As a meditation teacher, I saw an excellent model showing how 90% of all thought in all people is repetitive, repeating the same thoughts over and over. Then 90% of that is unoriginal thought. It was put there. Most of the "thoughts" in our brain aren't even our own, and we repeat them to ourselves endlessly.
In meditation, we try and let go of those repetitions & unoriginal thought, to cultivate that 10% original thought.
It's interesting that the common trope says we only use about 10% of our brain - when - my meditation classes have taught me it's just the opposite. We waste 90% of our brain on other people's thoughts and repeating them.
Today must be a day of alignment on Critical Thinking Posts.
I think the larger problem is that we just go off with the word 'critical thinking' and forget to explain what that means. I think you did a great job in covering ways to work through the process.
This was another one I came across today that made a nice clear breakdown of the term which includes a lot of your points.
Brilliant! I was sent to the principal’s office daily in second grade for “talking out of turn.” The thing is, I wasn’t chit-chatting with my classmates, I was interacting with the teacher. Little did I understand, this is verboten in our modern classrooms! The only question you’re allowed to ask is, “Is this gonna be on the test?”
Thanks for this. We homeschooled for 13 years and our main goal was to teach them how to learn. One common "complaint" to/about homeschoolers is that they learn different stuff, or the same stuff but at a different time, than kids in school. My answer was a) school as we know it is an organizational problem not an educational one. The logistics of getting children where they're supposed to go, when, etc, is way more important than what happens in the classroom. b) This isn't the Renaissance - there is way more information out there than anyone can learn. So if your child learns a bucket-full of information from a school and my child learns the same size bucket-full of information at home (excluding reading and math of course), is my child less educated than yours? Or are they equally educated just in different areas? And c) Anyone can learn anything at any time. If my kid didn't learn XXX at 14, he can learn it at 18 or 20 or 40 or 65. There's no time limit. If they know HOW to learn, there is no limit to when/what.
Like many homeschoolers, our motto was "Education is not the filling of a bucket, it's the lighting of a fire." Homeschool-haters REALLY hate all of these points and motto!
We are surrounded by idiots, and it's dangerous and depressing.
I think I can contribute an interesting read to complement this post. I was going back over my notes and excerpts from David Cayley's intellectual biography of Ivan Illich (buy it. So good!) and had drawn out this (with some of my own commentary in parenthesis):
Chapter 6 Disabling Professions 151
In 1925 Alfred North Whitehead, in his Science and the Modern World, had denounced the “professionalizing of knowledge,” arguing that it produced “minds in a groove” and sacrificed reality to the “set of abstractions” characteristic of a given profession. But what was distinctive about Illich's critique of professional power was his treatment of rampant professionalism as a legal and constitutional problem. In 1970's Deschooling Society, Illich had already argued that contemporary school systems must be “disestablished,” by which he meant that their obligatory character should be eliminated and jobs awarded on the basis of competence, not certification. His model was disestablishment of religion in the U.S. Constitution. He took the same view of other forms of professional power. What had traditionaly been called liberal professions had been optional, as the name liberal . . .
Dominant professions, he argued, had become compulsory in two senses: eligibility for employment, social benefits, and even elementary forms of social participation had come to require professional supervision and certification, and the social environment had been reshaped so totally as to starve all alternatives to professionally prescribed courses of action out of existence. Alternatives had become unimaginable as well as unviable.
To Illich the power concentrated in contemporary professions represented a profound shift in the political structure of modern societies. All liberal polities supposedly rest on two conditions: the existence of a civil society and a government in which power is divided and dispersed. Civil society, in theory, is a sphere outside the state in which people can meet in their “common quality” as free persons and form what the eighteenth century gradually began to call “the public opinion.” (speaks about separation of powers and Montesquieu: executive, legislative, judicial)... It is Illich's claim that these two ideals have been thoroughly extinguished by the hegemony of professionals. They have been able to make their services effectively mandatory.
…
Contemporary professionals now legislate by authoritatively imputing to others a “need” for their service; they exercise administrative or executive power by their monopoly on diagnosing and meeting these needs; they acquire judicial status by the penetration and reach of the expert opinions; and on top of all of this, they function as priests by controlling, as the Church once did, access to the means of grace or blessedness. They combine in one office pastoral, administrative, and legislative power. What this means is that there is no longer a civil space in which citizens can use their common sense to arrive at a considered opinion because all available spaces are saturated by the prefabricated lingos and ready-made solutions that characterize professionalized service. Illich gives a striking example of professional power in Limits to Medicine, where he writes of the extraordinary prerogatives conferred on “the medical functionary” by “the ritualization of crisis”: “It provides him with a license that usually only the military can claim. Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency. He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human...
Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in a an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation. The insistence of the physician on his exlusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.” There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt's claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception – and rule in its place as the very source of law. This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims...in an emergency.” Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates... Illich also emphasizes the ways in which professionals function as devisors, interpreters, and administrators of policy. And, as these functions pass into the hands of technocrats, Illich says, politics has “withered.”
(My comment: Now imagine the reduction of the personalized role of a physician due to insurance, governmental, medical board, and large employer protocols, or even mainstream mob focused-rage canceling. Now imagine going completely administrative in this role and eventually eliminating entirely, or as much as possible, the human involvement in the role of the physician. Now imagine artificial intelligence taking on that role somewhat, then more so, then with only a human sign off, then entirely. Illich died in 2002. What might he say today?)
This creates a constitutional crisis, in Illich's view, because powers have come into existence that were not foreseen when modern states were formed and that remain unrecognized in their formal constitutions...
The media complex, because of its overt and obvious impact on politics, affords an easy example of how professional power changes the political constitution of society. But Illich regarded other professions in the same light, as is probably already clear, he used the term quite broadly to take in not just the traditional professions but any group capable of gaining a legal mandate, dictating its standards, and disabling popular capacities, from morticians to grief counselors. In Limits to Medicine, he says that the power of “health occupations” is the result of a “political delegation” - a concession of power properly belonging in the sphere of political decision to a largely autonomous professional elite... Decisions about what is fitting and what is enough have passed out of the purview of popular judgment and into the realm of experts. Moral questions about what is good have been overshadowed by technical questions of what is possible. Public discussion has been, as Illich says, “stunned by a delusion about science”- the delusion that knowledge entitled to wear a lab coat should automatically trump common sense.
...dominant professions, Illich said, threatened a deeper alienation – an alienation from the very possibility of independent thought or action... “Pathogenic medicine,” he said, “...paralyzes autonomous action...”
“...The social commitment to provide all citizens with almost unlimited outputs from the medical system threatens to destroy the environmental and social conditions needed by people to live a life of constant autonomous healing.”
The limits to medicine must be found in the same way as the limits to the frustrating overproduction of any other industrial staple. “The point of optimal synergy between industrial and autonomous production” - between what is done for me and what I can, with others, do for myself – is to be found by a process by which “the natural boundaries of human endeavor are estimated, rcognized, and translated into politically determined limits.” The alternative, he says, is “compulsory survival in a planned and engineered hell.”
I used to like my doctor, but as the years went by the practice changed. At the beginning I could sit and discuss my health with her, but eventually a scribe would enter, typing everything on the computer while the doctor seemingly typed in the same information on her own computer. And sometimes a med student would join us. This became more absurd when we had to take insane precautions for covid, yet somehow it was ok for four of us to sit in one tiny room with flimsy masks. And when I once asked my doctor what she would do for me if I contracted covid, she had a confused look on her face and told me to wait for the vaccines.
My appointment today was different. It was like 'the old days' with just me and the doctor. We talked. She didn't push any vaxes since she knows my stance and then she announced her retirement. She then reflected on how medicine had changed and now it's a one size fits all approach instead of looking at each individual patient. In fact, she mentioned that several times. She is part of a larger health organization that obviously dictates how she practices medicine. It's sad because she was probably a good doctor at one time. Now, to try and find a doctor that isn't beholden to a corporate entity will be difficult.
Thank you for this thought provoking article. There was so much information that I questioned at the beginning of the pandemic, and wondered why those around me weren't seeing through all the BS. When I started learning about the risks of myocarditis from the data that was coming out of Israel, I implored my very healthy son in his twenties to hold off on the vaccine. This very healthy young man is also quite accomplished with advanced degrees. So when you wrote, "Typically, the more intelligent people are, the less they can perceive the totality of an opposing argument, and instead, the more they focus on rapidly looking for weak points in the argument which can be used to debunk..." I felt like you were writing about my son as well as other family members. I'm not an eloquent speaker and cannot articulate all the information I have gained, so he quickly tried to twist my concerns around and win what wasn't even a debate.
