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256 points hirundo | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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JoeAltmaier ◴[] No.35518164[source]
When IQ tests were invented folks didn't know about tests, at least in the US. They were rural immigrants who could maybe read. So when asked logic questions, they would answer pragmatically and be 'wrong'. That had some impact on perceived early low results.

As folks became better-read and educated they began to understand that IQ test questions were a sort of puzzle, not a real honest question. The answer was expected to solve the puzzle, not be right in any way.

E.g. There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How many elephants are there in Munich? A) 0 B) 1 C)2

Folks back then might answer B or C, because they figure hey there's probably a zoo in Munich, bet they have an elephant or two there. And be marked wrong.

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pseudo0 ◴[] No.35518406[source]
That theory could be plausible, except Flynn used results from Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is just pattern recognition. There are no questions about elephants or text-based questions that could introduce cultural bias. It's simply picking the shape that matches the pattern presented in a grid.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices

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WalterBright ◴[] No.35518518[source]
I've often heard from humanities academics that STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills.
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emodendroket ◴[] No.35518590[source]
Have you, or is this a very uncharitable gloss on what they actually were saying?
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WalterBright ◴[] No.35518647[source]
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.
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1. pxc ◴[] No.35525794[source]
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.

--

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

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2. int_19h ◴[] No.35528752[source]
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.
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3. pxc ◴[] No.35529500[source]
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.