[rosser]

No, "critical thinking" is evaluating ideas and arguments, including one's own, for flaws. That you conflate it with engineering further suggests that you don't actually know what it is, and continue to over-value the "hard" skills beyond their (admittedly incredible and irreplaceable) worth.

It also tells me we are utterly talking past one another here. I have better things to do with my afternoon than refute yet more straw-men.

[quotemstr]

I'm sure the engineers reading your comment appreciate your suggestion that the many late nights they've spent finding flaws in their proposals and those of others were all some kind of fever dream.

It's amazing that the academic departments that talk up their critical thinking in the most produce nothing that resembles a workable theory of the world.

Maybe what you wrote was true at one time, but these days, "evaluating ideas...for flaws" in large parts of academia is the process of finding logical contortions that, in the death-of-the-author spirit, twist texts and make them say the opposite of what they say. It's essentially formalized trolling.

That mode of thought has no business getting into the same building as real engineering.

[emmelaich]

Perhaps you're thinking of 'critical theory' and its cousins.

Critical Theory is about the opposite of critical thinking.

[quotemstr]

Right. And in many circles these days, critical theory is what passes for critical thinking.

[rosser]

> I'm sure the engineers reading your comment appreciate your suggestion they the many late nights they've spent finding flaws in their proposals and those of others were all some kind of fever dream.

> ...but these days, "evaluating ideas...for flaws" is the process of finding logical contortions that, in the death-of-the-author spirit, twist texts and make them say the opposite of what they say.

Wow.