#critical-thinking

#critical-thinking

Not every conversation with AI ends in the same place. Some end where they began: I arrive with an idea, the machine agrees, I leave satisfied. No disagreements, plenty of praise. What a delightful conversation. Others end in territory I didn't know existed. I leave with doubts that weren't there when I entered. The difference between these two outcomes is rarely about the tool. It's about the level of awareness I bring into the conversation and the question I decide to ask.

AI is designed to make people not think. But why study philosophy at university if you don't want to think - if you don't want to sharpen your critical abilities - and instead outsource them to a mindless AI program? In these moments, both his students' studies and his own role as a teacher feel less meaningful.

BrainSprout is about cultivating creative confidence and critical thinking in young people. We focus on helping students engage with big ideas-narrative, symbolism, ethics, technology-through art and storytelling. It's less about prescribing belief systems and more about helping people develop intellectual resilience and imagination.

In fact, I didn't even think to ask ChatGPT what might work in my favor if I just stayed the course.I was a "LLeMming": a term Lila Shroff uses to describe compulsive AI users in The Atlantic. Lila Shroff shares that just as the adoption of writing reduced our memory and calculators devalued basic arithmetic skills, AI could be atrophying our critical thinking skills.

Making good decisions doesn't merely rely on how much information we take in; it also depends on the quality of that information. If what we've instead ingested and accepted is misinformation or disinformation - incorrect information that doesn't align with factual reality - then we not only become susceptible to grift and fraud ourselves, but we risk having our minds captured by charismatic charlatans. When that occurs, we can lose everything: money, trust, relationships, and even our mental independence.

They escaped persecution in the form of violent antisemitism and came to Canada with next to nothing. They built their lives from the ground up and understood, through lived experience, what the normalization of cruelty did to the human spirit, how quickly people can be swayed by the opinions of the day, and how easily one could forfeit the human capacity to stop and truly think about what one is doing.

I've interviewed over 200 people for articles, from startup founders to burned-out middle managers, and I've discovered something fascinating: intellectual depth isn't about fancy degrees or knowing obscure facts. It shows up in how we communicate. When certain habits dominate someone's style, it reveals a concerning lack of curiosity and critical thinking that goes beyond just being annoying-it fundamentally limits their ability to engage with the world meaningfully.

You're not alone. And you're definitely not rude. Some of us are simply wired differently. We crave depth, substance, and meaning in our interactions. Small talk feels like eating cotton candy when you're hungry for a real meal. Growing up, my family dinners were never just about passing the salt. They turned into passionate debates about ideas, politics, and the meaning of life.

The most exciting moments for a teacher come when students stumble onto something unexpected-when they run to my office to tell me about a new twist in their thinking about birds in Sula or the discovery of yet another biblical reflection in Housekeeping. Those revelations come only when they survey the text as it is, not as they assume it to be.

On December 25, 1914, British and German soldiers stopped fighting and met in the middle of "no man's land" to socialize, exchange gifts, and play soccer. In what has become known as theChristmas Truce of World War I, the men, for a moment, returned to being normal people. Perhaps the holiday made them nostalgic for their families and the joy of the season. From inside the cold, wet, snow-filled trenches, one side started singing Christmas carols, and then the other side joined in.

1. A gravity-based marble run game to enhance critical thinking and have your child constantly challenging themselves by undertaking harder and harder levels. Great for developing logical reasoning, spatial reasoning, and planning skills, this game will have the whole family joining in on the fun and working together to get through all 60 challenges. Promising review: "Bought it for my 6-year-old nephew, and he loved it! The game is set up so that my nephew could figure it out intuitively with minimal guidance. It introduces children to fundamental concepts of physics and problem-solving mechanics in a very natural way." - Seoung Kim Get it from Amazon for $24.72.

From nurturing curiosity to harnessing cognitive science principles and designing learning for co-intelligence, November's Guest Author Article Showcase spotlights some excellent pieces on human-AI convergence. What happens when humans focus solely on technology when designing learning with Artificial Intelligence? Why do we need to teach and cultivate critical thinking? Can AI tools amplify our humanity? In no particular order, here are last month's top guest author articles on this hot topic.

The other researcher suggested that the methodology we use should, to a large extent, be dictated by our epistemological philosophy. For example, are you a positivist, interpretivist, a hypothetico-deductivist, a post-positivist or some other stance appearing on the list of epistemological perspectives? I imagine many readers of this blog, like myself, will be surprised by this stance. Since day one of my research methods training, I've been taught that it's the research question that should dictate your methodology...

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli dismissed a muddled theory with this single, scathing line: "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong." It sounds pedantic, but Pauli's point is an important one. Some claims are wrong not because they contradict evidence, but because they can't be tested at all. And that distinction is just as relevant when debating on social media today as it was when applied in the field of 20th-century physics.

Our Greek forebears, as early as Hippocrates, coined the term "kρίσις" to describe a "turning point"; kρίσις, a word related to the Proto-Indo-European root krei-, is etymologically connected to practices like "sieving," "discriminating" and "judging." In fact, the most widely mentioned skill we humanists offer our students, critical thinking, originates from the same practice of deliberate "sieving." Thus, when we call ourselves critics and write critical theory, we admit that crisis might just be our natural habitat.

The fretting has swelled from a murmur to a clamor, all variations on the same foreboding theme: " Your Brain on ChatGPT." " AI Is Making You Dumber." " AI Is Killing Critical Thinking." Once, the fear was of a runaway intelligence that would wipe us out, maybe while turning the planet into a paper-clip factory. Now that chatbots are going the way of Google-moving from the miraculous to the taken-for-granted-the anxiety has shifted, too, from apocalypse to atrophy.

Thinking can be both active and passive. We can choose where to direct our attention and use reason to solve problems or consider why things happen. Still, we cannot completely control our stream of thought; feelings and ideas bubble up from influences outside our control. One kind of passive thinking is letting others think for us. Such passive thinking, Kant thought, was not good for anybody.

Prescribed burns reduce fuels, leading to less intense wildfires, along with other proven benefits, such as promoting the resilience of forest habitats. Carefully managed prescribed burns are a vital component in our efforts to combat the threat of wildfire, which increases with the intensification of climate change and the growing proximity of human populations to wildlands. This initiative helps not only property owners but also anyone who values public lands and the cleaner air that comes with a reduction in wildfire intensity.

We're told to "trust our gut," and to look for shifty eyes or nervous fidgeting. Detectives in movies and TV shows spot liars through micro-expressions. Yet across hundreds of experiments, the average rate of accurate lie-truth discrimination is 54% (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). In fact, computers often outperform judges on deciding who will skip bail, and seasoned police officers who are most confident in their "lie-detecting" abilities are often the least accurate (Gladwell, 2019).

AI models can tend to be "yes-men." They are sycophantic by design, meaning they agree with us, support our ideas, and want to help. Part of the reason I think so many AI projects fail is because the human factor is overlooked. The same biases that apply to us also apply to AI, so it's important to factor in psychological principles when building experiments, agents, and automation.

Every day, we make choices, big and small. From what we eat for dinner to our careers to life-altering decisions, we are continually confronted with challenging and even intriguing complex choices. It can be easy just to follow our usual habits, ask friends and colleagues, or search the internet for advice. Sometimes, we sit back and wait for things to happen, hoping they'll sort themselves out.

Agency is what keeps us from running on cognitive autopilot. Artificial intelligence now offers to do much of that work for us. With a single prompt, we can receive elegant summaries and polished solutions that are so smooth and immediate that they can (and often do) lull us into submission. If we aren't careful, we risk becoming passengers in our own intellectual journey, letting the machine set the course.