
Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills - sprucely
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-schools-should-not-teach-general-critical-thinking-skills
======
internaut
Interesting critique. I'm inclined to agree. Having one good counterexample
(or a lot of solid confirmatory examples) can often change your mind
significantly. You can't accumulate this kind of information from first
principals. That's why exploration is important, in the form of world
experience and reading books. Travel does not broaden the mind because of
physical geography, it does so because you realize vast numbers of people have
a different frame of reference to yourself.

Without Darwin's visits to the islands and South America his ideas would have
remained dormant. The same is true of reading a good book. You may have had
those ideas before in some tangential form, but now you see them fully
realized on the page. A single turn of phrase can make an idea click.

I also enjoy things such as The Sequences (general rationality heuristics), so
it is a paradox.

