[Cpoll]

> But before you fly off the chain, prove your undeniable superiority, and prove that they are wrong, let me suggest instead that you do something crazy, that you do the opposite: that you prove they are right.

I'm a bit uneasy about this. If you spend your time agreeing with a suggestion that your initial reaction is to reject, you probably won't have the patience to go back and question it after the fact. You'll also possibly 'brainwash' yourself into thinking it's a good idea?

I agree that you shouldn't knee-jerk into rejecting an idea, but I believe thinking critically is important. Take the opposite side, but do it civilly. Come up with counter-examples, but phrase them constructively: "have you considered this problem, do you think it's an issue, can you think of a solution?"

[kibwen]

An important aspect of thinking critically is the willingness to entertain opposing ideas as true. If you can reject an opposing position even while granting it the benefit of the doubt, then that says good things about the strength of your original position. But if you can't reject such an opposing position, then that helps to inform how you should respond to people with that position since now you know that, rather than being illogical, it's merely that their axioms are different.

[Veen]

> but I believe thinking critically is important

I think you have to differentiate between thinking and communicating. Thinking comes first, unhindered by concerns for social niceties and hurt feelings.

Then, you communicate by expressing what you've concluded in a way that does account for the fact that you're conveying a message to a human being, with all the baggage that entails.

[mwfunk]

I agree, at least in general- I think of critical thinking and communication as overlapping but very distinct skills.

I believe that if an idea hasn't been articulated yet (put into words, whether in writing or speech or thought), it hasn't been fully formed.

There's a saying that you don't truly understand something until you have to explain it to somebody else, and that's because it's not until you have to explain it to somebody else that you are forced to articulate the entire thing by serializing it (ugh) into words. Putting things into words nails down meaning in a way that can make logical problems or false assumptions much more obvious.

So, IMO communication is a two-pronged challenge. One challenge is articulating something that may have previously existed in a partially-formed state in the back of our heads. The other challenging is adapting that articulation to be as lossless and efficient as possible when directed at a specific audience. Communication is only successful if the signal is both successfully transmitted and successfully received. When we fail, it's easy to blame the audience, but IMO more often than not it's our own failure to read the room and we just don't like admitting that to ourselves. It's human nature to get defensive and use excuses like, "they were focused on nitpicking my words and not listening to my ideas!" That excuse in particular has become a huge red flag for me.