Before you read, try a reasoning challenge
A tip: don't let your mind go into an artificial “riddle-solving” mode. There's no trick wording, and I didn't plant some hidden detail that everything else depends on. Just think about it the way you'd think about anything puzzling in your day-to-day life.
You and some friends have started taking walks a few times every week down a well-used hiking trail on the outskirts of town. It's shaped like a loop, about four miles from beginning to end; it has just the one entrance and there aren't any side trails. You've noticed a strange pattern: the only place you see much litter is a single quarter-mile stretch, a little past the halfway point. Before and after that stretch, the trail is quite clean. What might explain this?
(You don't have to stick only to the facts in the scenario, by the way—this isn't a whodunnit. Feel free to speculate about what unknowns might have caused this. And once you've done so, think: how do you feel about your answer? You'll find an explanation at the very bottom of this page.)
The goal of The Art of Figuring Things Out is to help students make the best use of their own minds: to think more effectively and independently. There are many classes out there with similar goals, of course, and many of them are valuable, but few capture the breadth of what it means to think. Some lean toward formal logic and argumentative structure, offering tools for winning debates and honing academic essays. Others focus on hot-button topics: social media literacy, the issues in the headlines, and so on—even though these “of the moment” issues may not be the priorities of the future. All of this can be worthwhile, but take a moment to think about how much these approaches leave out.
Consider the following situations:
- Orren is a month into middle school, and he just got his second math test back. It's another F. He remembers when his fifth grade teacher would tell him, trying to be reassuring, that “not everyone's a math person.” He had wondered at the time if it was a polite way of saying he was bad at math. Now he's sure that it was—and that it was true.
- Priya has become convinced that her lucky socks help her win at soccer. Her brother laughed at her and called it a “dumb superstition,” so she made a spreadsheet comparing wins to socks worn. The numbers lined up: her team has won almost 30% more games when she's been wearing the lucky socks. Now she's planning to wear them to every game... and she's considering whether she should stop washing them, too.
- The end-of-year trip got canceled because someone stole money from the fundraiser envelope, and Sarah heard that it was Daniel. They were best friends in elementary school, and even though they've grown apart a bit since then, Sarah would have ignored the rumor if she'd only heard it from one person. But she heard it from three different people, none of whom even hang out with each other. What are the odds? When Daniel calls her in the afternoon, Sarah doesn't bother to pick up.
There's something wrong with the thinking in all these cases—but what habits and skills would these kids need in order to have a better chance of getting it right?
Orren's problem is that he settled on the first explanation that came to mind. There might be all kinds of reasons why that particular explanation came to mind first, but the point remains: he didn't keep looking. What if the tests were unfairly hard? (Did other students in the class do poorly, too?) What if his fifth grade teacher had actually been talking about himself not being a “math person,” and Orren just needed a teacher who could explain it better? There might be all kinds of other explanations—and if Orren was in the habit of not stopping at the first that came to mind, he might have discovered them.
Priya took one good step: she collected data. But when she saw that wins lined up with wearing her lucky socks, she didn't stop to think: does that mean the socks caused the wins? If she knew to dig deeper than correlation, she might realize that the games she usually wears those socks to are home games; for away games, her dad packs her bag and grabs socks at random. This realization wouldn't prove anything by itself, but she would, at least, have something else to test before giving up on hygiene.
Sarah gave credence to the rumor because she heard it from three people who don't hang out with each other. She didn't consider whether they might have anything else in common, though, and when she brushed off Daniel's phone call, it was based more on an emotional reaction than on a conscious thought process. If she thought it through more, she might have realized that even though the three people don't hang out, they do eat lunch around the same corner of the cafeteria, making it entirely possible they'd all overheard one person blaming Daniel. How confident should she be in the rumor? She might think it through and decide 15%, maybe 20% at most—not enough to end a longtime friendship over. It's still a bit of a gut sense, but it's a thoughtful one.
Most critical thinking classes make one big assumption: there's already an argument. Students read the provided passage and find the fallacy, or they compare the strengths of two essays. Those are useful skills, but a lot of the real challenges in life are ones where you're starting from scratch. How do you come up with hypotheses of your own? For that matter, how do you make the sorts of observations that would lead you to notice that something needs explanation in the first place?
Here's an oversimplification of the process that students will practice in this course:
- Notice that something needs explaining
- Describe it precisely: what do I actually know, and what am I assuming?
- Generate possible explanations without settling for the first/most obvious
- Analyze them: do they hold up?
- Consider how they could be tested to determine which is right.
Running throughout this will be the theme of calibrating confidence. Many classes encourage students, as a point of rhetoric, to make bold, confident claims. In this class, students will be encouraged to earn that sort of confidence—and, when they haven't, to use terms like “likely,” “possible,” and “probable” with precision.
The two semesters
Each semester of this class can stand alone: they complement each other, but the first isn't a prerequisite for the second. During the first semester, we'll focus on thinking about the world: situations, systems, and events. The second semester will shift the focus to other reasoning with and against other people's minds: for example, how to “step inside” views you don't hold to understand them better, how to catch yourself when your own mind starts coming up with reasons to believe what you want to believe, and how to test claims that are made by others.
Tell me you're interested →
mattballin.com—my older site (not fully current, but has more on my teaching philosophy)
