I find this very offensive, wait until my chatgpt hears about this! It will have a witty comeback for you just you watch!
I’ve only used it to write cover letters for me. I tried to also use it to write some code but it would just cycle through the same 5 wrong solutions it could think of, telling me “I’ve fixed the problem now”
Quickly, ask AI how to improve or practice critical thinking skills!
Chat GPT et al; “To improve your critical thinking skills you should rely completely on AI.”
That sounds right. Lemme ask Gemini and DeepSink just in case.
Improving your critical thinking skills is a process that involves learning new techniques, practicing them regularly, and reflecting on your thought processes. Here’s a comprehensive approach:
1. Build a Foundation in Logic and Reasoning
• Study basic logic: Familiarize yourself with formal and informal logic (e.g., learning about common fallacies, syllogisms, and deductive vs. inductive reasoning). This forms the groundwork for assessing arguments objectively.
• Learn structured methods: Books and online courses on critical thinking (such as Lewis Vaughn’s texts) provide a systematic introduction to these concepts.
2. Practice Socratic Questioning
• Ask open-ended questions: Challenge assumptions by repeatedly asking “why†and “how†to uncover underlying beliefs and evidence.
• Reflect on responses: This method helps you clarify your own reasoning and discover alternative viewpoints.
3. Engage in Reflective Practice
• Keep a journal: Write about decisions, problems, or debates you’ve had. Reflect on what went well, where you might have been biased, and what could be improved.
• Use structured reflection models: Approaches like Gibbs’ reflective cycle guide you through describing an experience, analyzing it, and planning improvements.
4. Use Structured Frameworks
• Follow multi-step processes: For example, the Asana article “How to build your critical thinking skills in 7 steps†suggests: identify the problem, gather information, analyze data, consider alternatives, draw conclusions, communicate solutions, and then reflect on the process.
• Experiment with frameworks like Six Thinking Hats: This method helps you view issues from different angles (facts, emotions, positives, negatives, creativity, and process control) by “wearing†a different metaphorical hat for each perspective.
5. Read Widely and Critically
• Expose yourself to diverse perspectives: Reading quality journalism (e.g., The Economist, FT) or academic articles forces you to analyze arguments, recognize biases, and evaluate evidence.
• Practice lateral reading: Verify information by consulting multiple sources and questioning the credibility of each.
6. Participate in Discussions and Debates
• Engage with peers: Whether through formal debates, classroom discussions, or online forums, articulating your views and defending them against criticism deepens your reasoning.
• Embrace feedback: Learn to view criticism as an opportunity to refine your thought process rather than a personal attack.
7. Apply Critical Thinking to Real-World Problems
• Experiment in everyday scenarios: Use critical thinking when making decisions—such as planning your day, solving work problems, or evaluating news stories.
• Practice with “what-if†scenarios: This helps build your ability to foresee consequences and assess risks (as noted by Harvard Business’s discussion on avoiding the urgency trap).
8. Develop a Habit of Continuous Learning
• Set aside regular “mental workout†time: Like scheduled exercise, devote time to tackling complex questions without distractions.
• Reflect on your biases and update your beliefs: Over time, becoming aware of and adjusting for your cognitive biases will improve your judgment.
By integrating these strategies into your daily routine, you can gradually sharpen your critical thinking abilities. Remember, the key is consistency and the willingness to challenge your own assumptions continually.
Happy thinking!
Corporations and politicians: “oh great news everyone… It worked. Time to kick off phase 2…”
- Replace all the water trump wasted in California with brawndo
- Sell mortgages for eggs, but call them patriot pods
- Welcome to Costco, I love you
- All medicine replaced with raw milk enemas
- Handjobs at Starbucks
- Ow my balls, Tuesdays this fall on CBS
- Chocolate rations have gone up from 10 to 6
- All government vehicles are cybertrucks
- trump nft cartoons on all USD, incest legal, Ivanka new first lady.
- Public executions on pay per view, lowered into deep fried turkey fryer on white house lawn, your meat is then mixed in with the other mechanically separated protein on the Tyson foods processing line (run exclusively by 3rd graders) and packaged without distinction on label.
- FDA doesn’t inspect food or drugs. Everything approved and officially change acronym to F(uck You) D(umb) A(ss)
that “ow, my balls” reference caught me off-guard
I love how you mix in the Idiocracy quotes :D
I hate how it just seems to slide in.
A savvy consumer, glad you mentioned. Felt better than hitting it on the nose.
- Handjobs at Starbucks
Well that’s just solid policy right there, cum on.
It would wake me up more than coffee that’s for sure
Bullet point 3 was my single issue vote
You mean an AI that literally generated text based on applying a mathematical function to input text doesn’t do reasoning for me? (/s)
I’m pretty certain every programmer alive knew this was coming as soon as we saw people trying to use it years ago.
It’s funny because I never get what I want out of AI. I’ve been thinking this whole time “am I just too dumb to ask the AI to do what I need?” Now I’m beginning to think “am I not dumb enough to find AI tools useful?”
Good. Maybe the dumbest people will forget how to breathe, and global society can move forward.
