Becoming a Critical Thinker

Having carefully explained what critical thinking is [and I assume that everyone here thinks I'm absolutely right, since there were no responses], I've successfully separated my audience into three groups.

Group #1 thinks I'm full of shit.  They do not think I'm right, they think I don't know what I'm talking about, that I wouldn't know good film criticism if it was a lance slammed into my chest and that critical thinking is an elitist liberal bullshit term intended to make ordinary people feel stupid.  There's nothing complicated about thinking; people inherently know the difference between right and wrong, made obvious by all the social media comments that explain "right" from "wrong" like millions of mics dropping per second.

We don't have to worry about Group #1.  There aren't many of them here, and although there are a lot of them out there — at least 98% of the population in fact — their historical contribution to human thought comes in the form of someone needing to hold the pitchforks when some grifter points out an enemy.

Group #2 looks at what I've written and mutters, "Duh."  They already know all this, they don't need to read a blog post about it, they think I'm being pedantic, that I'm oversimplifying, and in any case just talking about critical thinking without talking about application is a dead waste of time.  Some of the readers here who think they belong to Group #2 are actually in Group #1 ... Dunning-Kruger and all that.  In any case, I tend to agree with Group #2.  I took the time to read several papers and websites to get my ducks in order, so that I'd describe critical thinking as accurately as I could; I found the material grossly boring and inconsequential.  I think critically all the time, as this blog demonstrates, and I'm well past the point where I need a really pedantic philosopher or psychologist describing the process, particularly with endless hedging while annotating every line.

Group #3, then, are those capable of realizing they don't or can't think critically, and are willing to admit it to themselves.  Assuming I have 24,962 readers, Group #3 would average at one person.  I'll be a patriarchal shit-head, presume it's a man and call him Dave.

Dave.  Somehow, you've gotten to be an adult D&D player or DM without learning to critically think.  I can guess at the reasons and we don't need to go into them.  It won't be easy.  By and large, we won't find articles on the internet about how to teach adults to critically think; it's assumed that any effort along those lines should be used to teach children, so that by the time they become adults, they don't belong to Group #1.  Fellows like you are, well, treated as a lost cause.  That's not very kind, and I know it hurts.  But you have some understanding that thinking better would meaningfully contribute to your life, which it will.  You are far and away beyond most breathing, deluded people on this planet, those capable of killing themselves on any given day with the surety that warning labels on products attempt to prevent.

First, metaphorically, you need to understand the brain is a muscle.  Often, people will think that if they clean their house regularly, walk around the supermarket, sometimes take the bus to work instead of a car, have sex or cheer at a baseball game, that they are active and healthy.  This is unfortunately not true.  A healthy body means taking a significant amount of time, between 150 and 300 minutes a week, and using it to make your body strain, stretch and sweat, to the exclusion of all else except music, which will help you focus.

Likewise, using your brain effectively means taking 150 to 300 minutes a week and thinking ... to the exclusion of all other activity.  This does not include reading, writing, experimenting, otherwise creating and working, though these things will help.  It means turning off the media, resting, participating in a low-physical effort like walking calmly, while allowing your mind to participate in uninterrupted thought.  You might get away with eating and drinking, especially a mild stimulant like coffee, but you don't want to get caught thinking about how good the coffee or the food tastes, because this is not helpful.

If you attempt this course of action, most likely you will find yourself staring outwards, bored, without anything to think about.  You won't like it.  Think of this as being a flabby, unhealthy soul who's decided to join a gym, only to discover that lifting weights hurts, walking machines hurt, swimming hurts, and afterwards everything hurts.  If you don't think on a regular basis, and you manage to "muscle" through 30 minutes of doing nothing but thinking, afterwards you will feel that was a stupid, ridiculous waste of your time, and you're not going to do again, as it's only made you feel dull-witted and moody.  Yes.  Just like real exercise, it's evidence that you don't think enough.

Incidentally, compelling a member of Group #1 to participate in one hour of silent non-communication or entertainment, without permitting them to sleep, three times a week, will usually produce an "epiphany" after a short time.  Many undergo this experience for some health reason.  In any case, if you don't do this thinking thing regularly, it's excruciating to have it forced on you, which happens.

Dave, I'm fairly sure you'll have trouble with it.  The best strategy is to fill your head with as much difficult, academic content you're able to force yourself to read.  I suggest starting with one subject you like, and then reading everything.  I wouldn't recommend documentaries or other media.  Media is designed to feed you simple pieces of information that don't require much thinking.  It tends to "dumb down" the subject material, just as I'm dumbing down what you need to do right now.  If you want something substantial to think about, you'll need to train yourself up to material that amateur and authority researchers find stimulating and fact-providing.  Textbooks aren't a good idea either.  They will provide fact-dumps, which are useful, but what you really want are materials where people in the field argue about something for the benefit of other people in the field, without any concern for those NOT in the field.  This means, Dave, you'll have to learn what the field involves and what's going on there.  This will take a lot of time ... but it will begin to give you something to think about, as you puzzle out what you're reading.

