The Polymath's Guide to Critical Thinking

It's a crucial yet overlooked skill to upgrade.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

I first encountered this intellectually crucial term from one of my Professor Layton games on Nintendo DS. Whenever I completed a puzzle, he would congratulate me with a lesson:

Critical Thinking is the key to a success

The puzzles can be easy but as you progress through the game they can be challenging and formidable. Through multiple attempts and completing puzzles, Layton did have a point about critical thinking when trying to solve a puzzle.

Let me ask you.

What comes to mind when you see the term Critical Thinking?

Crucial thinking?

Sceptical thinking?

Conceptual thinking?

It is sufficient to have multiple viewpoints on cultivating critical thinking and different methodologies to clarify on how we practice it effectively.

But let’s add the definition of critical thinking from the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking:

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualising, applying, analysing, synthesising, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.

To summarise, it is the cognitive process of actively conceptualising information, accounting its origins and intentions, and evaluating why it is created and the evidence used to support its intellectual structure.

This sounds like the work of a scholar, researcher, academic, and other smart-pants and nerds!

But it is for everyone.

From the uneducated to the highly trained to the polymath.

The Wicked World

I am at the start of my bioinformatics masters, where the challenges of big data are in our midst. One of the skills needed to face these trials is this cognitive skill I am emphasising.

One simple instruction came up over and over:

Question

Question the data

Question where the data came from.

Even if it came from a highly respected academic.

Whether this instruction came out humbly or maybe as a little trick, it is clear that we live in a society where the rules and patterns are not clear.

Data containing silent errors.

Issues with simple binary solutions but complex at heart.

Novel innovations changing the course of time.

Predictions of major events like financial crises have been misled.

We have entered…

The Wicked World.

This concept is the brainchild of psychologist Robin M. Hogarth, who investigated human decision-making and experiences. Sadly he passed away in April.

He conceptualised two distinct learning environments on how humans solve problems and play games:

1. 😇Kind Learning Environments - rules and patterns are clear to decipher, and feedback is immediate. E.g. tennis, chess.

2. 👿Wicked Learning Environments - rules and patterns are not clear, and feedback may be delayed. E.g. our world today.

Hogarth hypothesised the impact of experience on problem-solving, particularly deriving from the Wicked World:

In most life circumstances, we are up against wicked learning environments, where our experience is constantly subject to various filters and distortions. Experience still leads to learning, of course, but there is no guarantee that its lessons are reliable.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that we have difficulty differentiating between kind and wicked learning environments. Whatever we learn through observation and participation appears to be the reality. In Thinking Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman dubs this syndrome: “What you see is all there is.”

The summary:

Experiences particularly in one domain as repetitive as they are, may not lead to similar outcomes as they would in kind learning environments.

Science writer David Epstein references this finding to argue that individuals with varied domain experiences triumph among specialists.

But what about critical thinking?

Look back at Hogarth’s reference to Daniel Kahneman.

It isn’t just experiences that are at the mercy of the Wicked World.

But our perceptions.

Our thinking.

Our superficial observations are only a taste of the problems that we face, and yet we fall into the temptation of equating them with reality.

Especially now we have TikTokified our media.

Now I don’t want to get into the philosophy of perception yet, and certainly don’t want to spell doom!

But with our problems becoming intensely complex and discord entering into the mix, it is worth reflecting on our cognitive processes, focusing more on our System 2 thinking.

Unfortunately, critical thinking is on the decline.

Factors include:

• Recent significant events

• Technological innovations

• Tribalism

• Cognitive Biases

• Negativity towards the cognitive effort

• No space for thinking

But with an intentional and bold step back into how we think, the leap forward will be substantial.

New Approach to Critical Thinking

How am I supposed to change it, if I can’t see the wood for the trees?

This lyric from the song Poundshop Kardashians by Sam Fender resonates with how we approach problems.

Sometimes we focus more time on the details than the overall big picture.

But the opposite applies.

We can also focus more on the big picture than finding any crucial hidden details that are worth considering.

Critical thinking requires flexibility with both points of view for effective conceptualisation and unbiased evaluation.

But there is more to it.

As experts acknowledge the decline in critical thinking, there are common solutions that they mention to solve the issue:

• Multiple perspectives

• Intellectual Humility

Multiple Perspectives

If you have been reading my Substack and other platforms talking about polymaths, you have seen how we acknowledge the power of interdisciplinary approaches.

It isn’t simply about appreciating alternative viewpoints for a balanced argument or “being in another person’s shoes,” aka Perspective Taking.

It is being exposed to multiple fields, related or unrelated, and using these domains as lens to perceive an aspect of life. For example, exploring the universe from a philosophical approach.

The multiple exposures in these areas benefit for the long-term future, as new ideas come from the relational thinking of distinct concepts.

Intellectual Humility

More varied experience in these multiple domains is a transition towards perspective-seeking; actively searching insights and nuances from conversations with people.

You are taking advantage of the one trait that a polymath can muster:

Curiosity.

And with it comes another trait like no other…

Intellectual Humility

The acknowledgement of what you have little to no knowledge about.

The ingredient of curiosity.

These two are an excellent combination to upgrade our critical thinking, but there is one more element I would add.

Philosophical Thought

Philosophy.

The study of the good life.

It is a strange and exciting topic, but when you dive in, you begin to see how it fits in with how we think.

Philosophy is the ultimate deconstruction of life’s aspects, and the interconnectedness of the parts.

I must admit it is hard to explain, and I am still learning about how philosophy fits in.

And I’m also wondering why most polymaths choose philosophy as a domain.

But when comes to critical thinking, philosophy looks back at aspects came to be, and finds any intentions and arguments to analyse.

One of the simplest and common philosophical methods is the Socratic Method, which involves asking open-ended questions regarding common beliefs, how they fit together, and transforms into an engaging dialogue to reach a clarified truth.

There is currently ongoing research on whether studying philosophy can directly improve critical thinking skills, a number of meta-analyses conclude that it does, while some say more research is needed.

Whilst I am looking forward for new data to arrive, I believe it is worth the read of philosophy to upgrade our thinking.

By breaking down what life is, we can understand where things originate.

And to a behavioural level…

Make our societies kinder.