Addiction

I'm not surprised that a post on critical thinking inspires an occasional joke.  We don't take it seriously because, for some, there's no reason we should.  Most of us get along letting someone else do our critical thinking for us ... and that seems fine.

For myself, I can't stop.  I'm in so deep now, it's a drug I can't put down ... literally a collection of drugs, produced right here in my own body, free.  And as we know, addiction is a disease that affects both the brain and behaviour.  When we're addicted to drugs, we can't resist the urge to use them, no matter harmful they can be to our responsibilities, our family and friends, and ourselves.  Worse, the drug I'm addicted to is legal.  I can get it any time I want, I can get so high on it I forget where I am or what I should be doing ... and removing my access to this drug is, in fact, life threatening.  So the gentle reader can imagine how seriously I take this problem.

See, we take a drug because we like the way it makes us feel.  Oh, sure, at the beginning critical thinking was too strong for me; overwhelming, no question about it.  But like any drug, we develop a kind of resistance to the drug; we can take stronger and stronger hits of it.  Eventually, just a little bit isn't enough to make us feel high ... we just want more.  And while we think we're in control of the drug, eventually it becomes evident that we're not.  No, after awhile, the drug controls us.  That's what happens.

Before we know it, the damage it's done to our brains is irreversible.  We just don't think like other people any more.  Those things other people think are funny ... nope, not funny.  And the good ideas other people think they have; the arguments they make; the sense that they're, you know, actually aware of the whole picture ... for someone like me, they just seem, I don't know, like their consciousnesses haven't been expanded enough.  I look at the universe as this amazing, metaphysical structure ... honestly, to someone who hasn't taken the drugs I've taken, it's impossible to explain it.

For those people not on the drug, I don't expect them to understand.  Critical thinking is something you have to do.  You can't just pretend.  Entry level drugs are just, well, not the same.  In fact it gets kind of hard to explain what's going on in my head.  So I can see why I sound like a crazy person ... and why people around me want me to get some kind of help.  They see me as a loved one struggling with addiction.  They see my obsession with deconstructing things, sensemaking, semantics ... hell, thinking ... as a problem.  I tell them I need these drugs to make me feel good, to ease my stress, to investigate reality ... but they call it a habit.  They urge me to quit; some make fun of me, treating me like I'm delusional.  Granted, my judgement is being altered.  I don't "decision-make" like other people.  My memory doesn't function "normally."  And my ability to learn ... what can I say?  It causes other people not to trust me.

What choice do I have?  I feel a constant need to use this drug multiple times a day.  Most often, I take way more of the drug than I mean to take, resulting in these rabbit-hole sequences that go on for hours and hours.  And because the drug is free, I always have it with me.  I take the drugs at work, I take them when my family's around me, sometimes they make me lash out at friends and people on social media ... and that results in me spending way more time alone than what's normal.  Sometimes, I don't take care of myself; I don't bathe, I don't think to eat, I forget to take my blood pressure pills, I don't care what I look like.  And I feel sick whenever I try to quit.  I spend virtually all of my time critically thinking, finding ways to critically think, and recovering from having spent too much time doing it.

I don't want help.  That's probably the worst.  All this time thinking makes me actually hate people, actually resenting them for telling me not to think.  In the end, I know, I'm going to do this until it kills me.  And I'm okay with that.

I'm okay with that.

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.

Critical Thinking

Following up on the last post about film criticism, I tactfully declined to talk about "critical thinking."  So, what is critical thinking?  Straight definition: critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it.  This is an enormously difficult thing to explain ... and I am not going to do better than Immanuel Kant in a blog post.  At the same time, "simplifying" the method is fraught with terrors ... so I go ahead from here trepidatiously.

If we wish to understand how a spoon works (at the moment an in-depth study presently taken up by my 8-month-old grandchild), we initially examine the spoon physically: how it can be held, swung about, used to poke at things ... and naturally how it feels in our mouths, since intrisincally we first discover how everything works by shoving it in our mouth.  Take note, however.  Before we can fully train ourselves to understand how a spoon works, we will have it demonstrated for us by competent others; and they will train us to hold it correctly (or incorrectly, with some people), bypassing our need for personal research.  The speed with which we learn the spoon's use depends on how much resistance we have against learning things.

Resistance is a tricky concept.  Resistance can occur because the learner is dead stupid or bloody minded.  But resistance can also occur because the learner does not trust that what the teacher does with a spoon is everything that can be done with a spoon.  It is in this second form of resistance that we find genius.

