Contra Scott Young on critical thinking as an illusion

The blogger argued recently that what we call "critical thinking" is actually just knowing more facts about a topic. I think he is deeply confused about this.

I am consistently astounded by the inability of some well-respected people to reason clearly and think critically. I don’t mean this as a petty jab — I mean, literally, that many people do not understand how to break down an argument into its implicit and explicit premises and conclusions, evaluate the validity of each premise, and evaluate whether the conclusions follow logically from the premises. Formal logic is a real thing, and it can actually be applied to most arguments in the real world, despite the fact that this memo is easily missed — even for those who studied philosophy or math.

Case in point: Scott Young, a blogger I hadn’t heard of until a week ago, recently published “My Simple Habit for Smarter Book Reading”. The article ended up in my email inbox via a weekly newsletter that typically surfaces good content, so I read it.

The landing page for Scott Young’s blog.

In the piece, Scott argues that the skill of critical thinking is basically an illusion:

I don’t believe critical thinking is a skill at all. Instead, most of what we refer to as critical thinking is simply knowing more about the topic being discussed. Experts can spot the fallacies in certain arguments because they’ve steeped themselves in the history of ideas and debates in the field for years. Newcomers have not, and therefore cannot.

Instead, for those who seek truth and facts, he recommends checking what opposing book reviews have to say about new ideas we’ve been introduced to, because these experts have essentially spent more total time thinking about that particular issue (than we have time to spend on it ourselves), and therefore we will never get closer to the truth on our own. We should simply “outsource” our epistemology to experts in the field (i.e. the sort of people who write book reviews).

Here’s a direct quote:

More importantly, reading thoughtful rebuttals outsources the expertise and extensive thinking required to find the flaws in big ideas to someone qualified to find them. Invariably, someone who has spent their entire life reading and thinking about a topic will do a better job noticing what’s wrong with an idea than you will.

Now, to be clear, it is actually super important to consider rebuttals and counterarguments to the things you think you know (i.e. believe). It’s just that book reviews are generally not the best place to find good-faith counterarguments, as the incentives for book reviewers are not aligned with those of clearly articulating the truth. Book reviewers are typically incentivized to get more people to think that they, as the reviewer, are intelligent or witty or aligned with their imagined audience’s other beliefs (such that readers will ultimately choose to read the reviewer’s book). Reconstructing the original author’s positions as charitably as possible doesn’t sell as many copies of your own book as it does to sucker-punch an intellectual strawman.

Scott goes further than this, though, and argues that critical thinking itself doesn’t really exist — it is actually, he says, just a matter of who knows the most facts about a particular topic or idea. 

Generating a thoughtful rebuttal to a well-presented idea is hard. It requires a lot of expertise and mental effort, more than most of us are willing or able to expend on a book we bought because it looked interesting. Instead, the best solution is to seek out the best counterarguments available. These arguments are typically made by competing experts within the same field.

While trying to be as charitable as I possibly can, I’ve reconstructed what I take Scott’s argument to be into the following 4 premises and conclusion:

1. Premise 1 (explicit): Critical thinking requires high-quality evidence and rigorous logical analysis, which is usually unavailable or cherrypicked.

   Except such high-quality evidence often doesn’t exist. Even when it does, aggregating it can be difficult—authors frequently cite an excellent study that supports their conclusion, while ignoring equally good research that does not.

2. Premise 2 (explicit): Most arguments can't be analyzed through the lens of logic because they are not presented as formally valid, syllogistic, deductive reasoning. Most reasoning is inductive or abductive, and can’t be converted into a deductive schema that we could rationally evaluate.

   This approach sounds smart, but it assumes all arguments are reached through deduction and laid out as a syllogism. However, most reasoning is inductive (and abductive) rather than deductive.

3. Premise 3 (explicit): Most of us, most of the time, are in the position of newcomers when dealing with new ideas outside our expertise, and we have limited time to spend learning about any given topic. Because of this inherent disadvantage relative to experts who have spent a lot of time researching and thinking about the topic, we should defer to what those people think.

   Unfortunately, when reading a book, we’ve already set ourselves up to lose—the author has spent years thinking through an argument we’ve never even considered before. They’ve planned their rhetorical moves well in advance, while we must improvise counterarguments while reading.

