At the risk of being too simplistic, I think when it comes to teaching critical thinking or decision making practices (I’d like to lump all this together under Discernment), the focus is best placed on awareness of the most common and distortive cognitive errors we make.
And I think any instruction on discernment should make clear that it will rarely be a clean and clinical process, so just avoid the common pitfalls and trust in your training like muscle memory. Emotions certainly play a part in that.
I like your use of “discernment” here. It does capture the broader territory. On the “cognitive errors” point, I think it’s worth teasing out that not every error is the same thing as a bias. I'm not suggesting you meant to imply that, per se, but it's often implied by decision-making folks. Biases are the systematic tendencies that show up across people; errors can be much more contextual. What looks like a mistake in one situation - say, relying on a quick intuitive call - might actually be the best move in another. Part of the challenge is learning to spot when a given strategy fits the environment and when it doesn’t.
That said, I’d agree there are a few common errors that crop up often enough to warrant extra attention. Overconfidence is probably the clearest example. Others could include sticking with a failing course of action because of prior investment, defaulting to the status quo without questioning it or its opposite - acting before there's sufficient reason to act. These aren’t always catastrophic, but they can quietly distort a lot of choices.
And then there’s the personal layer. Beyond the usual suspects, discernment often comes down to knowing your own idiosyncratic weak spots. Maybe you tend to overcommit. Maybe you tend to overestimate. Maybe you avoid decisions until the last possible moment. Becoming aware of those patterns where you most often trip up can go a long way in strengthening discernment. It’s not just about steering clear of the general pitfalls; it’s also about building a kind of self-knowledge around how you actually decide.
The framework you mention here sounds rather interesting, and I can somewhat see the arguments you're making - perhaps one has to start somewhere, and this is better than nothing in its context of application? Maybe this is also an opportunity for you in this publication to get into some of the more specifics of the framework to supplement / add clarity.
Also, I wonder, when did the teaching of philosophy (in the sense of logic, standard thinking) go out of vogue..
I'd like to be able to get into some of the specifics of learning how to handle complexity. The problem is that there aren't easy solutions to it. That's part of what more standardized systems, like what Duke is introducing, offer that seems useful - a more clear-cut way to make decisions. The problem is that life and uncertainty doesn't fit neatly into such a system - there's so many contingent possibilities. One of the things I teach students in my grad course on decision making is that my goal is not to give them a formula for making decisions, but to give them an idea about when it might be useful to stick with their intuition and when it might make sense to expand the search for evidence.
As to when logic went out of fashion, I honestly can't say. All I know if that for as long as I've been teaching adult students, only a small minority of them have ever been taught any sort of formal logic. Many have never even hear of logical fallacies!
At the risk of being too simplistic, I think when it comes to teaching critical thinking or decision making practices (I’d like to lump all this together under Discernment), the focus is best placed on awareness of the most common and distortive cognitive errors we make.
And I think any instruction on discernment should make clear that it will rarely be a clean and clinical process, so just avoid the common pitfalls and trust in your training like muscle memory. Emotions certainly play a part in that.
I like your use of “discernment” here. It does capture the broader territory. On the “cognitive errors” point, I think it’s worth teasing out that not every error is the same thing as a bias. I'm not suggesting you meant to imply that, per se, but it's often implied by decision-making folks. Biases are the systematic tendencies that show up across people; errors can be much more contextual. What looks like a mistake in one situation - say, relying on a quick intuitive call - might actually be the best move in another. Part of the challenge is learning to spot when a given strategy fits the environment and when it doesn’t.
That said, I’d agree there are a few common errors that crop up often enough to warrant extra attention. Overconfidence is probably the clearest example. Others could include sticking with a failing course of action because of prior investment, defaulting to the status quo without questioning it or its opposite - acting before there's sufficient reason to act. These aren’t always catastrophic, but they can quietly distort a lot of choices.
And then there’s the personal layer. Beyond the usual suspects, discernment often comes down to knowing your own idiosyncratic weak spots. Maybe you tend to overcommit. Maybe you tend to overestimate. Maybe you avoid decisions until the last possible moment. Becoming aware of those patterns where you most often trip up can go a long way in strengthening discernment. It’s not just about steering clear of the general pitfalls; it’s also about building a kind of self-knowledge around how you actually decide.
The framework you mention here sounds rather interesting, and I can somewhat see the arguments you're making - perhaps one has to start somewhere, and this is better than nothing in its context of application? Maybe this is also an opportunity for you in this publication to get into some of the more specifics of the framework to supplement / add clarity.
Also, I wonder, when did the teaching of philosophy (in the sense of logic, standard thinking) go out of vogue..
I'd like to be able to get into some of the specifics of learning how to handle complexity. The problem is that there aren't easy solutions to it. That's part of what more standardized systems, like what Duke is introducing, offer that seems useful - a more clear-cut way to make decisions. The problem is that life and uncertainty doesn't fit neatly into such a system - there's so many contingent possibilities. One of the things I teach students in my grad course on decision making is that my goal is not to give them a formula for making decisions, but to give them an idea about when it might be useful to stick with their intuition and when it might make sense to expand the search for evidence.
As to when logic went out of fashion, I honestly can't say. All I know if that for as long as I've been teaching adult students, only a small minority of them have ever been taught any sort of formal logic. Many have never even hear of logical fallacies!