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July 6, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

18:08

1692 Critical Thinking - A Video Series from a Freedomain Radio Listener - http://www.fdrurl.com/crit

An excellent video series on critical thinking from a longtime Freedomain Radio listener -- http://www.fdrurl.com/crit

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	Hi, this is Stefan Molyneux.
	This is a conversation I have with a listener who is producing a good series on critical thinking that I would recommend.
	You can check it out at fdrurl.com forward slash C-R-I-T. Hello?
	Oh, hey. How's it going? Pretty well, thanks.
	How are you, Steph? Oh, I'm great.
	Thank you. So, where would you like to start?
	Well, um...
	I think it's great.
	I guess you wanted to talk a little bit about or get people who listen to this a bit more of an understanding about the project that you're doing around critical thinking, which I think is great and I think I'm really looking forward to hearing.
	So I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about it, whet people's appetite, perhaps tell them how to get a hold of what it is that you're producing.
	Well, sure. I guess...
	I've had a bit of a desire to do this for six months or so, but I haven't had the time until now.
	And I've also seen a number of people on the boards asking questions about, you know, how can I learn this, how can I learn that, and whatnot.
	So I thought, you know, I might just put something together and see how it goes.
	So that's kind of how it started.
	I'm going to be putting the first one out today sometime.
	I spent all day yesterday It's just an introduction to some of the very basic principles.
	So I'm hoping to get a lot of feedback, what works, what doesn't work, all those kinds of things.
	But basically what it's about is just helping people learn a set of skills that is critical thinking.
	People in FDR obviously are far better than the average population at this stuff already, but I'm hoping to Help them with their vocabulary and gaining more confidence in articulating their positions about certain things.
	I'm going to run through a range of different topics, starting from the very basics, getting up to some more advanced stuff.
	I hope that people are going to find it useful, basically.
	I think that's great.
	And I mean, there's stuff that I haven't covered.
	I mean, and it's not like people are always welcome to cover stuff that I've covered, but I haven't done, you know, formal logic and I haven't done any sort of formal course on critical thinking.
	So I think it's a great thing that you're producing.
	And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you were working on yesterday and the kind of critical thinking basics, as you were saying, that you were trying to get across in the first episode.
	Sure. Well, I wanted to come in at a very, very low level, start at a very low level, because I know some people can be kind of intimidated when you get into the philosophical stuff.
	So I thought if I start at the very bottom, then everyone can...
	Everyone can kind of come along with it and people who already know the basics can skip the first few or whatever and that'll be fine.
	But the first one I did, it's a video.
	It's about 15 minutes long and it's also an article form and there's also some kind of practice questions that I've created that If people are interested, they can have a shot at and discuss and debate and whatnot on the message boards.
	I found personally that I learned a lot more by doing those kinds of things, by actually practicing the skills rather than just listening.
	If you're just going to go along and memorize terms or something like that, you won't get a lot out of it.
	These are the kinds of skills you actually need to put into use to really understand.
	Sorry, go ahead. No, please go ahead.
	The first episode is very basic.
	It starts with what is an argument.
	It's starting that basic and it's going through different types of sentences we come across, different forms of arguments can take, what statements are, all the basics, premises, conclusions, conjunctions, all these kinds of things.
	It talks a little bit about language and the vagueness of language and How when evaluating something, because language is inherently vague the way it's used, that it can be difficult to extract the meaning from the language in some cases.
	So it touches on those kinds of things.
	Yeah, it's basically just a really simple start, I think.
	I don't think any of the content in the actual thing will be new to very many people at FDR but I think perhaps the terms and stuff like that will be and I wanted to introduce the terms and I guess give people an understanding of the vocabulary so it's easier to build on top of those as we go along and get into more complex type topics.
	Right, so it is a more formal way of looking at arguments.
	Now, are you looking at them more syllogistically or more how...
	Misdirection can occur within language when it comes to a logical argument, you know, where somebody defines a term and then switches the meaning and doesn't note the switch of meaning and all of those kinds of sophisticated or logical tricks that can occur, or illogical tricks, I suppose.
	Is this more around looking at it syllogistically, or is this more around tricks of language, or is that something that you're going to deal with later, or what's the approach for the first few shows?
	That will come in later for sure.
	The first show is...
	When people see it, they'll see it is very, very basic stuff.
	I mean, we'll go into fallacies and games that people can play and all those kinds of things later on.
	And I'll introduce some of those kinds of concepts like conflating terms and things like that through the examples, which I think is a great way to learn because people have to kind of sit down and figure out, you know, I can see something that's not quite right here, but...
	When you actually have to figure out what it is, then I think your understanding improves.
	All those kinds of things will be taken on, I guess.
	I hope it generates discussion as well.
