This is part of my report on our education system. I am not providing evidence for it right now (it's long and in my report), but our entire education system (as well as all books, movies, research journals, and all other sources of media) come from a single source, and they have for over 100 years (multiple generations). I like to call that source The Trust, but you can call them the Rockefellers. It's not entirely accurate, but for now it's close enough.
I am making this post because people often don't understand what "trust" is. Nor do they understand what "critical thinking" is. The reason they don't understand these things is because they have been taught that they are something different than what they actually are. These confusions give the PTB control over our beliefs and our actions. They are fundamental control mechanisms for The Matrix. Here I will discuss these concepts a little bit.
This is part of a longer report, so forgive the flow, as it may relate to other content, and forgive some of the normie centric stuff. The report is intended for an audience that still thinks vaccines are God's gift to mankind.
What is critical thinking?
Looking up the definitions I am very unsatisfied with what I find. In addition to a lack of agreement, the definitions seem nebulous, even circular. You would think something so fundamental would not be that difficult to explain. Stanford’s philosophical encyclopedia says this about it:
Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus.
So its an “educational goal” that has apparently completely failed since it can’t even be defined in a satisfactory manner. What else?
John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as:
active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends.
Mmkay… I find when something seems difficult to define, its best to look at the roots. The etymological dictionary is quite nice for this, though we have to… think critically about what it says to piece it all together:
critical: critic + -al "involving judgment as to the truth or merit of something"
-al: relating to
critic: from Greek kritikos "able to make judgments," from krinein "to separate, decide" (from PIE root *krei-"to sieve," thus "discriminate, distinguish"
So to be critical means to judge the truth or merit of something. An important implied statement is that if you are being critical, it is you being critical, i.e. you are the “critic” in “critical thinking”. It is you applying judgment as to the truth or merit of something. It is you that is being discriminating (discerning). It is you that is deciding for yourself after consideration.
think: "imagine, conceive in the mind; consider, meditate, remember; intend, wish, desire"
To think means (according to this) to conceive in the mind. It’s perhaps a bit narrow of a definition, but for this purpose I think (conceive in my mind) that it will suffice. This suggests it is possible to “think” without being critical, but it is not possible to be critical without thinking. Thus, using the etymological dictionary, my conclusion is:
critical thinking: to be discerning and think for yourself, applying your own judgment, after consideration, as to the truth or merit of something.
(Emphasis because these ideas are so often skipped in our teaching.)
That wasn’t so hard. I like mine a lot better than any of the other “competing definitions” I’ve seen, though I had to use some critical thinking to get to it.
What would be the opposite of critical thinking? It could be “any thinking that is not applying your own judgment as to the truth or merit of something” (not being critical). It could also be “not thinking at all” (not thinking).
On an unrelated note (but totally not unrelated at all), what does it mean to trust?
trust: reliance on the veracity, integrity, or other virtues of someone or something
belief that someone or something is reliable, good, honest, effective
To “trust” means to rely on someone else (e.g. to make judgments, or decide what is truth) for us. To be “critical” means to rely on yourself to make judgments, or decide what is truth. To trust means to assign your critical thinking over to someone else. Trust, in this context, is the opposite of critical thinking since you are giving up the “you” part of the critic and giving it to someone (or something) else.
Why would we trust? Sometimes there just isn’t enough time to do a whole lot of critical thinking or to be skeptical. Imagine couples figure skating without trust. It isn’t that I think there is never an appropriate time for trust. What I mean to say is, most of the time we are trusting, we aren’t realizing we are doing so. We are instead doing what we were trained to do (trust) instead of critical thinking, which is what we should be doing.
For example; we are told:
- Listen to your mother (but we really mean trust).
- Listen to your teacher (but we really mean trust).
- Trust your doctor.
- Respect your elders (but we really mean trust).
- Trust the experts.
- Trust the science (which is the opposite of what scientists are taught about science).
- Trust what you see on the news, they can’t lie because you are being shown the truth.
Other than what we are told, we trust certain institutions as well. For example:
- We trust government institutions, even though almost no one trusts any politicians.
- We trust large corporate institutions even though they are basically conflict of interest machines.
- We trust books if they are old.
- We trust what someone says, if someone we trust also trusts them. Trust is like a virus, it spreads unabated within whatever echo chambers we belong.
- We trust leaders, because they are more important than us, and there must be a reason they are more important than us.
In other words, we give up our own critical thinking in all of these circumstances.
