Subject: Essay on critical thinking by an ex (fwd)
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 16:41:54 +1000 (GMT+1000)
From: Jan Groenveld <>


Critical thinking- some thoughts by an ex -scientologist on 
alt.religion.scientology 

Critical reading and thinking skills are often mentioned on this
newsgroup, and I've said before how I believe that a lack of these
same skills is what enabled me to fall for Scientology's
recruitment effort, its "hard sell" of its own weird brand of
spirituality or "technology", but I don't think I've ever defined
what I mean by these skills exactly, so I thought I'd take the 30
minutes to rattle off a short essay on the topic expressing some of
what I'm talking about when I use this phrase. Questions, comments
and additions welcome: (what did I miss?)

***

In the modern world there is a great deal of nonsense about.
Pseudoscience abounds in myriad different forms, and there is an
endless supply of con-games and schemes to entrap the unwary. Still,
not everyone falls for the various schemes to defraud us of money
or convince us of untruth. What specific skills can you arm yourself
with to become more skeptical? How can you become more critical and
harder to fool?

In general, you need a specific skill set to distinguish fact from
unsubstantiated claim, whether the claims come in written or verbal
form on any media, or even in person from a sales pitch or a cultic
recruiter.

First of all, you need to give yourself time to cover the material
in question. Critical reading is a slow and careful process, and
you must take the time to analyze the material in detail to
determine its status. Therefore, don't allow yourself to be rushed.
If the pitch is in person, ask for materials to read later. If you
are tired, make it another day. Nothing is so urgent that it cannot
wait another day, so don't allow yourself to be pressured. Cooling
off periods are allowed after a heated sales pitch and subsequent
careless purchasing decision in many countries, but make your own
cooling off period before you sign anything or commit to anything
or hand out any money. Give yourself time to think; if there is a
tag-team sales pitch going on, walk away and say you will give it
some thought and get back to them on it, and take your leave of the
situation to consider it in a less pressured environment. Refuse to
listen to arguments about how you need to commit immediately and
completely, and that any hesitation is a bad sign or that going
with your first impulse is the way to go. If the sales pitch is in
a written format, make sure you are well rested before you tackle
it, and that nothing else is on your mind at the moment.

The next technique you may apply to promote understanding and
to detect the verity of a subject is to think about the topic
carefully, not to just sit and absorb it. For example, if you are
reading something new, put it down for a minute and ponder what
is written. Ask yourself questions about the topic; what was the
author's intent in writing it? Can it be independently verified?
What is the author's background? Who disagrees with the author, and
what are their arguments? These questions may lead you to examine
other sources of information, and it generally a good idea to see
both sides of an issue before making a decision about it. If a
vacuum-cleaner salesperson is in your house and giving you a good
pitch about their product and you feel you want to buy the machine,
you might want to check out an issue of Consumer Reports about the
machine first before making up your mind rather than impulse buying
after hearing only one side. If you are reading a book, you could
preview it first and then stop to think about it and ask yourself
questions or make predictions about the contents. What do you know
about this subject? What is your gut feeling about it? What do you
think about it? Making notes about the subject may help you to
reflect upon it and get you thinking more about it rather than
merely taking it in, unquestioned. Reading to evaluate a source is
a more time-consuming task than pleasure reading of a novel, for
example; but its purpose is different and more serious, and there
may be consequences in the form of lost money or wasted life to not
taking your time with it now. Take the time to make notes, pause
and think, reflect, question, make predictions, summarize and
evaluate.

Keep an eye on yourself and your progress with the subject. Ask
yourself if you understand what you are reading, and, if you
don't, tackle it from another angle. Does what you are reading
fit with your predictions and expectations? Does it seem generally
reasonable? If what you are reading does not fit in with what you
already know, tread carefully, as this may be an area of deception
or error. Does what you are covering make sense? If not, can you
discover why that is? Is it too technical, does it appear illogical
or irrational? Find out why you cannot make sense of a subject,
if possible. The problem may well lie with the subject itself;
understanding nonsense is oxymoronic. The fault may lie with
the writer or with the subject matter itself, but if you have
determined that the problem lies in your own inability to
comprehend, then find other material on this same topic by
another writer at a more elementary level. The responsibility for
communication lies as much with the writer or speaker as with
the intended audience; you are responsible for your half of the
equation.

