There’s an extent to which I am totally willing to have a moratorium on global warming. After all, you don’t try to convince a religious fundamentalist that they’re wrong by going “you’re totally wrong, you have no sound basis for thinking the bible is inerrant”—anything that even assumes that is just going to raise their cognitive walls. You change their mind by helping them develop their critical thinking skills. Similarly, I wouldn’t say to a fundamentalist-equivalent skeptic “here, have a link to some IPCC report that shows that you’re wrong, I’m sure you can check it out yourself.” Counterproductive again. So even if theism or global warming are useful examples, I’m willing to avoid them, or certain statements about them, in many cases.
But at the same time I’d rather not just ignore the issue. Fortunately, I’ve found a certain forum that lets community members write posts to develop readers’ critical thinking skills :D So maybe I’ll do that.
Well, it is hard to discuss the improvement in productivity of arguments without any specific examples of arguing. It is hard to think correctly about abstract topics; people perform Wason Selection Task better when it is described in terms of anything specific, than letters and numbers.
There’s an extent to which I am totally willing to have a moratorium on global warming. After all, you don’t try to convince a religious fundamentalist that they’re wrong by going “you’re totally wrong, you have no sound basis for thinking the bible is inerrant”—anything that even assumes that is just going to raise their cognitive walls. You change their mind by helping them develop their critical thinking skills. Similarly, I wouldn’t say to a fundamentalist-equivalent skeptic “here, have a link to some IPCC report that shows that you’re wrong, I’m sure you can check it out yourself.” Counterproductive again. So even if theism or global warming are useful examples, I’m willing to avoid them, or certain statements about them, in many cases.
But at the same time I’d rather not just ignore the issue. Fortunately, I’ve found a certain forum that lets community members write posts to develop readers’ critical thinking skills :D So maybe I’ll do that.
Well, it is hard to discuss the improvement in productivity of arguments without any specific examples of arguing. It is hard to think correctly about abstract topics; people perform Wason Selection Task better when it is described in terms of anything specific, than letters and numbers.