Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I don’t think it reasonable to call the average person stupid in the sense that they’re incapable of learning it. Most have never actually been taught to think in that manner, and as such lack the skill set. Part of thinking well is the toolset, and part of it is being able to (and choosing to) read widely enough to make good use of the tools in that skill set.
Education, at least in non-elite American schools is not built to create thinkers. Nobody funding the schools or hiring the graduates cares if they can think (and other than the cognitive elite type jobs in high level stem, thinking is a net negative as thinkers are hard to control). As such the system is set up for mostly rote learning— what the classical education model calls grammar. Memorize and recall, perform mathematical equations. That’s all well and good, but that’s not going to create a thinker. There’s the next step where kids learn to understand why that works, or to learn to apply what they’ve learned, and to analyze texts, equations and problems to understand what’s being done and why.
Absent that, most people developed proxies that mostly work. Finding a “priest” type who you trust on a topic, trusting a given set of sources, using the canonical list of fallacies, or trusting the guy in the argument who sounds like Spock. Those sort of work most of the time, provided those you’re trusting are honest and knowledgeable. The trouble is that it’s not hard to know the tricks most people use as rationalist proxies and positioning yourself to appeal to those instincts.
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