How to Think Lesson Plans
How to Think by Alan Jacobs
Writing Assignment
Option A
In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.
Option B
In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.
Option C
In the context of How to Think, write a 1,000-word essay that compares the moral courage of Megan Phelps-Roper to the people who leave Utopia in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
Introduction: Why we’re worse at thinking than we think
One. Why are books about thinking so depressing?
Because they all show how thinking is larded with errors, and “they provide an astonishingly detailed and wide-ranging litany of the ways that thinking goes astray—the infinitely varied paths we can take toward the seemingly inevitable dead end of Getting It Wrong.”
Jacobs lists the names of these erroneous types of thinking:
Anchoring
Availability cascades
Confirmation bias
Dunning-Kruger effect
Endowment effect
Framing effects
Group attribution errors
Halo effects
Ingroup and outgroup homogeneity biases
Recency illusions
Jacobs writes: “What a chronicle of ineptitude, arrogance, sheer dumbassery.”
Jacobs is particularly offended by smug frauds: “Still worse, those who believe that they are impeccably thoughtful turn out to be some of the worst offenders against good sense.”
Jacobs is “dizzy” from all the fallacious thinking. He wants us to think correctly, but what does that mean?
Two. What is thinking?
In his book How to Think, Alan Jacobs uses the example of someone who agonizes over what car to buy. After the purchase, the husband argues with the wife about his choice. She says he should have bought the one that first appealed to him.
Thinking is “not the decision itself but what goes into the decision, the consideration, the assessment. It’s testing your own responses and weighing the available evidence.”
Acting on impulse and instinct is not thinking. Buying a car because it appeals to your reptilian senses is not thinking.
Why Most People Don’t Think
One. Most of us don’t deliberate. We act on impulse and intuition.
Two. Most of us conform to expectations to find acceptance rather than think for ourselves.
Academic life compromises thinking.
Getting good grades is the goal, and getting good grades is based on conformity, that is, pleasing your professors.
Professors too often want to impress each other or gain the approval of each. This, too, encourages conformity and hoop-jumping but not independent thought.
As a Christian man, and a professor, Alan Jacobs notices the effects of bias in academia:
Academics have a prejudiced notion of religious people--”those people”--a certain stereotype that doesn’t accurately define Alan Jacobs.
And Jacobs sees in his religious community that a lot of people have a prejudiced notion of academics--”those people”--a certain stereotype that doesn’t accurately define the professors.
Three. Most of us seek agreement with the ingroup or the in-crowd rather than think critically.
We want to be part of the ingroup so we demonize, unfairly, the ingroup’s hated outgroups without knowing specific details about those outgroups.
Jacobs quotes Marilynne Robinson who writes that in the way we disdain Puritans “is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.”
Our instinct is not to think clearly; our instinct is to have consensus, to show allegiance to a tribe. We can call this Groupthink.
Groupthink is not thinking. It is the degradation of thinking.
For example, I had a student from Los Angeles who told me she grew up during the O.J. Simpson Trial. She and her friends believed O.J. was guilty, but they never discussed it with their families or the larger community because the popular notion was that O.J. was innocent, not because he was necessarily innocent, per se, but because proclaiming his innocence was a way of getting revenge on the LAPD, which had abused her community for decades.
Our Tendency to Define the Repugnant Cultural Other affects our thinking.
We tend to gather in bubbles of like-minded people. We bond in part by demonizing outgroups deemed repulsive and repugnant. Borrowing from the writings of Susan Friend Harding, Jacobs refers to the Repugnant Cultural Other, a group so demonic that we must, as a sign of allegiance to our bubble, hate the RCO without knowing its details. We just see this vague abstraction, this preconceived stereotype, and we deliver hate toward the RCO accordingly.
America is divided by bubbles committed to demonizing the RCO, especially in politics.
Secular academics and evangelicals are each other’s RCO.
Red and Blue states are each other’s RCO.
Rural and urban areas are each other’s RCO.
“Gun people” and “Anti-Gun people” are each other’s RCO.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are people’s RCO.
