Thinking Clearly

In this third in a series of Thinking Clearly episodes—offered in the hope of fostering critical thinking and civil dialogue as we approach our 2024 presidential election in America—we are replaying core episodes with those themes. In this edition, you’ll hear an episode that we recorded with Stephen Hawkins, director of research at More in Common—a non-profit organization focused on understanding the forces driving us apart and working to bring us together to tackle our shared challenges.

As we head into the US 2024 Presidential Election with the knowledge that America is now as polarized as it has been since the civil war and that this amount of polarization drastically impairs our democratic process, we revisit the organization Braver Angels, which was founded "to bring Americans together to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic." From his experience as head of marketing, digital, and communications strategy for Braver Angels, Ciaran O’Connor, discusses political depolarization, the work of Braver Angels and what people who use the variety of free services offered at: braverangels.org can experience and use to improve their conversations and help heal our democratic republic.

Second time guest, Professor Melanie Trecek-King, updates us on what’s new in teaching critical thinking and new on her website resources at: Thinking Is Power. She also discusses Inoculation Theory as a foundation for recent work being done to combat mis- and disinformation by the Mental Immunity Project

In the spirit of promoting citizenship in our democracy, during this time as the 2024 presidential election begins to ramp up, every once in a while Julia and I will replay one of our previous episodes—an episode that reminds us of how important critical thinking is to our democracy. So, here’s the first of those: Thinking Clearly episode #79: How critical thinking can make us better citizens and cure our ailing democracy-with guest Timothy Redmond.

Disinformation and its danger to our social fabric and democracy are the focus of this discussion with philosopher, educator and author, Lee McIntyre. Lee holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. His latest book: Disinformation-How to fight for Truth and Protect Democracy is hot off the press.  

Jonathan Howard, MD joins hosts Bob and Julia to discuss the role of critical thinking in health and medicine and how critical thinking is especially important in crisis management such as the COVID pandemic. Dr. Howard is currently an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at New York University, Langone Health and the Chief of Neurology at Bellevue Hospital. And two of his books, Cognitive Errors and Diagnostic Mistakes and We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID, provide foundation for this conversation.

On this the 84th episode of Thinking Clearly, hosts Bob and Julia got the seven year itch to look back and pick one episode that they thought deserved replay in its entirety. Their pick encapsulates one of the main themes of Thinking Clearly and focuses on the importance of having a universal process, accessible by all, for reliably assessing reality and forming beliefs. Bob and Julia call that process “critical thinking” but their guest: journalist, deep thinker, and author, Jonathan Rauch, calls it The Constitution of Knowledge. This episode originally aired mid-pandemic on Oct. 7, 2021.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been impacting our lives in a variety of ways including our web searches, social medial experiences and even our telephone conversations with customer service representatives, and that impact will likely be accelerating at an exponential rate. This episode invites listeners to begin preparing for this changing environment as hosts Bob and Julia discuss the foundational knowledge for understanding current AI models, the relationship between AI and critical thinking, and the risks and benefits of this advancing technology. Also included is a demonstration of the large language model ChatGPT.

Alan Bensley, Psychology Professor and author of two textbooks on critical thinking: “Critical Thinking in Psychology: a unified skills approach” and “Critical Thinking in Psychology and Everyday Life”—from Frostburg State University—joins Bob and Julia to discuss: the most effective ways to teach critical thinking and the biggest challenges students face in mastering those skills. Other topics include: measuring effectiveness of classroom critical thinking instruction; how to identify unsubstantiated claims; and a focus on unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and what we know about the people who are prone to believing and promoting them.

Psychologist Emlen Metz discusses her research on Actively Open-minded Thinking and her current work at the Lawrence Hall of Science at U.C. Berkeley developing curricula on scientific-critical-thinking for high school and undergraduate classrooms and her work on a project called Public Editor, described as: “a massive effort to clean up the news.”