One resource for those skeptical of medicine in particular: Kendricks 2014 book "Doctoring Data." (Author recommended to me by A Midwestern Doctor, although not this title.) Although I'd done it earlier, this book helped me become better at dissecting a drug trial or meta-analysis to find hidden results. For example, Kendricks cites several studies and points out unexpected (and often unfavorable) results using their own data. Specifically (and was relevant to me) one can show that statins may very slightly reduce "events" but they make almost no change on all-cause mortality. He (and/or I) have drawn similar conclusions for lowering blood pressure. (Big asterisk: that's not to say these drugs have no uses, but for primary prevention in those without a history of disease, they provide almost no benefit. Actually, from the hypertension study I looked at, I'd say much the same for secondary prevention too.)
The broader and to me rather disquieting issues are these: The two drugs above are very widely promoted public health policies, probably among the most heavily so in the world. Yet it can be shown that they are of very close to zero benefit for the average patient and perhaps even harmful (side effects.) What does this say about the medical establishment that recommends them? The government panels that mandate or approve them? And in this case we're not discussing Covid-19 products rushed to market begging emergency need. No, we are talking about products that went through normal development, testing and approvals. After learning such dirty secrets, how can a patient like me retain much trust in my doctors, or in fact, anything that the government or the medical profession claims is true or best policy?
I was reading a journal this morning that states they are using ICD-9 codes worldwide (Israel this time) to check myocarditis post mRNA vaccine. I have not worked for 20 years but aren't we using ICD-10 codes for most of our DX these days?
I’ve been trying to finish reading this all day in between studying for college finals, running errands, and a much needed nap. Finally finished it and I wanted to talk about why the fad of fact checking has been something that people look toward for others rather than doing it themselves?
My curiosity has always led me to looking into a topic that peaked my curiosity. Doing my own research is what gets me answers to my questions. Would some of those answers come from experts in relevant fields? Absolutely! I’m no botanist! I’m not going to study botany to figure out why my money tree is shedding leaves (though the journey does sound interesting). The difference I see in looking toward an expert for information is that I’ll look into several botanists and will often look at contraindications. I also never make a person an immediate authority and may look into money ties for the sources being shared if I get real suspicious.
Anywuzzle, I’m saying this all to say that if fact checking is an important task for critical thinking, why not teach people how to do it rather than doing it for them? I think we all know the answer to that question. That answer is everything your article is about.
Another fine piece of work and a reminder to continue to safeguard my way of thinking while undergoing the indoctrinating methods of higher learning.
Thank you as always for such an insight into the medical school world.
I'm not 100% sure but I'm pretty close.
The med schools became propaganda campus' when Rockefeller's meds for anything & everything empire was rolled out. Mainly massively funding the universities. The wretch gates has also been increasingly funding med schools.
Give Rumble a try for your videos. Don't have the censorbots yet!
If our system is corrupted, that’s like the equivalent of having a computer that has a corrupted motherboard. All of our other problems are just programs that run on the computer. If the computer itself is no good, then arguing about what programs are best to run on it is a pointless exercise. We need to fix the system first. As long as we allow the systems that govern our lives to be corrupted we will never be able to navigate our way to the best society possible - and that should be the goal.
How? With transparency, decentralization, and super collaboration with highly aligned people.
Ten authors who have influenced my thinking on this subject:
Alfred Korzybski; Marshal McLuhan; Douglas Hofstadter; Marvin Harris; Thomas Kuhn; Karl Popper; James Grier Miller; Richard Feynman; Robert Anton Wilson; Terence McKenna.
Where to begin? This article focuses on a subject (epistemology) which I would describe as fundamental to the successful pursuit of every other area of human inquiry. As such, I feel compelled to add my own 2 kopeks, even though I have no formal training in the subject. Perhaps this is an advantage?
I would begin by noting that the term "Critical Thinking" already contains an inherent bias. It suggests that what we're critically thinking about is something external to our own beliefs, and not those beliefs themselves. Personally, I prefer to call it Managed Uncertainty, or the MU System - a term I stole from Douglas Hofstadter in his magnum opus, Godel, Escher, Bach - a must read for anyone venturing down this rabbit hole. Here's an explanation of the MU puzzle as he frames it:
From this basic premise we derive the fact that it's impossible to characterize every aspect of a subject under scrutiny. There will always be an element of uncertainty in our conclusions, no matter how definitive they at first appear. An example of this is the interference problem in the study of particle physics, where the mere act of observation changes the system we're attempting to observe. An earlier example is the geocentric model of the universe, contradicted by the retrograde motion of Mars. People paid with their lives to overturn that paradigm, which at the time was considered self-evident.