Kant divides reason through the operation of two components: (a) intuition, which is sense perception; and (b) understanding, which is a rational interpretation of the data given through sense perception.  Sense perception is what your five senses tell you about the world, including everything related to the physicality of the spoon: shape, smell, feel, sound and taste.  When you see someone else use the spoon, or you're trained to hold it just so by repetition (and forced to repeat that training through repetition), that is sense perception also.  But when you think about the spoon, reviewing your experience with the spoon, guessing at why or how the spoon is made, you are rationally interpreting the data.  When you take the next step, which is reviewing about how you've previously considered the spoon, related to what you're thinking about it now, then you are analysing your thoughts.  And when you take that analysis so that you may approach a better way to make the spoon, then you are participating in critical thinking.

Most youtube content creators fail at producing meaningful criticism because they think what they see or hear during the film, and especially what the film makes them feel, is film criticism.  It isn't.  To critique a film, first, the critic must be capable of seeing what problems the director, writer and crew must have faced in making the film as it is.  Using a somewhat infamous example, when Laurence Olivier chose to cast Marilyn Monroe as one of the leads in the film The Prince and the Showgirl [a brilliant film of the first order by the way, only a billion times better than anything Kubrick made], Olivier had Monroe to contend with.  Which was, by all later accounts, a horrific nightmare.  In a more prosaic sense, as I've discussed before, all films, even bad ones, are logistical trials on a par with Going to War ... with the added difficulty of ensuring that everyone gets through the experience alive (which, unfortunately, doesn't always happen).

Secondly, the reviewer must be able to interpret the relevant sensory information, and external knowledge of the difficulties involved, accurately and meaningfully.  A great many content creators do not understand film, they do not understand writing or direction, they do not understand budgeting, and thus why a particular scene plays as it does because it's what we could afford, or build in time, or logically fit into the continuity of the film's story.  Morons who bitch about CGI assume that every budget must be in the hundreds of millions, or else the film isn't worth seeing ... while failing the simplest smell tests: Hitchcock's brilliant film To Catch a Thief has several lengthy special effects "failures" because the film was released in 1955 ... and absolutely no one with a brain cares.  Filmmaking has limitations.  Comprehending this, and many other realities, is necessary to good criticism.

Thirdly, the reviewer must see why and how those problems were solved, as opposed to other ways those problems might have been solved.  It is not enough to point at a film and mutter that the direction or the acting fell short ... we must explain why and how it fell short!  Specifically, to follow the director's logic with a film like Being John Malkovich so that we can understand accurately why — although it is brilliantly made, written and acted — it really isn't a very good film.  For most persons, this is virtually impossible.  Those who both love and hate it will usually do so viscerally ... while simultaneously failing to realize that vast numbers were unable to appreciate any of the magnificent work put into the film due to the utter irrelevancy of the subject material.  Keeping in mind the goal of critical thinking is not to argue that a film is "good" or "bad" ... but to use what we know about a film to make a better product.

By deconstructing films, then, and examining their methods of solving problems related to the creation of art, we can advance our reasoning on how to solve additional, as yet unencountered problems that will come up with as-yet unfounded artistic endeavours.  In short, we are not lauding the past.  We are building towards a future.  When a film reviewer wallows in the beauty of an object, while at the same time failing to see that object as a method that can be applied further on in making better objects, the reviewer is simply describing a spoon.  It is not critical thinking.

It was intended, at this point, that I apply these same arguments to the examinations and discussions of role-playing games, but alas, it is getting late.  I did say I intended to move forward with trepidation.  Some things should not be rushed.  So let's pick this up with RPGs in another post.

The Rare Examples of Good Film Criticism

I like questions.  I understand there are people who fear that someone will ask them a hard question, but for me, questions are a gift.  A question I can't answer, doubly so — because it describes something I should be thinking about, or researching.

Naturally, I'm not here to answer questions about medicine, the law, mathematics or physics.  This is a D&D blog ... and I'm a soft-science/humanities sort of fellow.  So getting a question about the arts, that's in my bailywick.  On Monday, Dennis Laffey asked,

"You've mentioned YouTube movie "critics" like Lindsay Ellis and maybe Patrick Willems with some disdain (IMO Willems is better than Ellis, but YMMV), and I understand why. So my question is, are there any film critics/analysts on YouTube that you would recommend?"

