Of Studies and Educated Apes
An odd coincidence of things I saw in the news lead me to think about critical thinking. A recent study claimed that the rise of electronic has improved certain visual skills but has also reduced the prevalence of critical thinking, especially among the young. [See Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis?]. It’s hard to argue with that. People don’t read very much these days (if they ever did). Watching TV is passive and not very critical. I seem to recall that there was proof of this twice when TV writers went on strike and people just kept watching the repeats that were aired in place of new shows.
It’s hard to be much less critical than re-watching the same stuff that bored us on the idiot box (as my father has been known to call it) the first time. But does watching TV (or playing video games, or chatting via SMS or IM) really engage the brain that much less than other traditional human activities like gathering nuts and berries, or walking behind a plow? I’m not so sure. I’m also unsure that reading, alone, has much to do with critical thinking. It depends on both the quality of material being read and the quality of thinking the reader does about it. Experience shows that cramming for a test does not foster serious thought. Mostly, it just gives me a headache. (I hope that’s not just me!)But there’s more. I also ran across an interesting story that seemed to show a problem with critical thinking. The story is about an unexpected increase in the population of mountain gorillas during a time when the park where they lived was occupied by an army at war (the Congo Civil War). [See Mountain gorilla population increases despite war] There are two serious flaws in this story. First, the population only increased from 72 to 81 in a little over a year. It’s a significant percentage but not a big absolute number. A relatively small variation in the birth rate or in the survival rate of infants or even in the death rate of adults could account for this and have nothing to do with any trends in the outside world.
On the other hand, having an army nearby is something few animals or people are able to ignore, so it probably had something to do with the change. The question is, why was it a surprise that the gorilla population increased? Why would anyone expect it to decrease? Are gorillas prone to attacking large groups of people, provoking the people to shoot and kill them? That seems unlikely. Most animals avoid large groups of people, except for things like rats that can scavenge off the garbage that accumulates around humans. Gorillas aren’t rats. They eat things that would likely be in short supply around large groups of people, especially people who cut down brush and trees in order to make camp. So that seems to argue that the gorillas would stay away from people.
Well then, are gorillas such good eating that a group of humans, finding them near by would naturally hunt them down for dinner? I hit Google for the answer to that and was surprised to find out that gorillas may (might, maybe) be killed for meat to be exported. [see Gorillas] But the key to this was that the market for that meat was in the West, not in Africa itself. Apparently, the people who live near gorillas have not developed a taste for them.
The biggest human threat to gorillas is apparently poachers (who want to export the meat), not soldiers. And this is where we get back to the idea of critical thinking. Poachers are far less likely to be active in the area of a large armed force, that may kill them just to be sure they aren’t spies, than in an area without any such force. In other words, having an army around may actually be good for the gorillas, as long as the gorillas don’t go attacking anybody or making nuisances of themselves.
There! Was that such hard logic to follow? [Note: This is an example of real critical thinking, though it could be argued to be incomplete. It is critical because it examined premises, considered multiple scenarios and even used research to resolve uncertainty, rather than simply picking what would support a given conclusion and using that.]
Now I’m going to contradict myself. The problem with the article, which presumed that gorillas were threatened by any human contact, was NOT lack of critical thinking. It was lack of good critical thinking. Even before television, smart phones and computer games, there was not much good critical thinking in the world. Even avid readers and skillful writers have been known to be idiots (I could name a few but that’s an argument for another post). One very cynical way to look at the alleged damage to critical thinking done by modern media, would be to count it as a good thing, because it also removes from so many the opportunity to pretend that being well read equates to being smart.
Maybe a better way to look at it would be to consider that reducing something that was not there in the first place does no harm in the grand scheme, and might even provide opportunities to teach real critical thinking.Remember that the argument goes that electronic media have improved people’s visual skills at the expense of thought. But visual skills can be used to teach critical thinking too. Whatever became of the Classic Comics of the good old days?
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