So, I think there's a grain of truth that this article approaches that it unfortunately completely throws out the window when it suggests that you replace "critical thinking" with taking 15 seconds to look at someone's wikipedia page.
The truth is that the way we generally imagine "critical thinking" can be incredibly individualist and idealistic. You aren't ever going to be able to have such a well-rounded and simultaneously deep understanding of the world that you'll be able to engage with every subject that you see rationally and figure out the truth that everyone else is distorting. We see the fallout from people who try to do this distorted version of critical thinking every day - a politics example might be an enlightened centrist who erroneously assumes that both the Democrats and the Republicans are right about some things and wrong about others simply because they're being intellectually lazy and assuming that to be the case.
But then this article's solution to that is to essentially to tell the reader that they should be intellectually lazy, by yielding their opinions to Wikipedia and Google. Think about the given example for a few moments and you'll see what I mean - Caulfield instantly assumes when he sees that Robert F Kennedy Jr is listed as an anti-vaccine activist that that is a bad thing and reason to write RFK off as a source, but fucking obviously somebody who is skeptical of vaccines is going to see that exact same information and come to a completely different conclusion. People have different ideas about who is and is not biased, and that's not even considering the fact that people in different camps on these issues are literally getting different Google results because the algorithm learns what you like and gives you that.
So, I think there's a grain of truth that this article approaches that it unfortunately completely throws out the window when it suggests that you replace "critical thinking" with taking 15 seconds to look at someone's wikipedia page.
The truth is that the way we generally imagine "critical thinking" can be incredibly individualist and idealistic. You aren't ever going to be able to have such a well-rounded and simultaneously deep understanding of the world that you'll be able to engage with every subject that you see rationally and figure out the truth that everyone else is distorting. We see the fallout from people who try to do this distorted version of critical thinking every day - a politics example might be an enlightened centrist who erroneously assumes that both the Democrats and the Republicans are right about some things and wrong about others simply because they're being intellectually lazy and assuming that to be the case.
But then this article's solution to that is to essentially to tell the reader that they should be intellectually lazy, by yielding their opinions to Wikipedia and Google. Think about the given example for a few moments and you'll see what I mean - Caulfield instantly assumes when he sees that Robert F Kennedy Jr is listed as an anti-vaccine activist that that is a bad thing and reason to write RFK off as a source, but fucking obviously somebody who is skeptical of vaccines is going to see that exact same information and come to a completely different conclusion. People have different ideas about who is and is not biased, and that's not even considering the fact that people in different camps on these issues are literally getting different Google results because the algorithm learns what you like and gives you that.
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