All our lives, from cradle to grave, this is what we are taught; to trust these sources. I do not mean to suggest we should not be listening to our mothers, or teachers, or doctors, or experts, etc. On the contrary, I think that listening is an excellent path to understanding Reality. What I am trying to say is, listening to someone's argument and then thinking critically on it, and trusting someone are not the same thing. In fact they are, at least sometimes, at odds.
What is wrong with bias? Bias guides investigation. Such "bias" is often called "intuition." Bias is not a problem, trusting your biases is. Believing you "know the truth" is a problem, but listening to that guide inside you that we call bias is, I assert, a great thing. It can lead to fantastic discovery. It doesn't always of course, and if you hold on too tightly to your biases that you can't see evidence to the contrary then you lose the capacity to appreciate What Is. But by itself bias is great, and should not be rejected, but embraced. Just don't hold on too tightly.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The Truth is whatever It Is. I do not disagree with your assessment on the Musk situation, but I would never call it "the objective truth" because I don't know what the Truth is. Plus, as I said, "objective truth" is a redundant statement. If you are truly "objective" (AKA you have completely lost all capacity to be subjective) then you can only speak the Truth. I suggest that such a thing is impossible, and that humans will only ever be subjective when they speak, at least with any of the tools of language we have available to us today.
You seem to be really hung up on subjective and objective. I really don't think you appreciate what it would take to be Truly objective. The best you can do is be less subjective than you were in some other instance. I don't think you can ever actually reach "objective".
One can not cease to be what One is. Like Truth Is what It Is, You are what You are. Don't worry so much about being "objective." Just try to be honest with yourself. This will keep you from holding on to your useful biases too strongly that you can't be honest in your speech, thought, and investigations.
If the objective truth is the distillation of all components into the most fundamental forms, void of subjectively, how can an "objective lie" exist? Is the "objective lie" born tru the qualification process, and is not all qualification subjective? Does the objective truth only exist in the observational state? Is not even the thought process required to observe the "objective truth" a contamination of the "objective truth", as it requires prospective? I don't disagree with you, just wondering where that line exist.
"no way out of the mess that we're in save for mass acceptance of the truth."
The Hegelian hope that the slave can safely evict the master from his mind? It would certainly be the most amicable of all solution.
The rest I'll chew on for a while. :+)
Fact.
Indisputable fact.
What is the difference?
Coloration. i.e. bias. Bias is your conviction, your predetermined position, a preposition. Note the first definition OP used:
careful thinking directed to a goal.
If the goal is to reach a judgement, I would say, yeah, that definition fits. However, a goal can be a great deal of things. The reports written by people in business and government are usually written towards a pre-determined goal. And gone is the critical thinker. And should you, as a critical thinker, pose critical questions to it, you are being derided, cut off, and considered not a teamplayer.
Why? Because teamplayer is the superimposed value, a container word imparting the idea that you cannot and must not step outside the boundaries of the group, lest you want to suffer the consequences. This is a classic example of group-think!
Back to the difference. When we use language we are used to employing this in a social setting. That is why we use a lot of adjectives, or coloration. This serves a perfect objective: to discover commonalities, or shared values. We call it communication. Only after this process we move to the point of contract, i.e. get the girl, make babies.
The difficulty is in the discovery phase, as it presupposes the coming together of equal parties. Mostly it is not. Why, because we tend not to know who we are and how we operate. This favors the strong! the energetic, the easy talker, the smooth talker, the fraud.
Coloration therefor is an emotional process, a process of manipulation.
Consider now title 18: 241, 242. Deprivation of the rights under the color of the law. It is to some extend, amazing such a title should even exist. Unconstitutional is what it is, right? It seems like people even a way of weakening objectivity into subjectivity, and what is set in stone, to consider it as not existing.
There is so much here I disagree with, but instead of going through it all, I am going to try a different approach.
No it is not. There is bias in each and every step of scientific endeavor, and that is unavoidable. When we take measurements, we leave some out. For example, "I bumped the table here, so I will leave this measurement out." If our data is really bad, we will assume we made a mistake in the protocol and do the entire thing again. When we present data we choose how to present it. The data can be presented in many ways, but we choose, in our subjective process, the way we think best represents our thoughts, our conclusions. Someone else repeating the same experiment will come to different conclusions, even if only slightly. They will present their evidence in a way that represents those conclusions. In a body of pictures in biology for example, we will select the one picture that best represents our subjective conclusions. Someone else might pick something completely different.
Our intuition, our biases guide these subjective decisions. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is the debate that leads us closer to the Truth in science. Science itself is designed specifically to never make claims of Truth because that closes the door on future investigation and debate, which is the opposite of the founding principles of science.