Journalist, author and public speaker Guy Harrison— a longtime advocate for skepticism, critical thinking and science appreciation—discusses the virtues, benefits and joy of critical thinking and how understanding core ideas in science can add value to all of our lives. Guy has authored eight books, including: Think Before You Like: Social Media's Effect on the Brain and the Tools You Need to Navigate Your Newsfeed and At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life.

Thinking Clearly guest, political scientist, author and educator Timothy Redmond, discusses the toxic effects of extreme political tribalism on our democratic institutions and offers hope and solutions—as detailed in his recent book: Political Tribalism in America: How Hyper-Partisanship Dumbs Down Democracy and How to Fix It.

Psychologist, author and entrepreneur, Gary Klein, joins us a second time to take a closer look at experts, skilled intuition and many of the other topics associated with Naturalistic Decision Making—a process of understanding how people make decisions and perform cognitively complex functions in demanding, real-world situations.

Mark Edward tells the story of his journey from the world of magicians and psychics to becoming a skeptical activist who promotes science and critical thinking. As a skilled practitioner of mentalism, Mark has authored a number of books on magic, mentalism, and séance production, including his revealing book: Psychic Blues. And, on this episode of Thinking Clearly, Mark will do a demonstration, with Julia, of how a mentalist-psychic reading is done.

The conjunction fallacy, base rate neglect and the Monty Hall Problem are some of the topics discussed as guest John Allen Paulos from Temple University offers up a host of essential critical thinking tools relating to understanding probability and other statistical concepts. Professor Paulos authored the widely acclaimed book, Innumeracy-Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences and will give listeners a preview of his new book: Who's Counting?: Uniting Numbers and Narratives with Stories from Pop Culture, Puzzles, Politics, and More.

Under very unusual conditions, Jon Guy made a transition from one who never thought much about skepticism, the nature of science and critical thinking to learning and mastering those topics and writing the excellent and comprehensive book: Think Straight—An Owner’s Manual for the Mind—described on the Rowman & Littlefield web page as: “a tour de force through the science and philosophy of the human mind.” In this episode, a variety of important tools for improving our thinking are discussed as Jon emphasizes that improving the quality of our thinking, improves the accuracy of our representation of reality, which leads to better decisions and a higher quality of life.

Our guest, Melanie Trecek-King, Associate Professor of Biology at Massasoit Community College, became dissatisfied with students mindlessly memorizing facts about biology, so she designed a general-education science course that puts less emphasis on facts and more on science and information literacy and critical thinking. Her commitment to these topics also prompted her to create the wonderful teaching and resource-filled website, which can be found on-line at: Thinking Is Power.

Dr. James Zimring, professor, medical researcher and author of the books What Science Is And How It Works and Partial Truths-How Fractions Distort Our Thinking, describes how the form of a simple fraction can be used as a conceptual framework to understand errors that we commonly make in our thinking. Many aspects of critical thinking are discussed, including: heuristics and biases, the advantages and disadvantages of our human tendency to perceive patterns, the primacy effect, the power of disconfirmation and what we can do to minimize errors in our thinking.

Dr. Paul Thagard is our guest on this final episode of a three-part series on The Nature of Trust. Paul is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, author and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy from the University of Waterloo. As described in his 3-book Treatise on Mind and Society, he discusses the relatively new approach in cognitive science, called the Semantic Pointer Theory of Cognition and explains how trust can be viewed through that lens. The discussion also includes some of his perspectives on misinformation that will be found in his forthcoming book: Misinformation: How information works, breaks, and mends.

This second edition in a three-part series on The Nature of Trust features guest Dr. Kevin Vallier, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University and author of the books: Must Politics Be War? and Trust in a Polarized Age. Topics discussed include the importance of social and political trust in our liberal democracy, the relationship between trust and political polarization, possible causes of falling trust levels, how our declining trust levels might be strengthened, the role of cultural change in trust and polarization, whether there are fatal flaws in our democratic system, and the relationship of trust to critical thinking.