【Academic achievement and critical thinking ability are not directly proportional?】

In school, people often use grades to determine a person's intelligence, and good grades are academic masters. However, while getting a high score, it does not necessarily mean that he is really thinking, maybe it is just that he has better test skills?

There is a study done on different departments of top universities in the United States, and the study asked students to take a "critical thinking test":

This type of topic requires the use of an applied framework of conceptual reasoning, in which students apply the logic and abstract concepts learned in textbooks to everyday practical situations.

The results were unexpected: Academic scores were not associated with critical thinking scores!

That is to say, students who can get high scores in these exams can follow the steps to get good grades when they usually face exams that do not require too complicated conceptual reasoning; however, when they need conceptual analogy or practical application, these are taught in textbooks. Not useful.

Logically speaking, we should first learn the "method of thinking" and then learn the content of knowledge . For example, we should first learn common sense such as logic, methodology, and problem-solving ability;

However, the current education often puts the cart before the horse. Everyone has learned a lot of professional knowledge, but basic common sense is lacking.

[Interdisciplinary thinking and Fermi method, dismantling problems with limited knowledge]

In the book, two methods are proposed for us to train thinking methods:

1. Cross-disciplinary thinking

If you want to be able to think by analogy, the first step is to be able to think about the same problem from different fields and different angles, so that you can have different perspectives to comprehensively select the best solution.

The University of Chicago has launched an interdisciplinary critical thinking course, which aims to introduce the thinking tools of various disciplines, that is, to teach students to use different frameworks in science, mathematics, humanities and social sciences, and after familiarity, they can use different perspectives. right question.

In Taiwan, it is sometimes difficult to come into contact with such a diverse learning environment at one time. At present, the school still emphasizes professional learning. I think reading books and online courses are the best way to get in touch with knowledge in different fields and promote your ability to think across fields.

The Fermi method

If you were asked the question, "How many piano tuners are there in New York?" how would you answer?

Most people may guess randomly, even if you have strong chemical knowledge or social science knowledge, it seems that you may not be able to answer it; however, this kind of question is to train people's critical thinking.

The Fermi method can help you guess the closest answer from your limited knowledge.

If you know the population of New York, you can roughly estimate how many households there are, what percentage of those households have a piano (high percentage of households with children, low percentage of single households), how often pianos need to be tuned, how long it takes, a pianist How many home tunings can he go to in a day, and how many days a year does he work?

The answer is around 100. It's not about guessing the exact answer, it's about using structured and educated analogies to break down the problem and solve it. (Sometimes it also requires common sense or knowledge of a different field).

In the future, humans will face unfamiliar problems more often (familiar problems will be left to robots and AI to do), so when facing new problems, it is more important to have a framework and a method of thinking, because these problems are impossible to take What I have learned in the past is hard.

【in conclusion】

Knowing how to think and having the tools to analyze the modern world may actually be more important than learning a major in a department. The focus is on "learning how to learn".

When we are able to effectively learn various fields and even new concepts from scratch, we will be more able to integrate and not be limited by old knowledge.

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