I have been trying to explain that to be truly objective (completely distinct from self AKA subjective) is to speak the absolute Truth (AKA they are redundant). But we can't speak the absolute Truth, we don't know what it is and our language is too limited to speak it. Our definitions of things miss most of what a thing is. Science never speaks the Truth, because it can't. That is not its purpose. We never close the door in science, because it is impossible to say anything True using the scientific process. It's goal is to get closer and closer to the truth. Like taking sum(1/2^n) (i.e. always taking a step halfway to your goal), it never reaches 1.
Neither of these values is unchanging. The acceleration due to gravity depends on where you are, and changes from moment to moment, even in a stationary place. The 9.81m/s^2 is an approximation. It changes all the time. The speed of light is exact, but it's exact by definition, and only within a certain context. It is an average speed of light. A photon can travel at any speed it wants (Heisenberg uncertainty principle), but on average it will travel at c. In other words, it is entirely possible to set up an experiment and get variance within that measurement, albeit according to QM, the experimental setup would have to be very small.
Even the word "the speed of light" is a misnomer. It is more appropriately called the speed of information. And yet we have many theories that allow for the possibility that information (or light) can travel at any speed by altering spacetime itself (both QM and GR allow for non-locality, in fact they practically insist on it). The very idea of spacetime, upon which all theories of the movements of the heavens are based (including the speed of light) is an unproven axiom with a great deal of controversy. We have had to make up the ideas of "Dark Energy" and "Dark Matter" just to hold onto those axioms even though there is zero other evidential support for those ideas.
The point is, all of the things you think are "objective truths" are not at all. They are subjective ideas that do not capture the whole of a thing. They are fraught with controversy or subjective interpretation. The greatest breakthroughs in physics (or science in general) come from subjective bias AKA intuition bucking the standard (consensus) view and thinking of things in completely new and subjective ways.
That's not what I said. In fact, I said exactly the opposite. "It Is what It Is" is a clear statement of "Truth". You keep using the phrase "objective truth," and I am trying to show you that "objective truth" and Truth are the same exact statement.
I never stated we couldn't understand Truth, I said we couldn't speak it. Our language is insufficient. Our definitions are incomplete in every possible sense. We say, "here is a spoon," for example. Well, what is a spoon?
Does that really define the Whole of what you hold in your hand and call a spoon? Maybe its a shiny, curved metal thing. Maybe its a bunch of metal ions in a specific mixture (alloy) that is hard and conducts electricity.
Our current best model of Reality (quantum electrodynamics (QED)) suggests the most accurate way to look at things (most likely to agree with measurement) is by writing down the equations of a bunch of waves and adding them up into one wave (even if it’s a little tedious on the scale of a spoon).
Each of the constituent waves are really just the one wave, and there is no way to distinguish the waves of say, any one particular electron. In fact, there is no way to say the resultant waveform is really made up of a bunch of little waveforms, that is instead an idea that we have, and the math works out pretty well. But really, there is only one wave. This wave is connected to all other waves. It is connected to the "waves" that make up the hand holding the spoon for example. They also are completely inseparable except through thought. That separation is not truly appropriate, because the system is described most accurately by the single wave. Extend that out to the whole of the universe, which is, through QM, most accurately described by a single wave. The abstraction of the individual "spoon" wave is an idea that is an approximation of the most accurate form of the equation.
Maybe the Truth is, there is no “spoon.”
There is a Truth, but we can't speak it because our words are insufficient. That doesn't mean we can't understand it. I suggest the best way to understand the Truth is to stop trying to speak it, and learn how to listen. It speaks to us all day long, every day of our lives.
That is the opposite of the truth, as I have explained above. Bias is a fundamental (inseparable) part of the process. Explain what it is to eliminate a suspected bad data point other than bias? Just because we can tie it to an event, does that make it sound decision? Yet we do it all the time. That is our intuition saying, we should remove this because when you bumped the table, the detector went BRRSST.
And it is perfectly sensible to do that. Either that or repeat the whole experiment if necessary. What we would not do is include that data point and go through all the process of explaining why because then we would never get anything done, because these sorts of human errors occur all the time.
Science is not about removing bias. If it were, we wouldn't have to debate the science. It would be the truth. It is DEBATE that is the real strength of science, not "lack of bias" in measurement, presentation, etc. That is a myth and has nothing to do with the reality of how science actually proceeds, and has since its beginning. That is why it is oriented, geared specifically, towards debate, because the complete elimination of bias is impossible.