The Seed of Critical Thought Sprouts Not in the Shade
There’s a moment in each of our lives when we first begin to doubt what had previously been an unassailable truth. It usually happens when we are quite young. Perhaps for you it was a niggling suspicion that the dollar under your pillow hadn’t really been left by the Tooth Fairy. Or perhaps it was the first time one of your teachers presented a fact that didn’t quite jive with something you had read on your own. Or maybe it was something more profound. A betrayal of trust by a friend. Or a growing discomfort with some tenet of a belief system you’d been raised in. No matter how it first happened, it was surely disorienting. But planted in this garden of confusion is also the first seed of critical thought.
When we are very young, our first epistemology—our first theory of knowledge—is that every new thing we learn is inherently true and unassailable. And we dip into two streams to gather new knowledge. First, we learn about our environment directly through our senses, and then more complex knowledge as it is bestowed upon us by others. So long as these two streams of data do not interfere with each other, we remain very simple—and satisfied—epistemologists. Life is easy.
But once that first clash of ideas occurred, life became more complicated. You realized you could no longer trust both streams equally. You instinctively began the process of evaluating individual pieces of information. You started testing the things you were told against the things you could perceive, whenever possible. And in this way, you slowly began noticing that certain people in your life gave good information more often than others, which in turn became a useful tool for evaluating new knowledge. You learned how to invest your trust.
You likely did all this without knowing you were doing it, but you did it, nonetheless. And so, your little seed of critical thought sent up its first green shoot.
But the thing about little green shoots is that, despite all the energy and hope they manifest by bursting into the sunlight, they are easily trampled. It is difficult to exist always in a world where every new piece of information must be questioned and tested against other bits of knowledge. How much simpler it would be to retreat back into the seed. And it is dangerously easy to do just that.
When you learned that people can be wrong, you likely also learned that some people can be right over and over again. The world’s a complicated place and no one can know everything about everything. But maybe someone can know everything, or at least everything there is to know, about one thing? You begin your search for experts. As you should.
But finding experts is a lot of work. Surely once you do find them, you should at least accept the knowledge they offer you as true. Otherwise, what was the point? And there are so many different areas of expertise. How can one person ever find the time to diligently uncover the best expert in each? The obvious solution is to find an expert at finding experts. And that’s when the trouble really begins.
When the COVID-19 pandemic was in its tumultuous early days, experts were on display everywhere, but there was precious little good information to go around. Our most prominent expert finders—those in government and media—were in disarray: The experts didn’t always have the information needed at the moment and even if the information was available, the experts didn’t always agree on what it meant. The battle lines were quickly drawn. A strong social imperative to trust —or not trust—specific experts followed in short order. It was a battle to support a single point of view in a test of blind loyalty, but more importantly to you, it brought order to an uncomfortable and seemingly chaotic situation—ahhh, to retreat back into the seed. In this climate, any tree of independent thought that aspires too high risks drawing the ire of the new Church of the Experts.
“In the Middle Ages, a huge amount of power was concentrated in the religious classes,” says Craig Thompson, Senior Director of the Public Health Association of British Columbia, Executive Director of the Society for Intelligence Management, and Co-Founder of Miss Trust. “The priesthood maintained this power in two ways. First, they held a monopoly on knowledge and learning in an era of widespread illiteracy. Second, they wielded divine authority with license to persecute those who challenged orthodoxy. In today’s culture of experts, we are seeing a resurgence of the priest class in different regalia.”
“Science is one of civilization’s great triumphs, but we see it every day misappropriated and misinterpreted as a new divine authority,” Thompson continues. “And, though the Internet has truly thrown open the gates of universal access to information, this has not been the panacea against orthodoxy that we may have hoped. With a near infinite supply of information and no easy way to differentiate it by quality, the new priest-experts can still plausibly claim to be in sole possession of the ‘scientific consensus,’ the new dogma. Is it any surprise that discussing or interpreting data that undermines the scientific consensus has now become one of our strongest taboos?”
The pandemic brought many hard lessons, but one of the hardest was that we can’t delegate our critical thinking. When we let the word of experts becomes the law of heaven, we revert to the most naive epistemology. Even when it is inopportune, even when it is heretical, we must instead nurture our little green shoot so that it grows into something new, something hardier. Something we can lean on.
We do need experts. And we do need to invest trust in them. But growing our capacity for critical thought into a mighty oak requires that we investigate and untangle what “trust” truly means.
If you were hiring a mechanic to work on your car, would you prefer to choose someone who is blessed with omniscient insight into the cause of your engine trouble, but has no qualms about ripping you off? Or would you prefer instead a mechanic who occasionally makes mistakes but is always truthful and morally unimpeachable? This isn’t a trick question. Depending on your needs, you might be pulled one way or the other. But the point is that the first mechanic is always right. And the second mechanic is trustworthy. These are different things. Oh, and also, the first mechanic doesn’t exist. So, it’s a bit of a trick question.
There is no such thing as perfect knowledge. Everybody will be wrong sometimes. The whole scientific endeavour is fallible by design. “The fluidity of science can be disconcerting, because it means you never know everything,” says Dr. Paul Offit. “A hundred years from now, we will obviously know more about science and medicine than we do today. And again, a hundred years after that. More research is always needed. The question is, when do you know enough to make a decision?”
Investing trust, and assessing expertise, is a matter of evaluating whether someone is equipped to be wrong less often than you would be, and also whether, when they do give you incorrect information, you can be reasonably certain they have done so unintentionally. The uncertainty of the world, the imperfection of science, often requires us to act on our best hypotheses and conclusions at the time — without any real assurance that they are correct. Every source of information will be wrong sometimes, but there can be a significant difference in the character of that error.
There’s a crucial difference between misinformation, which is incorrect but shared in good faith, and disinformation, which is incorrect and shared with a malicious agenda. Both are huge problems, but they may require different solutions. “Fighting misinformation and disinformation today is kind of like trying to stop Hurricane Katrina with a plastic cup,” explains Dr. Paul Offit. “We can obviously have an impact by putting good information out there in a compelling and compassionate way. What’s most important is to always be honest and transparent about the limits of your knowledge.”
In a world overrun with information of varying quality from innumerable sources, our garden of critical thought is our only refuge against the impulse to simply believe and disbelieve. Even when relying on someone else’s expertise, we need to employ our tools of critical thinking so that we may tease out the basis of someone’s knowledge, their motivations, and their biases, even if they may not know they have such biases. We need experts, in the sense that we are all still children in most domains. There is too much knowledge in the world for each of us to become masters of every field. The plumber hires an accountant, the accountant hires a gardener, and the gardener goes to the doctor. But as soon as we designate any of these experts—for all of them are experts—as infallible, we have made a critical mistake.
We must, on some level, always be looking at the dollar under our pillow and asking ourselves if we really know where it came from. We must rely on imperfect people, and so our trust in them can never be absolute. Because not only does the first mechanic not exist, the second mechanic doesn’t exist either.
Our tree of critical thought only flourishes—only branches into the rich epistemological canopy that will shade us for the rest of our lives—once we truly accept that all knowledge is inexact and all trust provisional. But in the shade of that tree, these flawed and subjective strands of information can still be woven together into useful models of the world.