Jacobs writes: “This is a profoundly unhealthy situation” because we lose commonality with others; we lose sympathy and empathy with others; we lose the idea that we are neighbors; we lose sight that we may share common ground in shared love of TV shows, concerns for our children, concerns for the middle class, etcetera.
Jacobs observes: “The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called ‘the war of every man against every man.’”
However, let us stop and make an important point: Critical thinking doesn’t mean that all RCOs are worthy of our understanding or sympathy. The white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville with their Bath-And-Beyond tiki torches are truly RCOs.
There are true, bona fide “deplorables,” to use a term made popular in recent times.
Four. Most of us are content to live in Refutation Mode, where we repel all contradictory and different opinions. We prefer our bubble.
Five. Most of us are indifferent to what thinking is and would prefer to live a life of mindless habit.
Six. Most of us find that even when we attempt in earnest to think, our conclusions are twisted by prejudices and biases that we are reluctant to acknowledge or even be aware of.
Our Biases Don’t Die Easily
Jacobs cites Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, who addresses the central question about thinking: “What can be done about biases? How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us?”
Kahneman concludes after decades of research that quality thinking can be achieved but only with sustained great effort.
I would make an analogy to dieting: You can lose weight and keep the pounds off but only by maintaining consistent diligence. Only a tiny percentage of people can do this. Most of us go off our diet.
This is scary to contemplate. We’re talking about the human race, the majority of which is doomed to be slaves to impulse, instinct, and base appetites. Why take a critical thinking class except to take in this terrifying state of affairs?
To underscore this point, we can look to another Kahneman quote: “a considerable part of our thinking apparatus, the part that generates our immediate intuitions, ‘is not readily educable. Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.’ This is not encouraging.”
Seven. Thinking, the kind of critical thinking that goes against the grain of our default settings for bias and acceptance, requires great effort and cannot be sustained for long periods.
Eight. Even people who devote their lives to thinking--writers, philosophers, theologians and the like--find that their thinking is crippled by bias, arrogance, and self-righteousness.
Nine. To be a good thinker requires humility, a deep suspicion of one’s convictions and how one has arrived at those convictions, and the courage to be honestly self-critical. Very few people have these characteristics.
Ten. You would think that universities, colleges, and academia in general would be hospitable sanctuaries encouraging the flourishing of free thought, but more often than not the opposite is true: universities encourage conformity to expectations and reward compliance to hollow stereotypes of “good professors” rather than reward critical thinking.
Critical Thinking Is Not the Norm
Critical thinking therefore is not the norm; critical thinking is an anomaly.
Therefore, the whole conversation about thinking is really a conversation about whether humans are slaves to impulse or masters of their own actions, agents of free will.
A nihilistic and pessimistic worldview posits that we are helpless slaves to our appetites.
A more optimistic worldview posits that we can cultivate reason, become self-possessed, and become agents of free will.
Three. How does Jacobs’ book on thinking differ from most others?
Most books on thinking, Jacobs observes, focus on science, when it might be more helpful to look at thinking as an art.
Jacobs writes: “There are certain humanistic traditions, some of them quite ancient, that can come to our aid when we’re trying to think about thinking, and to get better at it.”
As an art form, thinking can be looked at as a rider, the thinker, riding an elephant, a metaphor for intuition. Jacobs wants to help the rider control the elephant even though the rider and the elephant, our logic and inner intuition and instinct, have minds of their own.
My immediate reaction is that 1% of the population will be drawn to reading a book such as Jacobs’ and that that 1% is motivated to think better, but most people could care less.
Four. What is Jacobs’ argument about thinking?
He writes, “In particular I’m going to argue that we go astray when we think of our task primarily as ‘overcoming bias.’ For me, the fundamental problem we have may best be described as an orientation of the will: we suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of the familiar, comforting habits; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?”
Many might think, in my words: “This whole thinking thing is too hard, it’s too slow, and it’s too painful. The hell with thinking.”
Five. How do we begin to become better thinkers?