4. Premise 4 (implicit): Critical thinking requires high-quality evidence, formally valid deductive syllogisms, and a lot of time. If these three criteria are not met, then critical thinking as an epistemological skill does not really exist.

5. Conclusion: These three criteria are so rarely met that it doesn’t make sense to claim that critical thinking is a real thing. What we call “critical thinking” is actually just having more knowledge of relevant facts about a particular topic.

The author's reasons for dismissing topic-agnostic critical thinking are not just misguided — they're intellectually cowardly. (I might even have found them funny if Scott’s article hadn’t been promoted by a newsletter that I respect!) These arguments, if true, would render the average smart person unable to reason effectively about the world.

Fortunately, these premises all turn out to be either false or misleading, and the conclusion is null. Let’s break down his claims individually:

1. First, the claim that high-quality evidence is often lacking is a poor excuse for abandoning critical analysis. While perfect, double-blind RCT-style evidence may be rare, there are usually at least some relevant data points available, and we can weight them based on how strong each one is. Of course, not all evidence is created equal, which is why a critical thinker needs to assess the quality of evidence and give more weight to rigorous studies and expert consensus than to anecdotes, fringe theories, or obvious cherrypicking. It is intellectually irresponsible on an individual level, and literally dangerous on a societal level, to give up as soon as you realize that great evidence is hard to find, and most data is compromised in some way or skewed in some direction.

2. Second, the idea that most real-world arguments cannot be analyzed logically is a misconception that would cripple critical discourse if it were actually true. The fact that arguments are often not explicitly presented in perfect syllogistic form doesn’t mean their underlying logic can’t be extracted, schematized, and rigorously assessed. A good critical thinker can and should reconstruct the core logical structure of arguments, identifying key premises, exposing hidden assumptions, and testing the reasoning against established rules of inference. To ignore this process because it takes effort, as Scott does, is to surrender the very foundation of rational argumentation and epistemic legitimacy.

3. Third, the complaint that argument-makers have more time than argument-evaluators is a red herring that misses the point of critical thinking entirely. For arguments about substantive issues, the time required for careful analysis is well-spent, and many non-experts are in fact willing to put in considerable time to learn about topics outside of their areas of expertise. More importantly, critical thinking allows us to conduct efficient, on-the-fly assessments of arguments as we encounter them. The goal is not always an exhaustive point-by-point refutation — it’s often a triaged critique that homes in on the essential claims and weakest links. With practice, this becomes a powerful real-time ability. To suggest that critical thinking is impossible without unlimited time is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature, applicability, and generality of this skill.

4. Finally, the defeatist view that critical thinking is futile outside one's domain of expertise is a severe underestimation of the power and scope of critical thinking abilities. The core tools of critical analysis — assessing logic and evidence, considering alternatives, evaluating relevant supporting and opposing evidence, etc. — are highly transferable across domains. One need not be the world's foremost expert to identify weak arguments or questionable claims. While deep background knowledge might help, a well-trained critical thinker can effectively analyze arguments in a wide variety of fields, even if certain advanced technical details may elude them. To reserve critical thinking only for a narrow band of alleged expertise is to deprive ourselves of our most powerful intellectual capacity.

Scott’s objections to the existence and topic-neutrality of critical thinking skills do not hold water. By setting up an impossible standard of perfect evidence, explicit logical presentation, unlimited analysis time, and total expertise, he attempts to make critical thinking seem impractical and futile, encouraging people instead to outsource their knowledge to people who write book reviews.

This is a serious misrepresentation of actual critical thinking — the kind that Scott himself may lack. (I will, however, say that I agreed with some of what he said in the article, especially regarding the value of questioning one’s own beliefs.) Real critical thinking, while challenging, is an extremely potent and wide-reaching skillset for navigating the world of arguments and ideas, in real-time, as we encounter them. Cultivating and applying this family of skills is not a hopeless endeavor; it is an essential part of thinking courageously and seeking the truth. We will make mistakes, of course, and we will often be misled to believe falsehoods and endorse confusions.

But despite that, triangulating the truth remains a worthwhile endeavor.

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My article you just read could be considered a book review of Scott’s article. If you take the time to read his original article, then by reading my response, you have dutifully followed Scott’s own advice by reading an opposing “book review” and considering its counterarguments! However, you’ll still have to decide for yourself which side of this debate strikes your as more coherent.

And, for your sake, I sure hope critical thinking isn’t an illusion.