Column: Critical thinking skills serve college grads for a lifetime
The most important thing that I discovered in college is that higher education is not about how much information you can stuff into your brain, but rather about grasping how to learn.
I don’t know if it matters that I remember the exact definition of what an atom is or what to use the formula y=mx+b for, but I do know that the critical thinking skills that I gained from my undergraduate program will serve me well no matter what field I end up in.
Being able to look at information that is presented to me and determine whether or not it is trustworthy is a life skill that is not always touted as necessary to education. To me, people seem so concerned with tangible skills that they forget about learning to think.
Writing and editing only go so far if you can’t look at information and make perception inferences about it. I am an astute thinker and an innovative problem solver, which has honestly served me more than knowing rules of grammar.
The world that we are living in currently--which is vastly different than the one I was born into in 1994--is full of misinformation. There is no other way to handle that than to question everything you see and hear.
Tangible evidence and reliable sources are more important than ever. Just because something is possible, or sounds accurate, does not mean that it is.
A few years ago there was a rumor circulating the internet (as rumors often do) that Donald Trump said that black people should go back to Africa if they don’t like the U.S.
I was ready to believe this when I read it, because it honestly sounded like something he would say. The thing is, though, that he didn’t say it. The origin of this rumor was a satirical fake news site called Love That News.
A quick google before I decided to share this rumor on social media stopped me from spreading misinformation. This is important, especially in this case, because misinformation can distract from factual information, which can cause mass confusion and plant seeds of mistrust toward reliable news media.
Trump didn’t say that black people should go back to Africa, but he has certainly said racist things.
“They're sending people that have a lot of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he said in 2015 about Mexican immigrants.
The options to share on Facebook or retweet on Twitter are like giant, red, nuclear warfare buttons. It may seem innocent enough to share something to your feed, but billions of people use Facebook and Twitter worldwide.
Even if your Facebook is set to private, there are likely at least 150-1000 people on your friends list. If you have 300 Facebook friends and even half of them view the post and believe it, you have then spread misinformation to 150 people.
If each of those 150 people tell just one person, the misinformation has doubled and will continue to double. That is how misinformation campaigns work and most people are perfect pawns to continue the spread of them.
The next time you read a Facebook or Twitter post, consider googling the information before sharing it. We all have to do our part to stop the insidious spread of misinformation on a global scale.
