This is where The Algorithms have a fun hidden place in our daily lives. I tried a number of variations of that phrase and couldn't get Google to autocomplete it for me without getting to "stem majors lack crit". Before that it was suggesting math/calculus and chemistry skills without any mention of critical thinking.

Google will autocomplete it for me but then pretty much all the results I see are STEM proponents refuting this supposedly common criticism.

Completions for "stem majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue, critical thinking skills, creative

Completions for "humanity majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue

No humanity majors refuting the claim that they lack critical thinking skills, maybe because that is never claimed in the first place?

A bit of a logical leap in my mind to infer from that that there a bunch of of people saying STEM majors "lack critical thinking skills."

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Straw men?

Perhaps they read a defense of liberal arts majors as having certain benefits including teaching critical thinking skills and decided to take this as an affront? I don’t know. Lots of groups have strange persecution complexes.

> To drive the point home, google will autocomplete it for you.

I'm not sure if the irony here was intended or not. But it is poignant.

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It's a good reminder, but in this context you really ought to mention that STEM is the least affected by the replication crisis, while "softer" fields like sociology and psychology are the most affected.

That's true. Alarmingly, medicine is pretty badly affected, though! Basic science seems to do better.

And as computer people, our house is not clean either, despite the formal character of computer science. Empirical results in computer science, demos and benchmarking done in the field, and more, also matter and are often non-reproducible just a few years after publication— if source code is provided with the paper at all, which it often has not been.

Science is amazing, both for its processes and achievements. But there's lots of important work being done and yet-to-be-done on science itself. Critical thinking is essential to that work, and it goes beyond formal reasoning or puzzle-solving in the small.