Panning for Gold —— 《Asking the Right Questions》

For quite a long time, I'm shamed to be frequently messed up with logic during our communication. I'm shamed to use words often loaded with heavy emotional baggage and ambiguity. I'm shamed to be a passive absorber of information. In brief, I'm shamed not to be a critical thinker before. Now these shame motivate me to dig into critical thinking area, to read this book eagerly, to try best to find clarity of my mind, to try to make strong reasoning to my arugements. Nevertheless I know there will be no chance any more to show you my changes.

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Below are my notes on this book:

We normally use sponge thinking style which emphasizes knowledge acquisition.

Pros:

1. Knowledge you have acquired provides a foundation for more complicated thinking later.
2. Rather than requiring strenuous mental effort, it tends to be rather quick and easy.
3. The primary mental effort involves concentration and memory.

Cons:

1. Decisions become accidents of association, instead of reflective judgments.

We need to shift to critical thinking style (so-called panning-for-gold) which requires us actively interaction with knowledge as it is being acquired.

Why:

1. Making personal choices critically about what to accept and what to reject: Emotional involvement should not be the primary basis for accepting or rejecting a position. To avoid it, you need to be as open as possible to ideas that strike you as weird or dangerous.
2. become more sensibly to select expert opinions on which you can rely from among the crowd of experts
3. build skills and attitudes that will enable you to make your personal judgment thoughtfully, shape your behavior and decision.

Two kinds of critical thinking:

• Weak-sense critical thinking: use of critical thinking to defend your current beliefs. It is weak becuase it is unconcerned with moving toward truth or virtue. The purpose is to resist and annihilate opinions and reasoning different from yours. It might ruin the potentially humane and progressive aspects of critical thinking.
• Strong-sense critical thinking: use of the same skills to evaluate all claims and beliefs, especially your own. It help us select from alternative opinions that we have understood and evaluated.

The list of critical questions:

1. What are the issues and the conclusions?

Two different issues:

• Descriptive issues: to raise questions about the accuracy of descriptions of the past, present, or future; to reflect our curiosity about patterns or order in the world.
• Prescriptive issues: to raise questions about what we should do or what is right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, good or bad.

Conclusions are inferred; they are derived from reasoning. Claims without support statement are mere opinions rather than conclusions. Clues to help you identify the conclusion:

• Ask what the issue is.
• Look for indicator words: consequently、suggests that、hence、therefore、points、to the conclusion that、thus、the point I'm trying to make is、it follows that、it is highly probable that、shows that、 proves that、indicates that、 the truth of the matter is.
• Look in likely locations:at the beginning or at the end
• Remember what a conclusion is not.
• Check the context of the communication and the author's background.
• Ask the question, "and therefore?"

2. What are the reasons?
An argument = A conclusion + Reasons allegedly supporting it.

"Reverse logic" or "Backward reasoning": reasons are an afterthought, following the selection of your conclusion.

3. Which words or phrases are ambiguous?
Identifying the precise meaning of key words or phrases is an essential step in deciding whether to agree with someone's opinion.

4. What are the value conflicts and assumptions?

Read between the lines to look at the full argument: Some ideas are taken for granted by authors, which are important invisible links in the reasoning structure, the glue that holds the entire argument together. They are assumptions.

Characteristics of assumptions:

• hidden or unstated (in most cases);
• taken for granted;
• influential in determining the conclusion; and
• potentially deceptive.

Value assumptions are very contextual;We hold our value preferences only up to a point.Because our minds tend to like to put things in neat compartments, you have to work hard to tolerate the complexity of a person's value preferences.

5. What are the descriptive assumptions?

Descriptive assumptions are beliefs about the way the world is.
Prescriptive or value assumptions are beliefs about how the world should be.

6. Are there any fallacies in the reasoning?

A fallacy is a reasoning trick that an author might use while trying to persuade you to accept a conclusion.