This is a question I'm researching all the time.  I've wasted far too many hours chasing film critiques on youtube, only to come up empty.  I love film; and when I seek the opinion of someone investigating film, I want to see people who understand what a critique is, what it's for, why film is made, what it arouses in the viewer, how filming is accomplished as an art, what choices were made by the makers and why, preferably without the speaker needing to graft their own agenda into the process.

"Agenda" describes the urge by the reviewer to insert their personal feelings regarding the film's content: the need to say whether or not they liked the film, the need to discuss whether or not the film has broken some covenant that art has with the political will of society, the need to argue whether or not certain characters were given enough lines, or whether the subject material is "valid," or a host of other qualms that would suggest that the purpose of filmmaking it to satisfy a will of the public to see visuals that ONLY meet with their prejudices.

Obviously, the popularity of a film depends on how many people are pleased by its plot, characters and themes.  Popularity has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a film is well made or relevant.  It is a great failing of youtube creators that they understand neither what it means to make a film well or what makes a film relevant.  Very often, many film reviewers fall into a trap of believing that a film is "well made" when it is technically well made.  This is why we see so many reviewers gushing over films made by Kurosawa or Kubrick.  I appreciate when an analyst fruitfully addresses technical prowess, such as this piece by Every Frame a Painting.  EFP stopped posting videos four years ago, a shattering loss.  From a filmmaker's perspective, the series is usefully descriptive about what the director's perspective, the structure of scenes, pacing and space.  I used to love every time EFP posted; but, at the same time, most of his work disappointed, because so little was said about writing or story.  Sorry, but technicals do not make a meaningful film.  No matter how many people want us to worship and adore Kubrick, we can't.  He had nothing to say about the concrete lives of concrete people.  His choice of stories were always irrelevant.

Very few content creators are as consistent as EFP.  Watch everything he's made.  Frankly, I think his worst piece was this one ... which also happened to be his last.  I simply don't feel that Marvel films are lacking because of their music.  On the other hand, watch this video at least twice and this one at least three times.  You're a fool if you don't.

Discussions of a film's overall relevancy are rare and hard to find.  Frustratingly, those persons who are capable of this kind of analysis rarely choose to do films that I would watch more than once.  But that is a matter personal taste — and as I've said, analysing a film and liking a film are entirely different things.  At the same time, watching analysation of a film and liking the film being analysed need not be compatible ideas.  I'm willing to watch a good analyst take apart a film I didn't like — and even willing to sit through the critique even if the analyst states matter-of-factly that they like the film.  Liking/disliking a film is not a deal-breaker.  What matters is what's said about the film's relevance.  I hope that's clear.

Ian Danskin discusses a wide variety of subjects and occasionally discusses film or a film-maker.  Of those, I recommend this about Guillermo del Toro, this 8-part series about the avenging female and this one about the Japanese film The Handmaiden.  I wish there was more.

Dan Olson lives here in Calgary with me, though shit knows what I'd say to him in person.  Like Danskin, he produces work on many subjects, but he's done a lot of work with film.  Starting with the older stuff, I'd recommend this one on Fight Club, this one on Sam Witwicky, this one on the End of Evangelion and very definitely this ironic one on Matrix Revolutions.  For his later work, if you've got the steady nerve, drag yourself through his 2 hour, 42 minute three-part series on the Fifty Shades of Grey movies ... and remember, I'm promoting the quality of the critique and not the quality of the film.  Also this one on Contagion.  There are more, but on the whole, I feel Olson is beginning to lose his way.  I've written about Olson before.

I strongly dislike critics or analysts who spend three quarters of a 15 minute video recounting the plot in excessive detail, only to end by saying, "I didn't like it."  I dislike those who badmouth films because of camera-angles, jerky cam or anything to do with cameras, really.  I dislike those who say "the acting was bad," while making no effort at all to explain why, how or even what "good acting" is.  Like they would know.  I dislike a lot of film reviewers.  Those that were good in the day are gone now, their sites pulled down ... hell, I can't even remember what the sites were called.  Every now and then I think I've found a new content creator; I watch two or three of their videos and think, "Those were pretty good."  Then I watch one more, screaming at the screen, "WHAT THE FUCK?" because they've just explained that the two main characters in a rom-com actually represent Israel and Palestine, Torquemada and Isabella or some other ridiculous pairing of black-and-white historical or religious figures.

Film critique on youtube is one festering pile of shit.

I am constantly looking for better and I am constantly disappointed.  But I'll go on looking.