On Critical Thinking

2026.01.11

CXXXIV

[The Scientific Method; Secret Hitler; Alien Monoliths; The Machine Knows All; A Fight for Freedom]

Thesis: Critical Thinking is an erroneously marginalized skill that needs to be practiced to protect progress.

[The Scientific Method]

Critical Thinking is one of the most important skills you can learn. A working definition:

Critical Thinking: Objectively analyzing information to come up with a consistent interpretation of reality.

If you are able to think critically, you'll have an easier time identifying decisions that really are in your best interest in the long term. And, as you'll later see, you'll have an easier time winning the best board game ever designed, Secret Hitler.

On the other hand, if you don't know how to think critically, you're more inclined to believe lies from both yourself and others--those lies can cost you dearly. And, you'll be more likely to lose Secret Hitler.

Beyond being in your immediate personal interest, Critical Thinking is how we, as a species, perpetually build up our store of knowledge and information over time, and progress science and our understanding of the world.*

However, critical thinking takes effort, and there are a lot of traps that can get in the way of clear, critical thinking. To make matters worse, some people, either through their words or actions, would have you believe that you can and should "outsource" your critical thinking, and that convenience is more valuable than the ability to discern truth.

If the majority believed that, scientific progress would stall and any new information would build up in the hands of a minority. Historically, such minorities end up being more interested in suppressing truth than progressing it.

The good news is that the opponents of critical thinking and free thought have never succeeded in completely destroying progress. In part, because enough people do not give into the temptation of the easy way out.

_{*While it can create new risks, I strongly believe scientific progress is a very desirable thing. This post is not about that belief, but I do assert an implication of being pro critical thinking is that at the least you're okay with scientific progress as an inevitable by product of that critical thinking.}

[Secret Hitler]

Secret Hitler is a phenomenal game played by a group of 5-10 people.

A minority of the players are randomly chosen to be Fascist, with the aim of electing their candidate, Secret Hitler, to Chancellor. These Fascists are aware of who the other fascists are.

The balance of the players are Liberal, and they, unlike the Fascists, have NO information about anyone else's party affiliation. Their job is to pass a number of liberal policies before the fascists pass a smaller number of fascist policies and succeed at electing Hitler as Chancellor.

One common trap I see many players who are selected as Liberals fall into (myself included), is believing beyond a shadow of a doubt that another particular player or two are certainly also Liberals.

On the surface, it is somewhat obvious why you would NOT want to do this for two reasons:

1. You can never know who is liberal for certain

2. The Fascists are exerting effort to try to lie to you

A more rational way to play is to have adjusting probabilities that each player is or is not Fascist. While you might feel strongly that one player is Liberal, if their future actions go against that belief, your probabilities should adjust.

Still, it’s often that one or two liberals play with the incorrect belief that a fascist is certainly a liberal, and, because of this belief, lose the game.

Here are some plausible reasons this happens:

• Desire to Reduce Complexity: If you’re playing with 6 other people, and 3 of them are fascist, you make the game easier for yourself if you can eliminate altogether the possibility of one player being fascist

• Certainty vs Uncertainty: It is far easier to think in terms of certainties than probabilities. It takes more mental effort to say David is .8 Liberal, Jake is .2 Liberal, Helen is .9 Liberal, Lana is .95 Liberal, and Henry is .2 Liberal than it is to say Jake & Henry are definitely fascist & Lana is definitely a Liberal.

• Hubris: You think that YOU are harder to lie to than anyone else is, so you are more inclined to keep your beliefs once you make them

And this issue isn't much better if you wrongly label someone as a fascist, either: now, based off that assumption, you have severely lowered the perceived probability that any remaining player is a fascist. Really, since you are wrong, you’ve raised the real probability of any reaming player being fascist, compounding your error.

All of that is to say, even for a simple board game, you can see how many temptations there are to push our brain further from the truth, even when we think we are getting closer to it.

