Tim Minchin and Saul Perlmutter on critical thinking

This is a ~45-minute video with a wide-ranging discussion what it says on the tin—mostly the importance of critical thinking.

Facts, fictions and critical thinking | The Future of Decision Making | Nobel Prize Dialogue Sydney by Nobel Prize (YouTube)

At about 30:00,

“Tim: I also think it’s about what we get cred for. And this is a lot further down the track, but people get cred at the moment for being sure, and [for] being declarative. And that’s good and certainly in activism that can be very, very important. And it can create good change but it’s mostly not at the moment. Mostly it’s causing tribalization. And so, the idea is that what a cool thing to be sure about is your unsureness. What a cool thing to be knowledgeable about is how hard it is to have absolute knowledge. I don’t know how to do that but it feels accessible to me.

“Saul: It does feel like we’ve often gone the other way, where we’re teaching essay-writing, that can be ‘show how you give your arguments to prove your point.’ Or a debate course where it can feel too much like the goal is to win, rather than to try to figure out how you’re wrong and what you could learn.”

At about 35:00,

“I don’t get too much into this to sound like an old ranting guy on a porch, but […] I’m a year clean, I’m off social media. And I don’t let the news tell me when to read it. It’s really hard. So my self-esteem was attached to the likes. But it’s about agency. My kids seem to get it because we’ve instilled it. I think parents are now very anxious, so that this next generation of kids are growing up, understanding that our generation have discovered it to be wanting at best and dangerous at worst. And so I talk a lot to my kids about agency. You choose when you’re going to read the world news, don’t have the news read you. You choose when you want to go look at a cat video video. Don’t get fed a cat video in the middle of your work And so I feel like it’s as simple as that to get through this bit where we’re being bombarded by digital information that we have no agency in consuming […]”

At about 42:45

“[…] when you’re looking at your phone. you’re not in your community. I noticed I wasn’t being as good a dad. I mean, that was the thing that just made me go: mate, there’s one thing you can do for the world is put good kids in it.”