Tinkical Crithing: A Mostly Serious Guide

(or "How to Think Properly While Your Brain Does Otherwise")

Good whatevering, dear readers and accidental internet wanderers!

Today we shall explore the noble art of Critical Thinking, or as I prefer to call it, "Tinkical Crithing" – a discipline invented by ancient Greeks with too much time and not enough television.

The Fundamental Problematicals
Critical thinking begins with questioning everything, which is exhausting and makes you terribly unpopular at dinner parties.

I questioned my breakfast this morning. Not metaphorically – I actually interrogated my porridge.

"Where did you come from?" I demanded. 
"What are your intentions toward my digestive system?" 
"Are you harbouring fugitive raisins?"

The porridge maintained a stoic silence. Very suspicious.

The Logical Fallaceousness Of Everything
Humans are walking logic-disasters, myself particularly included. We're positively busting with fallacies, rather like a poorly constructed sofa leaking stuffing at inconvenient moments.

Take, for example, the "Appeal to Authority" fallacy. Just because someone important said something doesn't make it true. Einstein might have been brilliant about relativity, but I wouldn't ask him to fix my plumbing. Though time does slow down considerably when waiting for actual plumbers to arrive, so perhaps he was onto something.

Then there's the "Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc" fallacy, which is Latin for "I'm going to say something in Latin to sound clever." It means assuming that because B followed A, A must have caused B. I wore mismatched socks yesterday and it rained. Clearly my sock choices control the weather. I'm wearing three left socks today as an experiment in creating tropical conditions.

Evidential Circumstantiations
Evidence is the foundation of tinkical crithing. Without evidence, we're just people with opinions, which describes approximately 103% of the internet.

Types of evidence include:

1. Actual evidence (rare)
2. Things your uncle said at Christmas (abundant)
3. Something you misremembered from a documentary you watched while falling asleep (universal)
4. Vibes (government-approved)

I personally collect evidence in specially labeled jars. The jar marked "Definitive Proof" remains mysteriously empty, while "Vague Hunches" requires its own storage shed.

The Bias Archipelago
We all harbour biases, a vast internal archipelago of tiny prejudice-islands connected by bridges of self-justification.

My teacup believes it's superior to my mugs. I've tried explaining the concept of cognitive bias, but ceramics are notoriously resistant to psychological education.

I myself am completely free of bias, except for my well-founded prejudice against Wednesdays, accordion music, and people who say "actually" too frequently. Actually, I'm also biased against self-contradiction, except when I practice it.

Confirmation And Other Comfortable Afflictions
Confirmation bias is the delightful human tendency to only notice evidence that supports what we already believe, while ignoring everything else with the selective attention of a cat pretending not to hear its name.

Example: I believe my neighbour's garden gnome moves when nobody's watching. Every morning it appears to be in exactly the same place, which is PRECISELY what a sneaky gnome would do to avoid detection.

The evidence is overwhelming if you squint at it properly.

The Emotional Reasonableness
Critical thinkers must separate emotion from reason, rather like separating egg whites from yolks, but messier and with more existential angst.

I approached this problem by assigning my emotions their own room in the house. They live in the cupboard under the stairs, where they occasionally hold parties and refuse to do the washing up.

Meanwhile, my reason sits in the study wearing a smoking jacket and pretending to understand quantum physics.

The arrangement works splendidly except on Tuesdays, when emotions have visitation rights and reason takes a day trip to the seaside.

Perspectival Considerations And Other Headaches
A true critical thinker considers all perspectives, which is why I've installed revolving furniture throughout my home. One must constantly shift viewpoints, even if it makes eating soup problematic.

I recently considered an argument from seventeen different angles. By the fifteenth perspective, I was hanging upside down from the light fixture. The blood rush to my head led to a profound realisation about the nature of truth, which I immediately forgot upon becoming right-side up again.

Gravitational forces have an underappreciated influence on philosophical insights.

The Questions Three (Or Possibly Four)
Effective critical thinkers ask essential questions:

• "What evidence supports this?"
• "Could there be another explanation?"
• "Who benefits from this interpretation?"
• "Has anyone seen my other left sock?"

That last question may seem unrelated, but missing socks represent a critical failure in the fabric of reality that deserves rigorous investigation.

Conclusions And Other Dangerous Leaps
Drawing conclusions requires jumping from evidence to interpretation without falling into the vast chasm of nonsense below. I recommend wearing a mental parachute at all times.

After careful analysis, I've concluded that critical thinking is:

1.  Essential for detecting nonsense
2.  Completely ineffective at preventing nonsense
3.  Frequently the source of entirely new categories of nonsense

 
My teacup disagrees, but it's biased against intellectual pursuits that don't involve steeping tea leaves.

Final Thoughtfulness
Tinkical crithing is rather like trying to solve a puzzle while someone keeps changing the pieces and occasionally stealing the box with the picture on it.

We stumble toward truth with the grace of a three-legged giraffe on an ice rink. The journey is undignified but somehow necessary.

And if someone tells you they've found absolute truth, check their pockets for your missing socks. The two mysteries are almost certainly related.

Until next time, think critically but not too severely.

P.S. My porridge finally broke under questioning and confessed to harbouring raisin insurgents. The currents have been currant-ailed.

P.P.S. If your thinking isn't occasionally absurd, you're not doing it properly. Aristotle said that. Or possibly it was my neighbour's garden gnome. The attribution remains critically unestablished.