When can you trust the experts?

What Hacker News says

1. tokenadultDec 2012
   This book chapter is an interesting read. It illustrates the importance of considering sample size, especially, when looking at preliminary research findings.

   After looking up the book from which this chapter is excerpted, I followed other recommendations from Amazon to another very useful book,

   http://www.amazon.com/When-Can-You-Trust-Experts/dp/11181302...

   When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education by Daniel T. Willingham, a very astute psychologist with an interest in education policy.

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2. aikFeb 2013
   Interesting. So the idea is that critical thinking boils down to a combination of domain knowledge and specific metacognitive strategies, and so critical thinking isn't actually a skill.

   I sense that "critical thinking" has become somewhat of a blanket term. When business leaders and others call for better teaching of "critical thinking", what exactly do they mean? What exactly are they looking for?

   One answer could be that they expect the person to have knowledge/skill in the specific area a person is hired in. Although this would be great, I somewhat doubt this is it. Often it is expected that new graduates don't know much about the area they have been studying (from a professional sense).

   It could be thought that they're asking the impossible -- domain knowledge is necessary for critical thinking, but they don't care about the domain knowledge as much as the critical thinking. Since they can't be separated, the problem is rather that students just need to be taught more domain knowledge, or leaders need to change their expectations.

   Or, the education system has a poor understanding of the difference between critical thinking, domain knowledge, and metacognitive strategies. For one, personally I've never seen focus placed on metacognitive strategies, and not even a list of strategies that apply to any given discipline.

   I would think that one component of the expectation from business leaders is the ability to learn and adapt. The issue here is: That it's OK that the person doesn't have domain knowledge, but rather the issue is that they struggle to learn what they need, and lack the self-awareness and understanding to best know what to focus on going forward and how. In school we are always given the information we need to learn, and in my experience, rarely are we given a blank slate and asked to learn everything we need, in any domain/discipline necessary, to accomplish the job.

   Tokenadult -- have you read Willingham's book on this topic (When Can You Trust the Experts?) and would recommend it? I read his previous book (Why Don't Students Like School?) and found it fairly interesting, though there are elements I find misleading.

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