American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'

Have you, or is this a very uncharitable gloss on what they actually were saying?

Yes, many times, from many of them. Google "stem majors lack critical thinking skills". To drive the point home, google will autocomplete it for you.

This is where The Algorithms have a fun hidden place in our daily lives. I tried a number of variations of that phrase and couldn't get Google to autocomplete it for me without getting to "stem majors lack crit". Before that it was suggesting math/calculus and chemistry skills without any mention of critical thinking.

Google will autocomplete it for me but then pretty much all the results I see are STEM proponents refuting this supposedly common criticism.

> To drive the point home, google will autocomplete it for you.

I'm not sure if the irony here was intended or not. But it is poignant.

Completions for "stem majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue, critical thinking skills, creative

Completions for "humanity majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue

No humanity majors refuting the claim that they lack critical thinking skills, maybe because that is never claimed in the first place?

A bit of a logical leap in my mind to infer from that that there a bunch of of people saying STEM majors "lack critical thinking skills."

Then who are said STEM majors refuting?

As someone who did a double degree in philosophy and computer science concurrently, I am here to tell you: STEM majors very often do lack critical thinking skills.

I have watched very smart physics majors struggle mightily (with success, in the end!) in a philosophy of science class because (a) they've implicitly absorbed an extremely naive epistemology, usually some Popperian but simplified thing, (b) they don't have a lot of practice reading and writing prose, and (c) their main coursework has focused on using existing models and methodologies to the near total exclusion of evaluating, analyzing, or comparing them.

Incidentally, that was in a class taught by someone with a graduate degree in STEM himself, who collaborates with working scientists on some of his work as a philosopher— this was an instructor who could very much speak the language of undergrad STEM students.

Critical thinking is also a matter of habit and temperament as much as it is being able to identify (un)sound reasoning itself. If you're not accustomed to seriously examining the structure and functioning of institutions, processes, and social practices, you ain't got it— even if you're extremely sharp with your logical and mathematical intuitions and skills.

That said, widespread innumeracy seems to me much more widely condoned socially than STEMlord parochialism, and is just as detrimental. Especially at an undergraduate level, I think we would benefit from rolling back our increasing specialization a bit. Everyone should have some experience with the work of mathematicians— writing proofs— and everyone should have some engagement with the history-of and philosophy-of some of the STEM disciplines, imo.

This is probably a good time to remind everyone that the empirical sciences are facing an extremely widespread methodological crisis right now¹. I point that out not to say that scientists are stupid or that the problems that add up to the replication crisis are easy to solve, but because critical thinking is exactly what scientists need to do and are doing when they work to address the replication crisis! It's not wrong to push for more emphasis on developing critical thinking skills and habits in science education.

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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Straw men?

Perhaps they read a defense of liberal arts majors as having certain benefits including teaching critical thinking skills and decided to take this as an affront? I don’t know. Lots of groups have strange persecution complexes.

It's a good reminder, but in this context you really ought to mention that STEM is the least affected by the replication crisis, while "softer" fields like sociology and psychology are the most affected.

That's true. Alarmingly, medicine is pretty badly affected, though! Basic science seems to do better.

And as computer people, our house is not clean either, despite the formal character of computer science. Empirical results in computer science, demos and benchmarking done in the field, and more, also matter and are often non-reproducible just a few years after publication— if source code is provided with the paper at all, which it often has not been.

Science is amazing, both for its processes and achievements. But there's lots of important work being done and yet-to-be-done on science itself. Critical thinking is essential to that work, and it goes beyond formal reasoning or puzzle-solving in the small.