What is critical thinking?

I have an acquaintance who is very much familiar with what is happening in the education system in Sweden. He knows about different schools and different methods for teaching and he expressed to me that he was just sick of all the talk about critical thinking. Everywhere the term ”critical thinking” is used almost as a spell, as long as the pupils are taught critical thinking it's not very important that they know anything else. If the schools just teach critical thinking skills the pupils will find all the other information that they need by themselves.
This is of course idiotic and anyone who used critical thinking would realise that this is the case. My guess is that too many fall in the trap of using a popular word without even trying to think about what critical thinking really is.

What it isn't
To think critical about something is not to be able to find the correct information about that something or the correct answer to a question. (Here ”correct” is of course only a temporary property for a certain set of statements. The term ”correct” is relating to the ”truth” which is only an approximation, our current knowledge of the ”Truth” - how things really are.) To do that is to expand the existing knowledge either for oneself, a group of people, or for humanity if what is discovered is something not previously known. To be able to establish the truth is not the same as being able to think critically. To think critically comes before finding the truth and sometimes a truth cannot be found but it is still possible to think critically before that.
To think critically is not to doubt everything. That is what skepticism is often accused of as well, being nothing but doubt of all assertions. But there is not much thinking involved in doubting everything. It is also not very efficient to doubt everything even if one tries to do it in a Cartesian way in order to find a fundamental Truth, something that cannot be a mistaken impression or a lie by a deceitful god. It would also be difficult to avoid solipsism if one begin to doubt everything.

It is in my opinion likely that critical thinking is not one thing but a collection of different important techniques that has to be used and weighted with judgement. To do this is to employ critical thinking skills. The indiscriminating doubt of everything is not critical thinking but doubt is likely to sometimes be the result of judging the evidence at hand, and it can also be an important part in weighing the evidence. To acquire the skill for critical thinking include both knowing the different techniques and having the experience of using them, non of which is easy or comes natural to us humans. Today I am beginning to write a series of blog-posts about important elements of critical thinking. The first one is Heuristics

Important parts of critical thinking – Heuristics
Some relatively simple heuristics is a part of critical thinking. These might be so well known that they are even made into proverbs. If something sounds too good to be true it probably is – is one that most people have heard. It is probably also possible to include longer stories that are teaching an important lesson of what to do or not to do. To cry wolf is something that is bad, you can understand this either by thinking about how people would react to constantly get false alarms or you can learn it from the story.
But is it critical thinking to know that crying wolf is not a good thing to do? No, not really, the critical thinking part comes earlier. If we get the impulse to sound the alarm even if we know that there is no danger, we can either act on the impulse or think about it and chose not to. In reality we have a choice between the immediate satisfaction of an impulse or to consider what might be good for us in the future if we would need to sound the alarm for real. That it is bad to cry wolf is not something that is set in stone, from an individuals point of view it might be more rewarding to follow the initial impulse and have a laugh sounding the alarm. It can probably be argued that for a society it is bad if people have the habit of crying wolf. But what says that an individual should place the benefit of society above the joy of following an impulse? This is one reason why heuristics are never 100%. But this kind of reasoning is not likely to take place in the head of the person tempted to sound the alarm. The Story About the Boy Who Cried Wolf is a way to avoid thinking critically and arrive at the conclusion without thinking. That is to say the opposite of critical thinking. If we start to think critically about heuristics we realise that they are general rules that are questionable.
I still consider heuristics to be an important part of critical thinking, not because it always leads one to a correct result but because it gives us a quick warning about when we need to start thinking. The heuristics are there because we as a species have learned to not trust our impulses all the time, and we use our culture to give us warnings in tricky situations. The heuristics are something like a starting point for critical thinking. Unfortunately we don't have heuristics for all situations and some people follow them more or less blindly. They have limits but with all their faults they can still not be ignored.

What I did last summer.

Well it is this past summer, not the one before that. The summer of 2013 that I spent planning the 15th European Skeptics Congress that was held in Stockholm in August.

Now you can actually see some of the talks from the congress since it was taped. The talks are availabel online to sometime in 2014.(Talks in English the rest in Swedish.) Enjoy.

http://www.ur.se/Produkter?q=Skeptikerkongressen

The Ghost in the Hotel

Last Wednesday I almost heard a real ghost story. It was at a dinner at Lingon, one of the nicer restaurants in Uppsala, that the conversation turned to hotel stories.

One in our company started to tell us a story of how he woke up in his hotel room in Gothenburg by someone inserting a key in the door and opening it. He was surprisingly not so alarmed that he became clear awake but was still drowsy as he heard the woman enter his room. He could hear that it was a woman by the distinct sound of high healed shoes.
The woman entered the bathroom, closed the door and locked it.

Still not completely awake he started to consider his options, scream? Call the reception and complain that some strange woman forced herself into his room? Or maybe just wait and see and hope that the problem would literally go away?

The room was still dark, he heard the bathroom door open and the woman walk toward the desk in the room. For some reason he remembered that there was a yellow pencil on the desk. At this point having things gone too far he turned on the light and the woman by the desk disappeared.

Now this would have been the end of a conventional ghost story, or perhaps he would have found out in the morning that a young woman been murdered in that hotel x years ago. That would have worked for both a literary story or a personal story told at dinner at a nice restaurant.

But this is one of the stories that didn't become a ghost story. It turned out that the walls in the hotel were so thin that he had just heard the guest in the next room.