Oh you can guarantee they won’t forget how to vote 😃
Microsoft will just make a subscription AI for that, BaaS.
Which we will rebrand “Bullshit as a service”!
Well thank goodness that Microsoft isn’t pushing AI on us as hard as it can, via every channel that it can.
Learning how to evade and disable AI is becoming a critical thinking skill unto itself. Feels a bit like how I’ve had to learn to navigate around advertisements and other intrusive 3rd party interruptions while using online services.
Well at least they communicate such findings openly and don’t try to hide them. Other than ExxonMobil who saw global warming coming due to internal studies since the 1970s and tried to hide or dispute it, because it was bad for business.
No shit.
I grew up as a kid without the internet. Google on your phone and youtube kills your critical thinking skills.
AI makes it worse though. People will read a website they find on Google that someone wrote and say, “well that’s just what some guy thinks.” But when an AI says it, those same people think it’s authoritative. And now that they can talk, including with believable simulations of emotional vocal inflections, it’s going to get far, far worse.
Humans evolved to process auditory communications. We did not evolve to be able to read. So we tend to trust what we hear a lot more than we trust what we read. And companies like OpenAI are taking full advantage of that.
Jokes on you. Volume is always off on my phone, so I read the ai.
Also, I don’t actually ever use the ai.
I am not worried about people here on Lemmy. I am worried about people who don’t know much about computers at all. i.e. the majority of the public. They think computers are magic. This will make it far worse.
I don’t think those people are still the majority in 20 years…
20 years? Do you know how much damage can be done in 20 years?
20 years is not soo long…
How old are you that 20 years is not so long?
And also, why does that matter that it’s not so long? Have you even bothered noticing all the damage Trump has done in under a month?
His administration just fired a bunch of people responsible for keeping U.S. nuclear weapons secure without knowing what their jobs were.
Less than one month.
Yup.
I know a guy who ONLY quotes and references YouTube videos.
Every topic, he answers with “Oh I saw this YouTube video…”
To be fair, YouTube is a huge source of information now for a massive amount of people.
Should he say: “I saw this documentary” or “I read this article”?
Let me ask chatgpt what I think about this
Also your ability to search information on the web. Most people I’ve seen got no idea how to use a damn browser or how to search effectively, ai is gonna fuck that ability completely
To be fair, the web has become flooded with AI slop. Search engines have never been more useless. I’ve started using kagi and I’m trying to be more intentional about it but after a bit of searching it’s often easier to just ask claude
Gen Zs are TERRIBLE at searching things online in my experience. I’m a sweet spot millennial, born close to the middle in 1987. Man oh man watching the 22 year olds who work for me try to google things hurts my brain.
Critical thinking skills are what hold me back from relying on ai
Damn. Guess we oughtta stop using AI like we do drugs/pron/<addictive-substance> 😀
Unlike those others, Microsoft could do something about this considering they are literally part of the problem.
And yet I doubt Copilot will be going anywhere.
Remember the:
Personal computers were “bicycles for the mind.”
I guess with AI and social media it’s more like melting your mind or something. I can’t find another analogy. Like a baseball bat to your leg for the mind doesn’t roll off the tongue.
I know Primeagen has turned off copilot because he said the “copilot pause” daunting and affects how he codes.
The one thing that I learned when talking to chatGPT or any other AI on a technical subject is you have to ask the AI to cite its sources. Because AIs can absolutely bullshit without knowing it, and asking for the sources is critical to double checking.
I consider myself very average, and all my average interactions with AI have been abysmal failures that are hilariously wrong. I invested time and money into trying various models to help me with data analysis work, and they can’t even do basic math or summaries of a PDF and the data contained within.
I was impressed with how good the things are at interpreting human fiction, jokes, writing and feelings. Which is really weird, in the context of our perceptions of what AI will be like, it’s the exact opposite. The first AI’s aren’t emotionless robots, they’re whiny, inaccurate, delusional and unpredictable bitches. That alone is worth the price of admission for the humor and silliness of it all, but certainly not worth upending society over, it’s still just a huge novelty.
It makes HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyessy seem realistic. In the movie he is a highly technical AI but doesn’t understand the implications of what he wants to do. He sees Dave as a detriment to the mission and it can be better accomplished without him… not stopping to think about the implications of what he is doing.
I mean, leave it up the one of the greatest creative minds of all time to predict that our AI will be unpredictable and emotional. The man invented the communication satellite and wrote franchises that are still being lined up to make into major hollywood releases half a century later.
I’ve found questions about niche tools tend to get worse answers. I was asking if some stuff about jpackage and it couldn’t give me any working suggestions or correct information. Stuff I’ve asked about Docker was much better.
The ability of AI to write things with lots of boilerplate like Kubernetes manifests is astounding. It gets me 90-95% of the way there and saves me about 50% of my development time. I still have to understand the result before deployment because I’m not going to blindly deploy something that AI wrote and it rarely works without modifications, but it definitely cuts my development time significantly.
Well that is obvious why, isn’t it!?
Microsoft LLM whatever the name is gives sources, or at least it did to me yesterday.