After you have finished reading the material, give yourself time to
ponder its implications. This is the time to read over your notes
if you made any and fit the new information into your present store
of knowledge - if the information is deemed to be of acceptable
quality and verity. Now would be a good time to check other
sources; never trust simply one person about any subject. Do the
other sources by different authors agree with the first one? If so,
are they independent sources, or are they linked in some manner
with the first source of information? For example, if the president
of Dow Chemical says that a certain pesticide is safe and
effective, and the other sources you find agree, make certain they
are not employees of Dow or working under a Dow Chemical grant!
Independent verification is vital to ensure that you are dealing
with legitimate documentation. It is also important at this time to
reflect on the purpose and motivations of the source of the new and
possibly questionable information. Don't take things at face value;
dig into the topic and into the writer or speaker to find out why
they are saying what they are saying. It is a given that ad copy,
for example, is unreliable as the authors are hired to sell a
product and are tainted thereby - be careful anywhere there is a
monetary interest. This extends to your own money; be particularly
careful if your money is on the line, as people are untrustworthy
when money is involved. It is reasonable to reject out of hand
anything someone tells you if they are to profit by the telling;
salespeople are an example of this, but it extends into religions,
for example, where salvation is a function of recruitment abilities
or where your time and effort are desired as much as your money.
Deception is often used in these circumstances as there is a direct
profit, monetary or spiritual, to be made from you. Ask yourself
what the person is going to get out of you if you believe them.

Fraud takes place the moment money leaves your hands in all
confidence games, so pay particular attention to that moment in
time. A good policy if you have any doubts at all is to refuse
to hand over your money - no matter what.

Realize that not everything you read will be true, no matter how
fine the prose or scholarly the source. Where deliberate deception
is not an issue, there is still room for errors to seep into the
material due to unchecked facts, inadequate or outdated science,
deception on the part of others who informed the writer or speaker,
commercialization of the academic community, and many other reasons.
It is important to pick through what you read; material is seldom
of such provenance and quality that all of it is useful to you.
What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? In general and
normal reading, there should be a great deal you disagree with, if
you are of a skeptical bent. Much of the material you will come
across is not true or only half truth. Ask yourself if what you
are reading is trustworthy and if you agree or disagree with the
author as they make each and every claim.

One skill you must develop is the ability to distinguish facts from
claims. Facts are statements that can be readily checked, as in an
encyclopedia or other reference work. If you read that Betsy Ross
designed the American Flag, for example, it should not be hard to
either verify or refute this statement in many reference works. You
can certainly question facts; they are statements that are amenable
to challenging their accuracy. Question facts when the writer may
have something to gain from their use. If Scientology, for example,
states that they have 8,000,000 members and uses this fact to gain
credibility and recognition, it may well be a claim that needs
looking into and independent verification from another source, such
as a census or checked against other numbers from the organization
such as numbers of churches and members at each.

An opinion or a claim is a statement open to interpretation and
judgment. Claims are not necessarily open to the kind of checking
that facts are. For example, a speaker might say that a liberal
government is bad for the economy. This is an unsupported claim,
not a fact. It lacks verification through the means of, for
example, looking at the economies of various nations over time
and comparing economic output with governmental liberality, which
in itself needs to be defined. Opinions may be well supported
or poorly supported, and you may agree or disagree with them to
varying degrees. One method of finding out more about opinions and
seeing if you may like to agree or disagree with them is to ask
the person expressing the idea why they hold such an opinion, or,
if reading material with such claims in it, ask yourself why the
writer holds this opinion. In the example above, the speaker might
say they hold this opinion because their daddy told them so, and
you might then wish to discard the opinion as worthless and
completely unsupported.

Opinions are often based on unstated assumptions about values or
definitions, and it may be fruitful to dig out what the author's
assumptions are that form the framework for their thinking on a
subject. In the example above, one of the assumptions may be
something along the lines of "daddy is always right" or based on
the idea that liberalism is inherently bad in and of itself, and
that no ethical person would be a liberal. This would be a value
assumption, that is, a belief about the way things should be or
what morality is, or a definitional assumption defining liberality
to be a certain thing or a certain way that it may or may not be
in reality. Read closely to see if you can spot the author's
assumptions underlying their arguments. If an author states that
detergent A is better at cleaning than detergent B because A is
better at removing stains, the author is using a definitional
assumption that cleaning implies stain removal. But what if another
author were to point out that detergent B is better at whitening,
and therefore a better detergent? They are using a different
definition for cleaning; they are more concerned with whitening
than stain removal. Read to find these assumptions underneath the
writing and then determine whether you agree with them or not before
making up your mind about the subject.

In conclusion, there is probably a large list of other techniques
and skills of critical reading in the area of logical fallacies of
many types - scientific reasoning, claims and proofs, and so forth
- but a good grounding in the skills mentioned above would make
people better consumers of both spiritual and commercial goods.
Learn how to read closely and carefully, to pose questions, make
predictions, to think about what you are being exposed to, to take
notes, always compare what you have read or heard with other sources,
monitor your progress with a topic, evaluate the source for motivation
and credibility of assumptions, and distinguish fact from mere 
opinion.

It will take more time to read and listen in this manner, but the
result will be a savings in time wasted going down the wrong paths
in life and a savings of money in avoiding making poor decisions -
and who among us has not made a hasty purchase or a rash decision
that was later regretted based upon a less than truly critical
evaluation of the evidence at hand?