Critical Thinking

Critical thinking may be THE issue of our times. If you want to better understand what critical thinking is these “top 10” books stand out from the crowd.

It isn’t easy to think about your own thinking, let alone to question it. It requires us to see from the outside in and ask questions about what we find.

The old media gatekeepers are gone (for better or worse) and there is no reliable filter to separate good information from bad—except for the filter within each of us, the “built-in baloney detector” that runs on skeptical questions.

If Einstein were alive today, he would see a world in which questioning has become more important than ever before. But he might also be left wondering why we still don’t encourage questioning or teach it to our children.

George Carlin and Carl Sagan encouraged the asking of skeptical questions. What might they make of today’s world, where so many people do seem to be asking skeptical questions, about pretty much everything??

Our society doesn’t seem to be asking the kind of questions that we need to be asking. It turns out critical thinking is hard. But it’s not impossible.

Author and professor Carl Sagan, a sage proponent of critical thinking, taught us that we must be conscious of our own cognitive blind spots—and of the many ways we can fall prey to faulty thinking.