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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Critical Thinking and Statistics

I discovered as I was enrolling for my university courses for 2012 in December last year that I was missing a prerequisite course (statistics) for one of my first semester classes (ecology). I decided to enroll in summer school (I live in the southern hemisphere remember), and to make the most of it I took a philosophy course in critical thinking as well. I wasn't really thinking of the applications of these two disciplines when I enrolled in them, but once I started attending lectures I realised that these two areas of study are perhaps two of the most important things anyone can have a solid grounding in.

I'm not sure about highschools everywhere, but when I was in highschool, there was no philosophy (let alone logic or critical thinking) taught at all and statistics was an elective class one could opt to take in 6th form (age 16-17). I am almost certain that if everybody had at least some grounding in critical thinking and statistics as teenagers, society as a whole would be a more intelligent place. People would be better equipped to deflect bad arguments and to not be duped by deceptive statistics used frequently in marketing.

2 comments:

  1. I went to a crappy public school in the States and we didn't have any classes in logic or critical thinking. A lot in the current economic crisis would have been avoided if people had the skills to understand that economic bubbles eventually burst.

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  2. I think you might enjoy this site: http://lesswrong.com/

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