> Children are taught to not question what they're told, because it's much easier on parents and teachers when children don't question what they're told. Then when they're adults they lack any kind of critical thinking skills because they've been miseducated and they're easy targets for disinformation.

I'm gonna guess you don't have children. Children like easy-to-follow directions. They don't understand nuance at all. It's not because it's "easier on parents and teachers", it's because it's what works.

You add nuance later in middle and high school.

> Children like easy-to-follow directions. They don't understand nuance at all.

I don't have kids myself, but I do remember how it is to be a child, having been one myself a while ago :D

I can assure you kids understand nuance quite well if they're explained things properly, patiently, in a friendly manner.

Young children absolutely need easy-to-follow directions because they can't follow complicated directions.

I'm not arguing against easy-to-follow directions, so I don't quite see your point. I'm against parents and schools encouraging unquestioning obedience to their directions.

> You add nuance later in middle and high school.

If you take children to be under 18 then the statement seems valid because I don't think there's a lot of nuance going on in most middle or high schools.

I think 'the meta' about parenting is more about entrusting your children to behave appropriately when unsupervised rather than insuring arbitrary directions are followed by making them in the form of an easy "lie-to-children".

When I'm 4, I could win the debate with adults. That bothered me for several years to think why an adult looks like child. As an adult now, I know the reason their mind never grow up. Not children could not understand complicated thing, it is that adult could not explain them well.

THIS. My father believed children should never be given a short answer, or told "because I said so". If we wanted something we would have to give a rational argument why. If we asked a question and he wasn't sure of the answer, he would say he didn't know and we would go to the encyclopedia together to read the full answer.

Every night from the time I was 6 we had to read 50 pages in a book he assigned and discuss it. This was after he came home from 10 hour days at work.

Most parents are (1) too lazy to properly explain things to their children, (2) unwilling to say when they don't know the answer, (3) lack the critical thinking skills themselves to evaluate statements, (4) lack the basic research skills needed to validate or invalidate a proposition.

That is the problem in America.

When I was about 8 years old we were riding in the car with a couple my parents were friends with and their children who were similar in age to us. The son asked the father why the sky was blue. The father turned around and said, "well, it reflects the ocean". I said, "no, you're wrong, it's the color the atmosphere refracts light" (or something like that). The father and son both stared at me in shock because I would tell an adult they were wrong. My father just laughed.

I don't think I was necessarily smarter than other children by nature. I was just brought up with the idea that it is everyone's personal responsibility to read, to learn, to say when you don't know the answer, to find reliable sources. And above all, never to memorize answers without fully understanding them.

Which is why I love writing code ;)

>when children don't question what they're told.

That doesn't mean they accept everything as fact. They may simply not choose to question because of fear of punishment, or for any other number of reasons.

>Then when they're adults they lack any kind of critical thinking skills because they've been miseducated and they're easy targets for disinformation.

That is a giant leap of logic.. or faith. Case in point :- I went to a religious school (though, it was more of a hippie religious school), and many of my classmates became atheists later in life. :)

I think there a large room for even further nuance about how humans develop and all the factors that shape our thinking. Simply forcing a 'critical thinking' class into the curriculum won't give them any benefit any more than attending an entrepreneurship class will make you an entrepreneur.

I agree 100%. The lack of critical thinking skills in this country is a national security threat. We need a national initiative improve the baseline education and critical thinking skills of the next generation.

The powers that be, haven't got the memo yet that it doesn't benefit them anymore to have a populous which is easily manipulated. In the past, old media acted as parameter control, though concentrated ownership. Sure they had vested interests, but they were generally alined with American values; capitalism, stable democracy, international leadership by America, etc. But now each of the 340 million brains in this country can be accessed directly by foreign adversaries. Parameter control can not work anymore, unless we shut down the internet. We must bring the security to each individual endpoint.

Some will argue that we should shutdown the internet or censor it. But is that the world we want to live in? That would stifle economic growth and i do not believe it is compatible with the ideals of liberal democracies.

What is the old line, people get the government they deserve, they elect people that they like and/or agree with? Even here on HN most people only upvote comments they like or otherwise agree with. Its the same everywhere. Massive massive echo chambers on the left and right with propaganda being retweeted and shared to millions.

>We must bring the security to each individual endpoint.

Why? Why must we treat adults as children that we have been entrusted with, and that it is our responsibility to give them 'mental medicine'? What makes our thinking superior to others' that we need to lord over them in this way?

>Some will argue that we should shutdown the internet or censor it. But is that the world we want to live in? That would stifle economic growth and i do not believe it is compatible with the ideals of liberal democracies.

I believe that these ideals are bottom-up. We form governments that align with the ideals of the people, not the other way around. If the people out of choice or ignorance no longer care about the ideals of liberal democracy, who are we to force them onto others?

>>We must bring the security to each individual endpoint.

>Why? Why must we treat adults as children

I am suggesting the opposite. Rather than treat adults as children and censoring what they can and can not see. I am suggesting we give them the skills to critically analyze input they receive.

