if there is one) to ‘read the whole thing’. According to a study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 percent of people who share a link on social media don’t read the underlying story. I’m honestly surprised the number isn’t higher.

One outcome, he observes is that people are more likely to believe and spread misinformation they hear on social media. Ironically, Twitter—used widely by social and political leaders—is particularly bad for “thoughtless polarization” which spreads like a virus into the majority of the population that does not use Twitter. He himself left Twitter (“a breeding ground for thoughtlessness and contempt”) in the fall of 2018 but he does not see that as a solution for political discourse because “With Twitter, you can participate and be driven crazy – or you can stay sane, and lose influence. That’s a bad trade-off.”

Source: HOW DID TWITTER BECOME A “VIRUS OF THE MIND”?

False Dichotomy:

https://youtu.be/m5ikx26se60

Mathew Hopkins.
The epitome of: "Poetic Justice".

Toxic Sanctimony:

Emotional hijack:

The Psychology of Partisanship:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... hip/66304/

Information Pollution:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/dist ... pollution/

Thanks for the info chaps, posting so that I can find this thread later... will likely need time to 'digest' it!