Applying this idea at a personal level leads to the question of why I should believe the things I take to be true, and not just the things others tell me are true. This goes beyond self-criticism and straight the heart of the matter. Why should I trust that my own beliefs are valid, which contains a further question: how did I come by these beliefs in the first place? Are they really my own, or did they come from some other source?
Clearly we inherited most of them since we all are members of a culture, and receive training in the elements of that culture, first from our parents, and later from observation of the people around us. This is all done without refection on the validity of those beliefs since as children, apart from basic instincts, we are a blank slate. So, by the time we enter school, we are already imbued with, if not thoroughly indoctrinated in the basic elements of our culture, which of course is just one among many, and not necessarily the most accurate reflection of reality.
Fortunately for the hapless elementary school teacher most of this can be overlooked, since the principle task at hand is teaching children to read and write, not to critique what they're reading. That supposedly comes later. But again, we have a problem. The way we express ourselves through language itself introduces bias in our thought processes. This is a vast topic and I've already taken up enough of your time, but as a parting example, consider the problem of learning to read Chinese characters. Western students only have to learn a couple of dozen symbols and their combinations. Chinese students have to learn at least 2000 distinct characters, and should have command of about 8000 by the time they graduate. Russians have it hard as well, where they have to learn 6 cases and their appropriate pronouns, plus noun and adjective endings for each case in order to write correct Russian. As you'd expect, Grammar, not Math is the most hated subject in Russian education.
OK, that's it for now. I may add to this later if I can find the time.
This whole question becomes even more interesting once you start working with a lot more of the complex sciences and interactions between the body, mind, and spirit.
You raised a lot of good points. One thing a lot of people don't realize is how many things that are out there there is not a good way to express within the English language.
As a meditation teacher, I saw an excellent model showing how 90% of all thought in all people is repetitive, repeating the same thoughts over and over. Then 90% of that is unoriginal thought. It was put there. Most of the "thoughts" in our brain aren't even our own, and we repeat them to ourselves endlessly.
In meditation, we try and let go of those repetitions & unoriginal thought, to cultivate that 10% original thought.
It's interesting that the common trope says we only use about 10% of our brain - when - my meditation classes have taught me it's just the opposite. We waste 90% of our brain on other people's thoughts and repeating them.
Today must be a day of alignment on Critical Thinking Posts.
I think the larger problem is that we just go off with the word 'critical thinking' and forget to explain what that means. I think you did a great job in covering ways to work through the process.
This was another one I came across today that made a nice clear breakdown of the term which includes a lot of your points.
https://polymathicbeing.substack.com/p/do-you-really-think-critically
Brilliant! I was sent to the principal’s office daily in second grade for “talking out of turn.” The thing is, I wasn’t chit-chatting with my classmates, I was interacting with the teacher. Little did I understand, this is verboten in our modern classrooms! The only question you’re allowed to ask is, “Is this gonna be on the test?”
Thanks for this. We homeschooled for 13 years and our main goal was to teach them how to learn. One common "complaint" to/about homeschoolers is that they learn different stuff, or the same stuff but at a different time, than kids in school. My answer was a) school as we know it is an organizational problem not an educational one. The logistics of getting children where they're supposed to go, when, etc, is way more important than what happens in the classroom. b) This isn't the Renaissance - there is way more information out there than anyone can learn. So if your child learns a bucket-full of information from a school and my child learns the same size bucket-full of information at home (excluding reading and math of course), is my child less educated than yours? Or are they equally educated just in different areas? And c) Anyone can learn anything at any time. If my kid didn't learn XXX at 14, he can learn it at 18 or 20 or 40 or 65. There's no time limit. If they know HOW to learn, there is no limit to when/what.
Like many homeschoolers, our motto was "Education is not the filling of a bucket, it's the lighting of a fire." Homeschool-haters REALLY hate all of these points and motto!
We are surrounded by idiots, and it's dangerous and depressing.
great article thanks Doc.