None of this, so far, has anything to do with D&D.  I promised with my last post that it would, but after doing so I found myself in a quandary.  I didn't want to repeat what critical thinking would be as it relates to D&D, as I've done that in hundreds of different ways and honestly, it's just more pedantry.  Instead, I wanted to actually help get people from not thinking critically to thinking critically.  Then I realized that's a very small subset.  Hell Dave, there's just you and me.

And if it's D&D that you want to think critically about, well ... your choices have much to do with the method by which information is produced.

In most studies, the participants obtained their initial qualification through the writing of a thesis or a dissertation.  These are based upon a Socratic ideal of challenging existing knowledge, with an understanding that forward movement in knowledge is obtained by questioning what's wrong and replacing it with something less wrong.  Not right.  Real studies are not concerned with "right."  They are concerned with cutting out the chaff and preserving a better staple.  When you complete your dissertation, you have to defend it — to others who previously created their dissertations and once upon a time had to defend those.  No one obtains credit by putting forth old, unchallenged material that's already established.  That's not good enough.  So, the dissertation board overlooking your work is interested in (a) what you chose to challenge; and (b) were you able to effectively challenge it.  This is incredibly hard, since you're pitching to conservative people who have a vested interest in not changing the status quo without a good, solid reason.  You've got to overcome that conservatism — which you do by choosing a challenge that only adjusts previous knowledge a little bit!  You don't go in there like Nietzche and tell them god is dead.  That won't get you anywhere.

D&D isn't an accepted academic subject.  It hasn't any legitimacy as an critical topic.  And you might notice that there's very little content around that challenges what we know about D&D.  The vast supply of what you'll read will be about defending the existing structures of D&D, even though virtually no one in text disagrees.  This is a pattern found in religion.  The minister steps to the pulpit to defend Christianity to the audience who already agrees.  A minister does not start off a sermon with "Is the Eucharist necessary" without ending by saying it definitely is.  This is the content to be found everywhere about D&D.

This won't give you much when you attempt to critically think.

Additionally, much information is given on how to do something: make a better dungeon room, when to fudge dice, what tools and modules to buy, what art related to the game's content is good, why Janie, John or Jackie like the game, whether using only d6 is better than using a mess of dice, etcetera.  This content is largely aesthetic or cosmetic.  It may give you something to think about while you're on your 50-minute hiatus three times a week (the bare minimum), but since it isn't critical or challenging, it won't lead to critical thinking.  It's possible you could use it to make better tools or modules, or think of better ways to fudge dice, or induce yourself to like the game better, but as the subject material is universally derivative — by which I mean it constantly reproduces in new ways the same old material —  it's unlikely Dave that you, without any previous experience in critical thinking, will suddenly wrest yourself out of its influence.

Your best option is to go read about things outside D&D and then attempt to apply what you learn there to how D&D can be adjusted here.  That, however, won't happen until you become adept enough at a field you know to challenge that field ... until then, you don't know enough about anything to challenge anything.

This is why educators want to teach children critical thinking and not adults.  Children have time.  10 to 20 years seems like a long time to you Dave, but to a 5-year-old, they don't have much comprehension of time and in any case, they're going to spend the next two decades immersed in education anyway.  They don't have a long history slacking off to overcome.  They can get their appetites whetted for reading difficult and engrossing material for fun, before being poisoned with the contentment of shallow and simplified pap.  Naturally, 98% of the time these children end up in Group #1 anyway, despite the efforts and irritation of educators everywhere, but still, that remaining 2% is critical.

The difficulty of being a critical thinker cannot be gotten around.  It will take you 10 to 20 years, Dave.  It will take more commitment than anything you've attempted in your life.  And it will pay off better than anything else you've attempted to do ... though you won't believe that for much of the time.  The brain is a long harder to kickstart than your physical body.  You can get your body in shape in just 18 months.  18 months is a drop in the bucket where your brain is concerned ... since for the first 18 months, you'll pretty much accomplish nothing towards actual critical thinking.  You can, however, get a lot of reading done in that time.  And you need to do a LOT of reading.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.  This is a do-it-yourself thing.  What's more, doing it yourself practically guarantees that when you are a critical thinker, you won't be like me.  Which is the goal.  We want every critical thinker to be unique in their approach to problems: this increases the chance that we'll solve them and improve what we know.