To augment your points -
This example makes me recall a Ted Talk by James Flynn (Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'). There's a very relevant case he discusses, which I'll copy a snippet of the transcript:
[quote]
Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects.
And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany.
A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?" And the response was, "Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear." Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were -- that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren't willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, "How can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?" Now, these three categories -- classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously -- how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? And let me give you a few illustrations.
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We're educated to think that "abstract thinking" is a "good thing". But it doesn't really have to be the case. Of course I understand that for some complex real problems, the solution lies in finding and exploiting abstract connections, but I'd argue that a lot of modern society's problems lie in leaky or flawed abstractions that do more harm than good, but we still believe in those abstractions over real things. For example, we tend to cling onto "pretty" theories even when contradicted by factual data. We fight imaginary enemies all the time. We classify things into abstractions and apply generalizations, forgetting the nuances that differentiate them in the first place.
The polar bear example was particularly striking to me, because for somebody who hasn't seen a polar bear before, it probably sounds like a trick question testing whether you're gullible enough to believe there are pink little men on Mars. Yet with modern "seasoned test-takers" they'd just take whatever premise given to them without asking questions -- probably the exact opposite of what you'd actually want from a person that knows how to think critically.