Annual scepticism

There are a few things that happens every year even in the world of scepticism. I will continue my series of highlights in the past and present year with something that did happen last year, one thing that has already happened this year, and something that will happen this year.

I have already mentioned the great success we (the Swedish sceptics) had with what we did at Almedalen last year but the thing I want to mention now is the biggest sceptical conference in the world The Amazing Meeting (TAM). I have been to a few TAMs and last year I got to go once more and I had a great time. For the interested reader I can recommend the soon to be published article I wrote for the Swedish sceptics publication Folkvett. I will update the blog with a link when the article is available online.

What has happened this year is that the Swedish sceptics has announced who won the two awards “årets folkbildare” och “årets förvillare”. Fortunately the news have actually been reported quite a lot in the media. I guess that the reason is that more and more people have heard of the organisation and heard about the awards. Though people tend to have heard about the “negative” award, the deluder of the year, much more than the “positive” award.
This year the positive award went to the children science show “Hjärnkontoret”. This is a very popular show that has been running for 16 years. Unfortunately only a few of the news media mentions this. Not surprisingly one is SVT, the Swedish state television that makes Hjärnkontoret. But also DN mention the winner of the positive award.
Of course even for DN the big news is who got appointed deluder of the year. This year it was the environmental board in Orsa and Mora municipality that got the award because they wanted to force telecommunication companies to change their antennas to remove all electro-magnetic radiation that allegedly caused great problems for one individual in that municipality. If the companies had been forced to follow the environmental board's decision half the area of the municipality would have no cellphone coverage or television.
The problem is that no one has been able to show adverse effects for the type of radiation that the antennas transmit. The reasoning the board relied on was shaky and included google as a source.
In SvD there is a short opinion piece where the chairman of the Swedish sceptics explain why the award was given to the environmental board.
One of the two big tabloids in Sweden also writes about the award (the negative one) and in their interview with the environmental board they uncover that they apparently still haven't understood that they have no scientific or rational standing in their argumentation.
Also the local radio for Orsa and Mora municipality have a short segment on the issue.
If one wants to learn more about how tax money are wasted on unproven and quite likely unnecessary removal of electro-magnetic fields Mats Reimer writes about it in his blog.
The announcements from the Swedish sceptics can be read on the Internet: årets folkbildare, årets förvillare.

Finally something to look forward to this year. Besides all the fun activities that will be arranged in Sweden like reccemottagningen, kulturnatten, and bokmässan there is the world sceptic conference in Berlin. As of yet I have no plans to go there but I really would like to.

First post this year

As promised here are some more highlights of last year and what to look forward to during this year 2012.

This time I like to focus on magic and mentalism. By far the most important thing regarding my magic and mentalism the previous year was my appearance in Fenomen, the Swedish version of Uri Geller's fairly successful tv-show concept. It is a show partly focused on finding the new Uri Geller but here in Sweden the focus was much more on the entertainment aspect.

Even though the show happened in 2011 it began even earlier, in 2010 with a phone call regarding mentalism. The first phone call was a bit cryptic since that is the nature of things in the television business when nothing is yet decided nor official. It was Helen Kraver that called me and indeed discovered me. since not that many had heard of me before. She later worked with the props for the show and is most recently known for her work with “Allt för Sverige”.
After the show there were some interviews and try-outs. The final try-out was at Magic Bar and I think that one went quite well, indeed so well that I ended up among the ten mentalists in the show.

Unfortunately I was the first one to leave the show. And although I would of course have preferred to be there longer I was not that disappointed. I had a great time and got to meet some very nice, funny and interesting people. I got my first experience of doing live television and that was an interesting experience. I also got to meet my old friend Ian Rowland who helped out as a consultant for the show.
I think that my stile of mentalism not really suited the demographic of the show but that is not an excuse since I should of course have changed my way of presenting my material. But I am glad to say that following the discussions about the show in different internet forums I didn't find any correct explanation of what I did.

I could make a long list of all the wonderful people that I got to meet but I will not do that because it would make boring reading. Instead I will address a question that I sometimes get. Some people wonder what a sceptic like me did on a show together with Uri Geller as if it would be immoral. But I think that it was far better that there were some sceptics there than Geller without any sceptics what so ever. Also my friend Banachek have worked on the US version of the show and no one can accuse him of not being sceptical enough.

Concerning things to look forward toward there is FISM 2012. That is in short the Olympics of magic and this year it will be in Blackpool UK. I have not bought a ticket yet since it unfortunately coincide with TAM in Las Vegas and I still consider my options. Although I do love to go to TAM I think that this year it will be Blackpool before Las Vegas (anyone that has been to both can question that decision but remember that is not the places that attract me).

I end with a few clips from my Fenomen performances.

An unexpected phone call

For some time now I have been one of the contributors to a sceptical column in the local newspaper Uppsala Nya Tidning. Yesterday I got a call from one of the readers who just read what I had written about dowsing. He said that he appreciated what I had written and it is of course nice to have people telling you that they like what you do. But it was unexpected to get a phone call.
We had an interesting conversation about his experiences living next door to a man who worked as a dowser for about 60 years and had a very different technique. Instead of using a rod or a pendulum this man used only his arms and sometimes he could feel the “force” or at least something, so strongly that it could knock him over.
It would have been interesting to learn more about this dowser and what he did but unfortunately he was already dead (The worked as a dowser for 60 years should have been a clue.) Apart from the unorthodox method the dowser appeared to behave as many other in the business. He didn't charge for his services but gladly accepted what people gave him. It also seemed as he was specialised on finding water.