I think I can contribute an interesting read to complement this post. I was going back over my notes and excerpts from David Cayley's intellectual biography of Ivan Illich (buy it. So good!) and had drawn out this (with some of my own commentary in parenthesis):
Chapter 6 Disabling Professions 151
In 1925 Alfred North Whitehead, in his Science and the Modern World, had denounced the “professionalizing of knowledge,” arguing that it produced “minds in a groove” and sacrificed reality to the “set of abstractions” characteristic of a given profession. But what was distinctive about Illich's critique of professional power was his treatment of rampant professionalism as a legal and constitutional problem. In 1970's Deschooling Society, Illich had already argued that contemporary school systems must be “disestablished,” by which he meant that their obligatory character should be eliminated and jobs awarded on the basis of competence, not certification. His model was disestablishment of religion in the U.S. Constitution. He took the same view of other forms of professional power. What had traditionaly been called liberal professions had been optional, as the name liberal . . .
Dominant professions, he argued, had become compulsory in two senses: eligibility for employment, social benefits, and even elementary forms of social participation had come to require professional supervision and certification, and the social environment had been reshaped so totally as to starve all alternatives to professionally prescribed courses of action out of existence. Alternatives had become unimaginable as well as unviable.
To Illich the power concentrated in contemporary professions represented a profound shift in the political structure of modern societies. All liberal polities supposedly rest on two conditions: the existence of a civil society and a government in which power is divided and dispersed. Civil society, in theory, is a sphere outside the state in which people can meet in their “common quality” as free persons and form what the eighteenth century gradually began to call “the public opinion.” (speaks about separation of powers and Montesquieu: executive, legislative, judicial)... It is Illich's claim that these two ideals have been thoroughly extinguished by the hegemony of professionals. They have been able to make their services effectively mandatory.
…
Contemporary professionals now legislate by authoritatively imputing to others a “need” for their service; they exercise administrative or executive power by their monopoly on diagnosing and meeting these needs; they acquire judicial status by the penetration and reach of the expert opinions; and on top of all of this, they function as priests by controlling, as the Church once did, access to the means of grace or blessedness. They combine in one office pastoral, administrative, and legislative power. What this means is that there is no longer a civil space in which citizens can use their common sense to arrive at a considered opinion because all available spaces are saturated by the prefabricated lingos and ready-made solutions that characterize professionalized service. Illich gives a striking example of professional power in Limits to Medicine, where he writes of the extraordinary prerogatives conferred on “the medical functionary” by “the ritualization of crisis”: “It provides him with a license that usually only the military can claim. Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency. He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human...
Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in a an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation. The insistence of the physician on his exlusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.” There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt's claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception – and rule in its place as the very source of law. This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims...in an emergency.” Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates... Illich also emphasizes the ways in which professionals function as devisors, interpreters, and administrators of policy. And, as these functions pass into the hands of technocrats, Illich says, politics has “withered.”
(My comment: Now imagine the reduction of the personalized role of a physician due to insurance, governmental, medical board, and large employer protocols, or even mainstream mob focused-rage canceling. Now imagine going completely administrative in this role and eventually eliminating entirely, or as much as possible, the human involvement in the role of the physician. Now imagine artificial intelligence taking on that role somewhat, then more so, then with only a human sign off, then entirely. Illich died in 2002. What might he say today?)
This creates a constitutional crisis, in Illich's view, because powers have come into existence that were not foreseen when modern states were formed and that remain unrecognized in their formal constitutions...
The media complex, because of its overt and obvious impact on politics, affords an easy example of how professional power changes the political constitution of society. But Illich regarded other professions in the same light, as is probably already clear, he used the term quite broadly to take in not just the traditional professions but any group capable of gaining a legal mandate, dictating its standards, and disabling popular capacities, from morticians to grief counselors. In Limits to Medicine, he says that the power of “health occupations” is the result of a “political delegation” - a concession of power properly belonging in the sphere of political decision to a largely autonomous professional elite... Decisions about what is fitting and what is enough have passed out of the purview of popular judgment and into the realm of experts. Moral questions about what is good have been overshadowed by technical questions of what is possible. Public discussion has been, as Illich says, “stunned by a delusion about science”- the delusion that knowledge entitled to wear a lab coat should automatically trump common sense.
...dominant professions, Illich said, threatened a deeper alienation – an alienation from the very possibility of independent thought or action... “Pathogenic medicine,” he said, “...paralyzes autonomous action...”
