Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills

Contributed by Charles Humble

Difficulty level: Intermediate

An awful lot of our school education system, at least where I’m from in the UK, is dedicated to teaching people to learn reams of facts and then regurgitate them in exams. While this skill has its uses, we live in an age where almost any “fact” we want can be found on the internet. However, many of those facts are wrong or misleading, intended to overwhelm our critical faculties rather than inform. I would argue that a more useful skill would be to learn how to determine when something is, on the balance of probabilities, likely to be true.

This is harder than it might sound because of confirmation bias—the human tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that supports our prior beliefs. Confirmation bias is insuperable, but can be managed by being trained in critical thinking skills.

For software engineers, critical thinking is a tool that can help us to innovate and find novel solutions to problems. It also provides us with a means to challenge decisions made solely on the basis of pecking order—we’re building this feature because the founder thinks it is a good idea, or we’re using this framework because the lead developer says it is non-negotiable.

It is a very broad topic, however. In the previous Shortcut in this series, we talked about one aspect—the importance of really understanding a problem, coming up with multiple solutions, comparing ...