Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.
Craig Newmark added this line from Hemingway: "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector."
While I agree that criticism is crucial to being able to effectively think, “criticism” might carry too narrow of a meaning to describe what is truly important to effective thinking. Maybe “discernment” is a better word. Criticism, to me, implies finding fault, and there is a serious danger in fault-finding, and that is that you are spending your best energy on finding faults instead of finding whatever the opposite of “faults” is.
Probably one of the blog posts that has influenced me the most is Seth Roberts’ post on “appreciative thinking”:
To learn appreciative thinking is to learn to appreciate, to learn to see the value of things. More or less the opposite of critical thinking.
That I had to make up a phrase shows the problem. I have complained many times about an overemphasis on critical thinking at universities.
When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to help students see such aspects of a paper as:
- What can we learn from it? What new ideas does it suggest? What already-existing plausible ideas does it make more plausible or less plausible?
- How is it an improvement over previous work? Does it use new methods? Does it use old methods in a new way? Does it show a better way to do something?
- Did the authors show good taste in their choice of problem? Is this a problem both important and possibly solvable?
- Are details done well? Is it well-written? Is the context of the work made clear? Are the data well-analyzed? Does it make good use of graphs? Is the discussion imaginative rather than formulaic?
- What’s interesting or enjoyable about it?
That sort of thing. In my experience few papers are worthless. But I’ve heard lots of papers called worthless.