“...The social commitment to provide all citizens with almost unlimited outputs from the medical system threatens to destroy the environmental and social conditions needed by people to live a life of constant autonomous healing.”
The limits to medicine must be found in the same way as the limits to the frustrating overproduction of any other industrial staple. “The point of optimal synergy between industrial and autonomous production” - between what is done for me and what I can, with others, do for myself – is to be found by a process by which “the natural boundaries of human endeavor are estimated, rcognized, and translated into politically determined limits.” The alternative, he says, is “compulsory survival in a planned and engineered hell.”
I used to like my doctor, but as the years went by the practice changed. At the beginning I could sit and discuss my health with her, but eventually a scribe would enter, typing everything on the computer while the doctor seemingly typed in the same information on her own computer. And sometimes a med student would join us. This became more absurd when we had to take insane precautions for covid, yet somehow it was ok for four of us to sit in one tiny room with flimsy masks. And when I once asked my doctor what she would do for me if I contracted covid, she had a confused look on her face and told me to wait for the vaccines.
My appointment today was different. It was like 'the old days' with just me and the doctor. We talked. She didn't push any vaxes since she knows my stance and then she announced her retirement. She then reflected on how medicine had changed and now it's a one size fits all approach instead of looking at each individual patient. In fact, she mentioned that several times. She is part of a larger health organization that obviously dictates how she practices medicine. It's sad because she was probably a good doctor at one time. Now, to try and find a doctor that isn't beholden to a corporate entity will be difficult.
Thank you for this thought provoking article. There was so much information that I questioned at the beginning of the pandemic, and wondered why those around me weren't seeing through all the BS. When I started learning about the risks of myocarditis from the data that was coming out of Israel, I implored my very healthy son in his twenties to hold off on the vaccine. This very healthy young man is also quite accomplished with advanced degrees. So when you wrote, "Typically, the more intelligent people are, the less they can perceive the totality of an opposing argument, and instead, the more they focus on rapidly looking for weak points in the argument which can be used to debunk..." I felt like you were writing about my son as well as other family members. I'm not an eloquent speaker and cannot articulate all the information I have gained, so he quickly tried to twist my concerns around and win what wasn't even a debate.
One resource for those skeptical of medicine in particular: Kendricks 2014 book "Doctoring Data." (Author recommended to me by A Midwestern Doctor, although not this title.) Although I'd done it earlier, this book helped me become better at dissecting a drug trial or meta-analysis to find hidden results. For example, Kendricks cites several studies and points out unexpected (and often unfavorable) results using their own data. Specifically (and was relevant to me) one can show that statins may very slightly reduce "events" but they make almost no change on all-cause mortality. He (and/or I) have drawn similar conclusions for lowering blood pressure. (Big asterisk: that's not to say these drugs have no uses, but for primary prevention in those without a history of disease, they provide almost no benefit. Actually, from the hypertension study I looked at, I'd say much the same for secondary prevention too.)
The broader and to me rather disquieting issues are these: The two drugs above are very widely promoted public health policies, probably among the most heavily so in the world. Yet it can be shown that they are of very close to zero benefit for the average patient and perhaps even harmful (side effects.) What does this say about the medical establishment that recommends them? The government panels that mandate or approve them? And in this case we're not discussing Covid-19 products rushed to market begging emergency need. No, we are talking about products that went through normal development, testing and approvals. After learning such dirty secrets, how can a patient like me retain much trust in my doctors, or in fact, anything that the government or the medical profession claims is true or best policy?
I was reading a journal this morning that states they are using ICD-9 codes worldwide (Israel this time) to check myocarditis post mRNA vaccine. I have not worked for 20 years but aren't we using ICD-10 codes for most of our DX these days?
I’ve been trying to finish reading this all day in between studying for college finals, running errands, and a much needed nap. Finally finished it and I wanted to talk about why the fad of fact checking has been something that people look toward for others rather than doing it themselves?
My curiosity has always led me to looking into a topic that peaked my curiosity. Doing my own research is what gets me answers to my questions. Would some of those answers come from experts in relevant fields? Absolutely! I’m no botanist! I’m not going to study botany to figure out why my money tree is shedding leaves (though the journey does sound interesting). The difference I see in looking toward an expert for information is that I’ll look into several botanists and will often look at contraindications. I also never make a person an immediate authority and may look into money ties for the sources being shared if I get real suspicious.