Common fallacy list:

• Ad Hominem fallacy（人身攻击）: An attack, or an insult, on the person, rather than directly addressing the person's reasons. Why it is a fallacy: the character or interests of individuals making arguments usually are not relevant to the quality of the argument being made.
• Slippery Slope（滑坡效应）: Making the assumption that a proposed step will set off an uncontrollable chain of undesirable events, when procedures exist to prevent such a chain of events.
• Searching for Perfect Solution（追求完美）: Falsely assuming that because part of a problem would remain after a solution is tried, the solution should not be adopted.
• Equivocation（模棱两可、偷换概念）: A key word is used with two or more meanings in an argument such that the argument fails to make sense once the shifts in meaning are recognized.
• Appeal to Popularity (Ad populum 诉诸大众): An attempt to justify a claim by appealing to sentiments that large groups of people have in common; falsely assumes that anything favored by a large group is desirable
• Appeal to questionable authority（诉诸可疑权威）: Supporting a conclusion by citing an authority who lacks special expertise on the issue at hand.
• Appeals to Emotions（诉诸情绪）: The use of emotionally charged language to distract readers and listeners from relevant reasons and evidence.
• Straw Person（歪曲原理、草人谬误）: Distorting our opponent's point of view so that it is easy to attack; thus we attack a point of view that does not truly exist.
• Either-Or (Or False Dilemma，非此即彼的虚拟困境): Assuming only two alternatives when there are more than two.
• Wishful Thinking（愿景思考）: Making the faulty assumption that because we wish X were true or false, then X is indeed true or false.
• Explaining by Naming（标签式解释）: Falsely assuming that because you have provided a name for some event or behavior that you have also adequately explained the event.
• Glittering Generality（光环效应）: The use of vague emotionally appealing virtue words that dispose us to approve something without closely examining the reasons.
• Red Herring（转移注意力）: An irrelevant topic is presented to divert attention from the original issue and help to "win" an argument by shifting attention away from the argument and to another issue. The fallacy sequence in this instance is as follows: (a) Topic A is being discussed; (b) Topic B is introduced as though it is relevant to topic A, but it is not; and (c) Topic A is abandoned.
• Begging the Question（以待决之问题为论据）: An argument in which the conclusion is assumed in the reasoning.
• Hasty Generalization Fallacy（草率泛化）: A person draws a conclusion about a large group based on experiences with only a few members of the group.
• Faulty Analogy（错误类比）: Occurs when an analogy is proposed in which there are important relevant dissimilarities.
• Causal Oversimplification（过分简单化）: Explaining an event by relying on causal factors that are insufficient to account for the event or by overemphasizing the role of one or more of these factors.
• Confusion of Cause and Effect（因果倒置）: Confusing the cause with the effect of an event or failing to recognize that the two events may be influencing each other.
• Neglect of a Common Cause（忽视共同原因）: Failure to recognize that two events may be related because of the effects of a common third factor.
• Post hoc Fallacy（混淆时间先后）: Assuming that a particular event, B, is caused by another event, A, simply because B follows A in time.

7. How good is the evidence?

What can be used as evidence:
intuition, personal experience, testimonials, appeals to authority,personal observation, research studies, case examples, and analogies.

8. Are there rival causes?
A rival cause is a plausible alternative explanation that can explain why a certain outcome occurred.

9. Are the statistics deceptive?

Be wary of statistics:

• How the statistics were obtained. Ask, "How does the author or speaker know?"
• Be curious the type of average being described: mean(total value/total number), median (in the middle of value range) or mode (the most frequent)?
• Be alert to users of statistics concluding one thing, but proving another.
• Blind yourself to the writer's or speaker's statistics and compare the needed statistical evidence with the statistics actually provided.
• Blind yourself to the conclusion, compare your own conclusion from statistics with authors'.
• Determine what information is missing. Be especially alert for misleading numbers and percentages and for missing comparisons.

10. What significant information is omitted?

Be sensitive to the importance of what is not said because omitted information is inevitable for at least five reasons.

• time and space limitations;
• limited attention span;
• inadequacies in human knowledge;
• consciously deception;
• existence of different perspectives

11. What reasonable conclusions are possible?

Multiple conclusions are possible reached from a single set of reasons which depend on how you makes certain interpretations or assumptions concerning the meaning of the reasons.

Dichotomous thinking: assuming there are only two possible answers to a question that has multiple potential answers. Together with either-or fallacy, dichotomous thinking in general damages reasoning by overly restricting our vision, limiting the range of your decisions and opinions. Even worse, it overly simplifies complex situations.