The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon

[Silent3]

24. Perhaps a different kind of education than traditional education *might* help

One thing that is not taught very consistently or clearly is critical thinking skills. Even in classes like math and science, the philosophy of critical thinking is more implicit than explicit, turned into rote procedures and "best practices", rules you need to follow to get a good grade or get published in a journal. It's easy to compartmentalize this into something merely situational for getting particular jobs done, without learning much about the broader application of critical thinking to one's entire life.

I'm not sure, however, how well critical thinking can be taught as a general skill. I'd like to think it can be taught, at least to some degree, but I don't know how much this has been tried, and what measurable results if any have been found.

People need to learn about basic foibles of human thinking like confirmation bias and how crappy our untrained, innate handling of probability is. People need to learn the media savvy to recognize manipulation and logical fallacies.

I sometimes suspect that these mental disciplines aren't pushed very hard because it would lead to uncomfortable confrontations with religious beliefs, which don't stand up to well when subject to this kind of careful scrutiny.