Why Intelligent People Have a Hard Time With Critical Thinking
This Counter-Intuitive Fact Stops Many People From Becoming Critical Thinkers
In today’s world, people seem to use the terms “critical thinker” and “intelligent” as if they’re somewhat synonymous, or perhaps as if they meant the exact same thing. Most people who haven’t been trained in critical thinking don’t even know what it is. Critical thinking is a set of skills that one learns through studying the various cognitive biases, heuristics, and mental shortcuts that people make in thinking to speed up the process and simplify results. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone who thought they understood critical thinking say something to the effect of, “Critical thinking is something that just can’t be taught!” I’d be on my way to retirement by now.
Precisely the opposite is true, of course, that critical thinking can only be understood if it’s been taught because it deals with deeply ingrained biases that cloud our judgment and impair our ability to view a situation objectively.
A quick glance at someone like Alex Jones will show that the ability to convey a point convincingly is no guarantee that a person will be right about the facts. And Donald Trump has found his niche audience of die-hard believers, even if a bulk of the often incoherent balderdash coming out of his mouth is flatly untrue. The Sandy Hook tragedy actually happened and to deny so convincingly is more dangerous than to deny so in private. While I don’t wish any ill-will on anyone, I think it’s fitting that Jones is now paying for the damage he’s done by way of lawsuits, and president Trump is likely to as well, as impeachment proceedings come underway. While I don’t consider either brilliant men, it’s undeniable that they’re intelligent enough to rationalize their way through the world and come up with plausible-sounding (to some) ideas that somehow grant them this unusual amount of credibility. Both, however, are terrible at thinking critically.
Loosely put, critical thinking is more about analysis than argument. When given a set of facts, critical thinking is what helps us come to a true appraisal of those facts; it has nothing to do with intelligence in our ability to argue, colloquially speaking. Intelligent people, on the other hand, are usually very, very good at debates and arguments — they’re very capable of accessing a wealth of knowledge and information from various sources, and synthesizing that material together in order to create a cohesive, plausible-sounding whole. The problem with this is that plausibility isn’t the truth. Intelligent people often never learn critical thinking simply because they don’t have to. They’re confident in their information and can hold their own in a world where information matters, but holding your own is very different from actually being right or being able to make sound judgments.
Logical Fallacies
Many highly intelligent people fall for the Monte Carlo fallacy, otherwise known as “the gambler’s fallacy” when they play the lottery every week. They rationalize that playing the lottery weekly will increase their odds the more times they play, with a minimal commitment, only a few dollars, which is well within their budget. This assumption is pretty universal. The problem is it’s entirely wrong. Someone could play the lottery every single week from the moment they turn 18 until they died at 100-years-old and still have the same odds of winning as someone who played only once. This is because the lottery numbers reset with each draw. A similar version of this is the assumption that if I were to participate in a coin toss ten times and got heads 7 times in a row, that the 8th time would be more likely to land on tails. The truth is, each time we flip, the odds of each are roughly 50/50, as the odds reset with each toss.
For an insightful and in-depth article on logical fallacies, RationalWiki has a great piece on them here. Most people know a few logical fallacies, but usually, only the ones that pertain to proving some other person wrong. What about heuristics, though? Heuristics are mental shortcuts that aid in our thinking, they make thinking about a lot of data much easier, but the cost to accuracy can be catastrophic. The Availability Heuristic, for instance, is when we rely on memory to recall something, rather than data, and people do this all the time.
Do more people die from drowning or commercial airplane crashes every year, in the United States? Most people answer that airplane crashes definitely kill more people annually. We always remember seeing airplane crashes on the television news and they make for interesting-but-macabre documentaries that make us feel a little uneasy. The truth is, not a single person died from a commercial airline crash in the U.S. in 2017, but already by October 3rd of that same year, 163 people under the age of 15 only had already drowned.
We tend to forget about small children when asked this question, because our memory tends to focus on things that are perceived threats to us, and most adults don’t see themselves drowning anytime soon. The illusion of control is also at work, as we tend to think that we have no control in the event of an airplane crash and total control over what happens to us in water. These are just a few instances of thinking failures where instruction in critical thinking could help us to not err as much.
Rationalization Isn’t the Same as Logic...
One thing about people with high IQs and intelligent people of all sorts, they’re usually extremely good at explaining themselves or reasoning through their thoughts, feelings, actions, or positions. The hardest part about being intelligent is that many people feel it’s a curse — intelligent people are excellent at being convincing and coming up with easy-to-follow paths when it comes to facts that are laid out from many sources, and are often logically sound — but what happens when the premises are false? What happens when a piece of the data somewhere in the mix is slightly ajar or manipulated accidentally through a lack of understanding of our own biases? Well, that person can often argue and still sound good, while overlooking a glaring omission. Intelligent people are great at rationalizing in subjects of their interest, but, the problem is, of course, that rationalization is itself a logical fallacy.
In many cases, the more intelligent someone is, the better they are at rationalizing, and the better they are at rationalizing, the less they have to think critically.
This is where most smart people run into trouble, in their ability to rationalize and succeed, which never causes them to have to search out the true errors in their own thinking. And I say this with all of the brotherly and sisterly love possible, as I’ve been this person myself. I spent a lot of years being too smart for my own good and never got around to studying the things I should have until later. It’s good for us to be impassioned and capable of effectively conveying what we feel is important, but it’s also important that we all learn how to analyze data efficiently so we make sure that we have the right substrate for our discussions, thoughts, ideas, and lives. I mean, how else do we intend to combat things like climate change if not by having a population capable of critical thinking, making important changes, and holding our representatives accountable?
Critical thinking has a long, rich history that traces all the way back to the humble beginnings of Western Philosophy itself, being one of the first endeavors the brilliant ancient Greeks sought out to explore and discover. We’ve learned a lot since then and I truly feel that critical thinking could greatly aid us in the problems we face today, from climate change to asking ourselves serious questions when it comes to our health and individual medical treatments. The information age is a beautiful thing. We have all of the information in the world at our fingertips, and the ability to learn amazing things. This is a double-edged sword, however, as we have too much information, which is also the perfect time to investigate what it means to think critically, which could very well be described as developing skills in information processing. The time couldn’t be more perfect to develop these skills and, for those who have them, take a refresher course.
Time will tell if we conquer these big societal issues and existential threats, but for now, we can learn critical thinking to improve ourselves and our own lives, as well as the lives around us. Here are some links to some helpful material…
