August 29th there was a meme that came out and went viral shortly after hurricane Harvey made landfall the meme said that on August 29th Hurricane Katrina Isaac Gustav and Harvey all made landfall on the same day of August 29th that is an absolutely amazing coincidence and it's absolutely not true but nobody bothered to fact-check the mean before they shared it and it really highlights one of the reasons why we need to learn the skill set of critical thinking we need to know what critical thinking is why it's important and some things that we can do
to become better at critical thinking my journey with critical thinking started shortly after I reported on board at the Navy senior enlisted Academy here in Newport Rhode Island it's a school that focuses on educating the top enlisted military leaders from all the services and we focus on things like leadership communication and of course thinking when I got there we used the word critical thinking quite freely we wanted our students to be critically thinking for their assignments but it wasn't something that we had actually investigated ourselves so we started asking can we get a critical thinking
class can we develop on and finally our wish was granted and I was lucky enough to get volunteered to develop this class and what I learned when I started researching critical thinking is that I didn't know as much about critical thinking as I thought I did which really struck me because I had college I had a degree and I thought I would have had that critical thinking thing nailed but what I discovered is is critical thinking is far less about our problem-solving and much more about analyzing our thinking finding the flaws in it and becoming
good thinkers if I was going to define critical thinking I would say it's the art of taking all of the information that is coming at you from all the mediums that we have and boy we've got a lot nowadays and being able to filter through it being able to find the facts find the opinions and then take the information and make the best decisions we can with what we've got there are many different parts to critical thinking but we'll look at biases and dirty tricks today we all have biases most of us are biased to
state this level down here this unconscious level we're not aware that we have them but one of the goals in critical thinking is to raise our awareness of our biases so that way we know what they are and then we can do something about it one of my biases reared its ugly head on a recent trip to Disney World Disney has a wonderful transportation system they take you from your resort hotel to the theme parks and back to your hotel so you don't have to worry about driving it's really designed to alleviate stress well we
had a particularly long day at one of the theme parks and we were waiting at the bus stop forever and we kept seeing buses for every other resort drive by except for ours and finally I see our resort bus step coming towards us nor get very excited and then a little bit later I was filled with this sense of oh my gosh this is going to take forever but luckily my critical thinking skills kicked in and I was able to identify why some reason I had it in my mind that she was gonna do a
bad job of loading up some wheelchairs that needed to get put on board and I thought it was gonna take forever and it was just gonna ruin our night well the gender of the driver really has no bearing on whether or not they're gonna be good or bad at loading wheelchairs she did a wonderful job we were on our way and had a great night but it really could have ruined my evening well biases are those things that we have internally but we've also got to contend with dirty tricks we'll see dirty tricks in discussions
debates interviews sometimes even news articles and the purpose of dirty tricks is to basically win an argument by discrediting or undermining either the person or the argument itself I saw one recently after a president Trump was elected Bill Nye was on Fox doing an interview with Tucker Carlson the topic of discussion was climate change what they were really discussing was how climate change has accelerated and human activity has helped to contribute to the acceleration of climate change this is something that most of the scientific community pretty much believes in but tucker carlson was pushing bill
nye for a particular bit of information he wanted to know the exact amount of human activity and involvement had increased the rate of climate change well that's something the scientific community hasn't quite figured out yet but what was happening was tucker carlson was using Bill Nyes inability to give that one bit of information to discredit the argument saying the scientific community maybe you don't have your stuff together and if you don't have it on that one number maybe you don't have it for anything so knowing a little bit about what critical thinking is is important
but why is it important why does it matter so when we don't know what our biases are we let that drive a lot of our thinking our biases can shape many of the decisions in our lives from who will hire who will fire where we'll live where we'll go to school and when we're making important decisions in our lives we need to know why we're making them not just base it on this feeling of well that feels good or bad because that's usually our bias talking and when we're not critical thinking we've essentially handed over
permission for somebody else to do our thinking for us and that's particularly troublesome when you learn that people are using dirty tricks to win arguments often not even based on facts or evidence and then finally on any given day if you're scrolling through your social media feed you can see things like liberals think or conservatives think lumping people into groups and what this does is creates this us-versus-them mentality and instead of bringing us together it really divides us and what we need to do in order to have meaningful engagement and conversation is come together and
have that in generalizations are one of those things that doesn't help us so after learning a little bit about what critical thinking is why it's important maybe thankful what can we do well there's a lot we can do right now to improve our critical thinking we need to look at our schools and what we can do personally I'm a big fan of school I would go to school non-stop if it was free it's not but that's okay but one of the things you learn when you love to go to school is that you research a
lot of schools and you I mean you take a lot of classes and in all the classes that I take in critical thinking is something I'd see in a syllabus but not a class that I'd actually have to take we need to start injecting this into our school systems we need to teach students to learn the difference between facts and opinions to view the world from multiple lenses and to ask meaningful questions and most of us will probably never set foot in a classroom again and that's okay because there's things that we can do right
now on our own to become better thinkers humans are funny people and one of the things we like to do is we like to find people who agree with us and when we choose our news sources we tend to wrap ourselves in the comfortable blanket of we we just found a new source that agrees with everything that we agree with one of the things we need to do is we need to take that blanket we need to cast it aside and we too without bias look at opposing views and see what they have to offer
because often they can be good things we need to ask questions see if somebody is trying to push a particular agenda with what they're presenting to you and one of the most difficult things that we need to do is we have to practice we can't walk out of here today and say hey I sat through a TED talk on critical thinking I've got this thing down now it doesn't work that way critical thinking requires discipline and practice much like the Olympians and Paralympians who represent their countries they worked hard they had discipline and they practice
well in order for us to become stronger critical thinkers that's one of the things that we need to do so we need to know what critical thinking is why it's important and things we can do in order to be better at it and so the next time you get that super share-worthy meme or headline article why not critically think on it before you hit share thank you [Applause]