You cannot address thinking directly, Jacobs argues. You improve thinking by working on your moral core. Good thinking springs from strong moral character.
Just like Viktor Frankl said you cannot pursue happiness directly. Happiness is the natural byproduct of finding purpose in your life.
In the same way, good thinking comes from cultivating a moral character.
For example, being honest about the errors of your ways is a moral quality, and this moral quality improves critical thinking.
Chapter One: Beginning to Think
One. What was the turning point in Megan Phelps-Roper’s relationship with her church?
She stayed with the church and cut off connections with her non-religious Twitter friend; however, she would not picket with hateful signs. She drew a line in the sand with her church. And this line was the beginning of her journey away from the church. It was the beginning of her religious apostasy of that particularly type of religious faith.
She was thinking that while she still wanted to belong to her church, her church’s position to encourage death and hell for the non-religious was crossing the line of decency. Though she could not admit it to herself at the time, she identified immorality in the group that was part of her chief identity.
Roper had come across what Jacobs called “forbidden knowledge,” information that condemns the group you belong in.
Roper will exit the identity, belonging, and safety of her church and family because her independent thinking as judged her world as an unworthy, morally bankrupt place. The seeds have been planted. It’s just a matter of time before she exits.
In Ursula Le Guin’s famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a utopia is based on cruelty to a helpless child. Most people accept the cruelty as necessary for the happiness of everyone else, but some people, upon being aware of the cruelty, see living in the Utopia as a deal with the devil, so they leave the Utopian city without any assurance of finding a new home. They simply know that their moral sense dictates that they must leave.
Alan Jacobs compares these morally courageous people to Megan Phelps-Roper who leaves the Westboro church.
Two. Why, according to Jacobs, is it a myth that “we think for ourselves”?
Megan Phelps-Roper left the Westboro church in part because she was engaged with outsiders, thinkers who weren’t confined to the church’s propaganda.
Jacobs points out that thinking is social; it’s built on social interaction.
During social interaction, we reject people we don’t want to be like, and we gravitate and imitate people we do want to be like.
More and more, Roper wanted to be less like the hateful members of her religious cult and more like the people she met on Twitter.
When people we care about who once shared our beliefs go on a different path, Jacobs writes, we say, “So and So has had a bad influence and was probably reading horrible stuff.” Why? Because we believe that we arrive at our “truths” through good means and that people who disagree with us surely arrived at their conclusions through inferior information. These biases contribute to our delusional thinking.
Three. What is the myth of rational thinking?
That we make decisions without emotion, that we are completely dispassionate, that we are completely objective.
In using John Stuart Mill’s breakdown as an example, Jacobs observes that analysis by itself is too dry to feed the soul. We need music, or in Mill’s case, poetry, or some other emotional outlet to be fully-realized human beings. The intellect can only take us so far.
Jacobs wants to examine the cultivation of feelings and how this cultivation affects our thinking.
To achieve meaning, we must have character, and strong character can only be achieved by a synthesis of the intellect and deep feeling.
The feelings side of your being should feed the analytical side. Your powers of analysis cannot exist without feelings.
Art, politics, culture, activism, ideology--all these things are the product of both analysis and feeling present in a strong moral character. “The whole person must be engaged.”
Four. What error in rational thinking do Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Frank make?
Famous basketball player Wilt Chamberlain was more successful throwing free-throws underhanded, or “sissy” style, but he returned to the conventional method. For Gladwell, this is irrational, but only from Gladwell’s point of view. Gladwell doesn’t see that rational for him is not rational for Chamberlain. Wilt Chamberlain wants to impress as many women as possible, so throwing in a masculine way, is from the basketball player’s view, rational.
Chamberlain is looking for a “relational good.”
Likewise, Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, is blind to the relational goods the people of Kansas seek when they vote for what Frank calls issues that are not in their best interests.
Frank doesn’t see that most Kansans don’t just vote on economic interests; they vote on social and moral interests. However, Jacobs points out that these interests can be misguided.
Jacobs’ main point is that rational thinking is limited and not always rational or in one’s best interests.
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