	I think that's the main thing. I think when people are talking about this kind of thing, that's the best way to learn it.
	I agree, and I certainly think it's definitely a hole in what I've been doing.
	I just haven't really been able to find a way to make it enjoyable.
	But that's not to say that it can't be.
	That could be entirely by my limitations of imagination.
	So I really, really look forward to it.
	I haven't had a chance to look at it yet.
	Have you posted it yet? And also, where can people get a hold of it?
	I haven't posted it yet.
	I'm going to post it within the next couple of hours.
	It'll be, I think, in the philosophy forum on the message board.
	So I'm going to post kind of an overview of the whole thing and also the first episode, if you will, and the first article.
	So people should be able to find that pretty shortly.
	And you're welcome to, if you want to send it to me, or I can create an account on the FDR blog.
	I mean, Nate and I have posted some stuff there.
	If you wanted to post it there as well, you're certainly more than welcome to.
	And what I can do is, in the description for this, if it goes out as a podcast, I can create a short URL to point to the video that you'll be producing so that more people can get a chance to...
	To have a look because I think it's a really, really worthwhile thing to do.
	It's really tough because we have this amazing instinct for logic.
	I think people have an amazing instinct for logic, but bubbling that up to the surface and understanding at a very precise level what is occurring in a logical argument or what is not occurring in a logical argument if what is not occurring is logic, it's really tough.
	It's really tough. It's the difference between knowing how to catch a ball and knowing how to describe I think it's a great, great thing that you're doing. Oh, I absolutely agree.
	I mean, I was always pretty confident with my logical abilities and my bullshit detects pretty good, but when I learned this stuff at uni, the biggest thing that I took out of it was the ability to articulate what I kind of knew on a kind of base level, if that makes sense. I already knew something was wrong or whatever, but it just gave me the ability to say, I know exactly why this is wrong and I can explain it to you.
	So the ability to put forward arguments and articulate problems with arguments is the biggest thing I think that I hope to pass on.
	Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, I certainly wish you the very best.
	And if you want to do anything through FDR, or if you want to, maybe we can throw out something you've done as a podcast to the stream to get people more interested, because I do think it's a really, really worthwhile thing to be doing and strongly encourage people to study this kind of stuff.
	I mean, it is the building blocks of philosophy.
	So I think it's really, really important.
	Yeah, me too, and hopefully I can figure out a way to do it that's not too boring, because some of the stuff is pretty hard to get through.
	There's a lot of definitions at the start and whatnot, but I'm trying to be light on the teaching side and more heavy on the questions and discussion side, so hopefully that turns out well.
	Yeah, I mean, I can never figure out how to do an introduction to logic in my car.
	That was always a challenge for me.
	So I think that it's a really, really good thing to do.
	So I wish you the best of luck with it.
	Thank you very much. Was there anything you said that you had something else that you wanted to chat about?
	Is that for another time or did you want to polish it up?
	Oh, it was just related to this.
	I mean, I've never done anything like this before.
	I don't have particularly a lot of confidence when it comes to presenting things and things like that.
	I was wondering if you had any kind of general tips that you had that could help me communicate effectively or make videos or write articles or any of that type of stuff.
	Yeah, I mean, it is a real challenge.
	I always rack my brain looking for a good metaphor.
	I find a good metaphor is a way of really pushing through a conversation relatively quickly.
	And so that can be really helpful, but it can take time.
	To come up with a good metaphor.
	But it's really worth polishing it and trying to find the right metaphor.
	I think that's really helpful. Another thing too, of course, is to look at current events and try to pull out some philosophical arguments or rational arguments.
	So you can take a newspaper article and break it down in terms of fallacies.
	You can also take...
	I mean, you could look at just about any popular video on YouTube and you can see all the comments and you can see all the logical fallacies that are recurring in the comments.
	You can break those down.
	And that gives something that people can put it to work in.
	work in.
	I've always, as you know, I've always tried to make philosophy something that you can do in the now, not something that you can study and forget.
	I've always, as you know, I've always tried to make philosophy something that you can do in the now, not something that you can study and forget.
	And so if you can give people ways of approaching conflicts that they have in their lives, either online or in person, if you can, or even the media that they're consuming, you can sharpen their skills in a way that they can put to use more immediately so they don't just sort of watch something and say, oh, that's cool, and then not really know you can sharpen their skills in a way that they can put to use more immediately so I I think that kind of stuff can be really helpful because the moment you try and do something in your life, it's a very humbling thing, right?
	Because you think you understand something and then you really try and do it and it doesn't really work out the way that, at least for me, half the time it doesn't work out the way that I want.
	I'm like, oh, I didn't really know it that well.
	I have to go and try it again.
	And I think to encourage people as much as possible to apply what it is that you're talking about in their daily lives I think is a very, very powerful thing.