Anywuzzle, I’m saying this all to say that if fact checking is an important task for critical thinking, why not teach people how to do it rather than doing it for them? I think we all know the answer to that question. That answer is everything your article is about.
Another fine piece of work and a reminder to continue to safeguard my way of thinking while undergoing the indoctrinating methods of higher learning.
Thank you as always for such an insight into the medical school world.
I'm not 100% sure but I'm pretty close.
The med schools became propaganda campus' when Rockefeller's meds for anything & everything empire was rolled out. Mainly massively funding the universities. The wretch gates has also been increasingly funding med schools.
Give Rumble a try for your videos. Don't have the censorbots yet!
If our system is corrupted, that’s like the equivalent of having a computer that has a corrupted motherboard. All of our other problems are just programs that run on the computer. If the computer itself is no good, then arguing about what programs are best to run on it is a pointless exercise. We need to fix the system first. As long as we allow the systems that govern our lives to be corrupted we will never be able to navigate our way to the best society possible - and that should be the goal.
How? With transparency, decentralization, and super collaboration with highly aligned people.
https://open.substack.com/pub/joshketry/p/what-we-need-is-a-transparency-movement?utm_source=direct&r=7oa9d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Almost forgot!
https://terebess.hu/english/tao/Wing.html#Kap01
Great book!
Ten authors who have influenced my thinking on this subject:
Alfred Korzybski; Marshal McLuhan; Douglas Hofstadter; Marvin Harris; Thomas Kuhn; Karl Popper; James Grier Miller; Richard Feynman; Robert Anton Wilson; Terence McKenna.
Did I miss anyone?
Where to begin? This article focuses on a subject (epistemology) which I would describe as fundamental to the successful pursuit of every other area of human inquiry. As such, I feel compelled to add my own 2 kopeks, even though I have no formal training in the subject. Perhaps this is an advantage?
I would begin by noting that the term "Critical Thinking" already contains an inherent bias. It suggests that what we're critically thinking about is something external to our own beliefs, and not those beliefs themselves. Personally, I prefer to call it Managed Uncertainty, or the MU System - a term I stole from Douglas Hofstadter in his magnum opus, Godel, Escher, Bach - a must read for anyone venturing down this rabbit hole. Here's an explanation of the MU puzzle as he frames it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MU_puzzle
From this basic premise we derive the fact that it's impossible to characterize every aspect of a subject under scrutiny. There will always be an element of uncertainty in our conclusions, no matter how definitive they at first appear. An example of this is the interference problem in the study of particle physics, where the mere act of observation changes the system we're attempting to observe. An earlier example is the geocentric model of the universe, contradicted by the retrograde motion of Mars. People paid with their lives to overturn that paradigm, which at the time was considered self-evident.
Applying this idea at a personal level leads to the question of why I should believe the things I take to be true, and not just the things others tell me are true. This goes beyond self-criticism and straight the heart of the matter. Why should I trust that my own beliefs are valid, which contains a further question: how did I come by these beliefs in the first place? Are they really my own, or did they come from some other source?
Clearly we inherited most of them since we all are members of a culture, and receive training in the elements of that culture, first from our parents, and later from observation of the people around us. This is all done without refection on the validity of those beliefs since as children, apart from basic instincts, we are a blank slate. So, by the time we enter school, we are already imbued with, if not thoroughly indoctrinated in the basic elements of our culture, which of course is just one among many, and not necessarily the most accurate reflection of reality.
Fortunately for the hapless elementary school teacher most of this can be overlooked, since the principle task at hand is teaching children to read and write, not to critique what they're reading. That supposedly comes later. But again, we have a problem. The way we express ourselves through language itself introduces bias in our thought processes. This is a vast topic and I've already taken up enough of your time, but as a parting example, consider the problem of learning to read Chinese characters. Western students only have to learn a couple of dozen symbols and their combinations. Chinese students have to learn at least 2000 distinct characters, and should have command of about 8000 by the time they graduate. Russians have it hard as well, where they have to learn 6 cases and their appropriate pronouns, plus noun and adjective endings for each case in order to write correct Russian. As you'd expect, Grammar, not Math is the most hated subject in Russian education.
OK, that's it for now. I may add to this later if I can find the time.
This whole question becomes even more interesting once you start working with a lot more of the complex sciences and interactions between the body, mind, and spirit.
You raised a lot of good points. One thing a lot of people don't realize is how many things that are out there there is not a good way to express within the English language.