I have a couple of questions for my regular (or semi-regular) readers, touching on a topic I’ve discussed many times on this blog. When it comes to power, persuasion, and influence, why is critical thinking so crucial? Alternatively, what are some common traps and pitfalls for those who prioritize critical thinking? You don’t need to recall specific details—just any vague or general information will do.
Great! Whether you remembered anything specific or not isn’t important. The key is you made the effort. Like many questions I pose here, the real purpose is to illustrate a point. If you aim to be influential and persuasive—essentially successful—in both work and life, you must be proficient in critical thinking. To achieve this proficiency, you need to cultivate and exercise your memory, a skill that is increasingly at risk in a technology-saturated age.
Learning and remembering something are often discussed as if they are two separate processes, but they are inextricably linked. Consider this: Everything you know now is something you once had to learn, from basic facts to complex knowledge and skills. Retaining this information as actual knowledge, rather than fleeting stimuli, depends entirely on memory. Without memory, there is no knowledge. Consequently, there can be no critical thinking, as it relies on prior knowledge, which in turn relies on memory.
Students sometimes tell me that they want to learn how to be good critical thinkers but complain about having to “memorize stuff.” On these occasions I will often say, in a playfully teasing manner, “You mean what you’re saying is that you don’t like this class because it requires remembering stuff.” This usually........