	Right. One of the things I was thinking about doing once we got a little bit into it was finding things that are actually going on on the FDR boards and kind of taking those into one of these threads and kind of breaking them down and analyzing them.
	But I was a little bit anxious that maybe that wouldn't go over so well.
	Like if, you know, we took Bob's post and started really breaking it down and everything, you know, Bob might think we're picking on him or something like that.
	You can always ask him, of course.
	You can always ask him, I think, and say...
	And you wouldn't be picking on Bob because if it's most threads, everybody's making some...
	There's a lot of mistakes that are occurring because people simply haven't abstracted to this degree.
	So it would be looking at a thread and you may pick an old troll thread or even a thread where there's a lot of conflict that's going on at the moment and say, you know, what's really going on here.
	And another thing that I found sort of interesting was, I mean, I took a lot of logic in my courses in Aristotle and we would take just a paragraph, just a paragraph, and we would break it down into its logical components.
	And that was challenging because what it helps you to do is to read really carefully carefully.
	And I think that's one of the things that A Course in Logic really helps people to do is to really slow down the way that they approach discussion and argumentation.
	And this is true of just about everything, right?
	So when you first learn how to surf in tennis or swing a golf club, you do it very, very slowly.
	You just sort of go and let rip, right?
	You do it very slowly so you can figure out each one of the moves and then you slowly accelerate it to the point where you can hit it really fast and hard.
	And I think that getting people to slow down is really important, because so many people react emotionally alone when they're in debates or in discussions, which is why tempers tend to flare and things tend to get pretty unpleasant.
	But helping people to understand how much can be packed into as little as two or three sentences, how much information, how much argumentation, how many premises, how many assumptions, how many definitions are included in two or three sentences really helps people, I think, to slow down. And once they slow down, they recognize just how complex all this stuff is and how many assumptions there are in just about any argument you launch into.
	And I think that helps people to take less opposing positions, if that makes any sense, just realizing how much is embedded.
	So I think getting people to understand how much logic is underlying the tip of the iceberg of the language that they're experiencing, either in person or on the web, I think could be really helpful because that's, I think, pretty essential to having more civilized and productive discussions.
	Oh, I agree completely.
	And for the people who kind of read the article and watch the video and have a look at the questions, they'll breeze through the article and the video and think, oh, that's all pretty easy.
	But then, I mean, I've made up a set of seven questions, and I think they're between one and three sentences long.
	And if anybody can kind of – I mean, this is only about kind of arguments, like identify an argument, tell me what the conclusion is.
	If anyone can, you know, do all those seven – Successfully, I'll be surprised, which I think should make people stop and pause and think, wow, sometimes these things get, you know, simple things get really, really complicated, so hopefully they get challenged in that way too.
	Right, right, right.
	I mean, you're certainly welcome.
	If you think it would be of use, you may want to start with, you know, a more recognized philosopher like Aristotle, which is what I did to sort of take just a paragraph and break it down into its logical components.
	But, you know, if it's in the FDR stream or towards FDR listeners, you're welcome to take a chunk out of any of the more sort of quasi-formal arguments that I've put forward either in UPB or in some of my articles.
	And say, well, you know, what are the major minor premises and so on?
	And that could be helpful. And certainly, of course, if I've made errors, I'd be happy to correct them, and that would be also useful.
	But it may be a way of hooking into some stuff that people have already read and may have some familiarity with.
	Oh, absolutely. I plan on doing that.
	And I already have particular things in mind for the future, like when we cover certain types of topics, I'll use certain extracts from what's on FTR. But yeah, I mean, each one will just kind of be questions about Yeah, I'll definitely do that for all the different topics that I plan on covering.
	Fantastic. Well, I think it's a great project, and I think what it will really do, obviously, even if the response is not great, and I hope that it is, but what it does is it really helps Cement the knowledge within you to teach others.
	And that, of course, is a great way of using your education because it's a no-lose, right?
	So if people are interested, which I'm sure they will be, but even if they're not, you at least have had the practice and example of setting it down, structuring it, and finding a way to communicate it to others, which really drives the knowledge deep into your own mind in a way that even an exam doesn't quite...
	Right. And I found that already.
	I mean, I spent 12 or 13 hours yesterday just doing one article and one video and coming up with some questions, which was a huge amount of time, a lot longer than I thought it would take.
	It's a lot harder when you're on the other side.
	Oh, it's hideous how long it all takes, but it does get a little easier as you go along.
	But oh yeah, so all my first stuff just took like unbelievable amounts of time.
	All right. Well, do send me a link when you've got it up, and I will make sure that I include this, and I strongly urge people to have a look at Ash's stuff.
	I mean, you're obviously a very, very smart fellow, very well-educated in this area, and I'm sure it will be very, very well worth looking at, and I certainly wish you the best of luck with the project.
	Oh, thank you very much, Seth. You're very welcome, man.
	Talk to you soon. Bye.

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