> that we have been entrusted with, and that it is our responsibility to give them 'mental medicine'? What makes our thinking superior to others' that we need to lord over them in this way?

Why provide any education at all then? As a society it is our responsibility to skill the next generation with the skills they need to operate in our society. I believe critical thinking skills is one of these required skills.

> I believe that these ideals are bottom-up. We form governments that align with the ideals of the people, not the other way around

I agree with this. But to get the best form of government we need educated and intelligent citizens.

> If the people out of choice or ignorance no longer care about the ideals of liberal democracy, who are we to force them onto others?

We really are fucked then aren't we. I kind of like living in a liberal democracy. If we throw our current system out due to ignorance I am very confident what comes next will not be superior. I'm not willing to accept that as path we take.

>Why provide any education at all then? As a society it is our responsibility to skill the next generation with the skills they need to operate in our society. I believe critical thinking skills is one of these required skills.

There are several views on education. It used to be that you went to school/college to be educated, but lately it seems like the schools are just places where you get trained so that you can get a job. Would parents send their kids to school if primary goal was education, and getting a job was just incidental?

Personally, I don't think critical thinking skills can be taught in a school via a curriculum en-masse. It requires a personal approach tailored to each individual's needs based on their upbringing and cultural context.

>We really are fucked then aren't we. I kind of like living in a liberal democracy. If we throw our current system out due to ignorance I am very confident what comes next will not be superior. I'm not willing to accept that as path we take.

Yes, we might very well be fucked in the near-term. But I'm not saying we throw everything out, I'm saying we have to trust people more than systems. How many people are willing to earnestly engage with the other side? We have to do our part to foster safe-zones where people can express any and all ideas without fear of being ridiculed or shamed. We're all responsible in some way for the decline in public trust in several pillars of democracy - especially the news media. To make it personal, several of my family members are Trump voters, and I do not think they're racist or evil. I understand them, and they hold varying beliefs with varying degrees of certitude but they feel trapped where they cannot even express an opinion without being shouted down and ridiculed.

I think we're mostly on the same page.

> Personally, I don't think critical thinking skills can be taught in a school via a curriculum en-masse. It requires a personal approach tailored to each individual's needs based on their upbringing and cultural context.

Upbringing and cultural context are certainly heavy influences. But it is totally possible to teach / develop critical thinking skills in students. Instead of focusing on memorizing facts & information, we should focus on the techniques used to break down problems, seek evidence, extract alternate readings & motivations, etc. Easy. The problem is this stuff isn't taught in school, and if it is, it's only brushed over as a particular topic and not part of everything. This stuff needs to be embedded in the core operating system of our citizens.

Putting the fate of liberal democracies aside. I believe the economic activity lost from the under development and under capitalization on the potential of our populous is significant.

I'll let you have the last word. Have a nice day :)

It’s been tried. It’s how we got “new math“

To be clear i did say a "national initiative" not a "national curriculum".

> When people believe the Earth is round only because that's what they were told, it's not that hard for a clever talker to convince them the Earth could be flat. When people know the Earth is round because they actually understand the physics behind it, there's no way you're ever going to convince them the Earth is flat.

The problem with understanding things from their fundamentals is that it doesn't scale. The world is too complex.

Are vaccines safe? Maybe I'll just should read through the Institute of Medicine's definitive, 900 page "Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality."

Can these robust explanations be simplified for lay people? Yes, but faced with competing, simplified explanations, can lay people dependably evaluate which is correct? Can they do it better than a domain expert?

I have some understanding of how vaccines work, from school and popular science literature. But if tomorrow leaders in the field of medicine broadly announced that all of our understanding of vaccines up until now had been mistaken and that there was now some new explanation, well I would accept that new explanation. Whatever education I have had on the topic, it is obviously not going to be better than the education of experts in the medical field.

Epistemic humility and a consequent reliance on domain experts is an essential part of being informed in our wonderfully complex world. This also means it is possible to be mislead by experts who are in the wrong, but I don't really see how this can be entirely avoided.

So you have to get good at evaluating experts. Strategies include: comparing multiple sources, checking on the background of the alleged experts, picking out a few interesting but verifiable statements from their argument and fact-checking those, finding an opposing argument and seeing which argument seems to make more sense or be better supported.

Having attended school through tenth grade... There were maybe a couple of assignments over the years in which we were told to choose a topic, do research on it while following some of the above (explicitly stated) strategies, and write it all up.

The rest of the time, though, it was a lot more like "this stuff is fact" and you're not really encouraged to doubt it or look closely into the evidence chain. Evidence or proof might be presented (textbooks often mention it), or might not. I wouldn't say that the whole "skeptically evaluating your chosen experts" thing was considered a core skill or habit to cultivate (probably a few teachers considered it such, but their curricula didn't really emphasize it).

Churches lose membership and therefore money when schools teach critical thinking effectively. Given the power of the church over the last thousand years, it is unsurprising that progress in education has been so stymied.

Thanks, I giggled. When conspiracy theorists aren’t horrifying for the potential impact on lives of their victims, they are immensely entertaining.

I bet most of the views on flat earther’s videos are just people looking for non artificial comedy.