Critical Thinking

There's an acquaintance of mine who has in the last few years gone over to the MAGA side of politics. I don't interact with him these days, but I do check his Facebook page once in a while, since I find it a reliable barometer of what the MAGA crowd is pushing on any given day. Since my social media and real life interactions are either with people I agree with politically, or those with whom I don't agree, but who keep it to themselves, it gives me an idea about what the Trumpist man on the street is "thinking". Twitter/X used to be a reliable source of this information until I deleted my account a few years ago. Until then I noticed that whatever was trending on Twitter/X showed up on his Facebook page. 

A few years ago this individual, before he had gone full MAGA, was bemoaning the predominance of what he called critical thinking among social media users. By "critical thinking" he meant people criticizing other people, not the actual definition: "the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue to form a reasoned judgment". I and several of his friends attempted to point out that what he was complaining about wasn't critical thinking, but no matter what evidence we presented, including the Merriam-Webster online definition, he stuck to his belief. I think of this incident whenever I see examples of people engaged in not thinking critically. It's also a great example of the cult mindset. 

People mindlessly repeating whatever they saw on social media is pretty common. Something pops up in your "feed" and if it confirms what you already believe and you share it or comment or "like" it. If you disagree with it, there's the infamous laughing emoji. What's missing from this equation is anything resembling fact-checking. 

One of the victims of Trump's attack on the credibility of news organizations, what he calls the enemy of the people or the fake news, is fake-checking sites. While I concede that any news organization will have its biases, in general I believe that mainstream media's reporting is usually accurate. Whether their interpretation of events or their opinions are reliable is a topic for another day, although I did discuss it last January. Fact-checkers are nothing new, although they multiplied in the age of Trump. The same people who derided mainstream news sources, also attacked fact-checkers as unreliable. The prevailing opinion was that facts were what you said they were and fact checkers were just as biased, if not more so, than the networks and newspapers. This attitude reflects a basic lack of understanding of how fact-checkers operate. 

The main benefit to utilizing fact-checkers is that they cite their sources of information. They "provide the receipts". Their ruling on whether something is true, partly true, or false is based on information that is usually publicly available. If there's a Facebook post going around that says that a politician made an outrageous claim they'll link to videos, to government websites to let you know what information they found out about the claim. You can follow the same trail that they did and decide whether you would have come to the same conclusion. The incredible thing about fact-checking is that for the majority of what you see on social media, the resources to do your own fact-checking are available. 

This is where it gets tricky. 

Some fact-checking is easy, some takes more work. The internet is full of so-called experts holding forth on every subject under the sun. A lot of it is just someone's uniformed opinion. Often it takes patience to work through it all to get to the truth. Other times it's a simple as watching a YouTube video of a press conference. But it starts with a willingness to accept that just because something sounds plausible, it doesn't mean that it actually happened. Repetition often cements certain things as "facts" in our minds, or we conflate similar stories. It helps to have a good bullshit detector, that is, an ability to see when something just doesn't make sense, in other words to be a confirmed skeptic. Being skeptical doesn't mean that you automatically discount something you disagree with, or find difficult to believe, but that you seek independent confirmation before accepting it as fact. 

Remember the definition of critical thinking from early in this article? The objective analysis and evaluation of an issue to form a reasoned judgment. Usually the answer is more complicated than an internet meme, and often it's not what we wanted it to be.