[Alien Monoliths]

When I was reading Herzog's autobiography, "Every Man for Himself and God Against All," there was a particular anecdote involving aliens, standing stones, and the power of critical thinking that stuck out to me.

In the 60s or 70s, Herzog had visited some standing stones in the North of France: these giant pillars of stone stand upright in unnatural, geometric patterns. When he was there, he ran into someone handing out pamphlets in a very official looking way, declaring that the stones were organized in such a fashion by aliens thousands of years ago.

Being a skeptic through and through, Herzog thought the notion absurd. He set about to come up with a plausible way to move the stones a few miles from their origins to where they were now and stand them upright.

With no phone or google or reference materials of any sort, he came up with a pretty realistic idea:

• From the stones’ starting position laying down, dig tunnels across it's width beneath it.*

• Insert some rolling item like a smooth or carved log in each tunnel.

• Dig out the rest of the dirt around the logs and a long, gradual ramp up in front of the stone.

• Proceed to move the stone with a mix of man power & pulleys attached to pillars in the ground when needed.

• Push the stone into a pre dug, sloped hole where you would like it to stand up right.

This idea is quite clever and also, a very plausible hypothesis for not only how these stones were moved and erected, but how other similar structures were developed. And, it’s pretty consistent with what a lot of historians believe about the stones.

Although it misses some actual bits about having to quarry the stones and only hits on one of the believed transit methods (sleds were also allegedly used), the critical thinking itself is admirable and something we can all learn from.

The point here is not that Herzog was “right”, but that he used information known to him* to come up with an idea consistent with facts that was also far more plausible than the alien hypothesis.

The conclusion not only helped him understand the world better, but the pulley system is exactly what he'd use to get a steamship over a mountain years later.

_{*A human who could command hundreds of others likely existed, ropes and wheels existed, the stones did not need to travel across a sea…}

[The Machine Knows All]

When presented with a mystery like a field of standing stones today, I think it's a lot more likely that most of us would pull out our phones and consult with Google or GPT or Claude than it is that we’d try to reason our way through it. (Since internet search and LLMs are converging towards the same thing, we'll refer to them collectively as the "Knowledge Base".)

More broadly, when given a choice between thinking critically and getting an answer from another source, it is very easy to bias towards getting the answer from another source.

Truly, this is nothing new: there have always been officials handing out pamphlets about aliens, “experts” telling you to trust them on TV commercials, Priests commanding you to blindly follow their interpretation of the religious text.

Still, it feels like we are at or are rapidly approaching a critical point: it has never been easier to find evidence in the Knowledge Base to confirm the thing you want to be true with out taking the time to Critically Think about whether or not it is.

More frightening than that, I’ve heard people seriously claim you should outsource your critical thinking to the Knowledge Base.

I don't believe the solution is throwing aside the Knowledge Base altogether at all. There has never been a time when it has been possible to learn anything so quickly, which is an amazing thing.

However, I think a very simple counterforce to the erosion of our ability to Critically Think is to dedicate time each day to doing thing without any access to the internet or LLMs. This could be:

• Reading long form materials like books that don't talk back to you

• Journaling at night before you go to bed

• Meditating in the morning and writing out your goals for the day before looking at your phone

• Going on a run in silence and doing brainteasers, like how far from our original intersection is a walker the second time you intersect (assumes out and back run)

• Cognitively and physically engaging activities like martial arts and rock climbing and surfing and skateboarding with no phone access

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[A Fight for Freedom]

If it seems that I'm being alarmist, it's because maintaining the ability to Think Critically is one of the greatest ways to ensure scientific progress and a free and open society.

To be crystal clear, I am not talking about some grand conspiracy here. Rather, I think the truth is more frightening than any conspiracy could be: we take the path of least resistance, and querying the internet or an LLM is easier than thinking critically.

The capacity for Critical Thinking atrophies like a muscle not in use. And the less critical thinking there is, the easier it is to lose Secret Hitler, both the board game and the real life game.

So, be sure your brain is hitting the gym.

Live Deeply,