#criticalthinking — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #criticalthinking, aggregated by home.social.
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Apparently I get to dissect a brain. Well... virtually. 🧠 Today was the first day of my ASU neuroscience class, "Peering into the Human Brain." I find it fascinating how the brain tricks people, including myself.
When was the last time your brain assumed something was real and only later you realized it wasn't?
#Skepticism #CriticalThinking #Paranormal #Neuroscience #ParanormalInvestigation #GhostHunting #ScienceCommunication #Skeptic #BrainScience #Perception
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What if AI isn’t making you smarter — just **better at being wrong?**
AI can turn assumptions into convincing arguments and polished analysis.
The key distinction: **AI-assisted reasoning vs AI-assisted rationalization.**
Instead of asking:
“Can you prove I’m right?”
Ask:
**“Can you help me discover that I’m wrong?”**
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RE: https://mas.to/@AlexJimenez/117134682162265490
Applied #CriticalThinking skills when engaging with the God of Lies is a good thing.
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"Ah, the good old days when search forced us to use our brains 🧠. Now we're just swimming through an ocean of SEO-fueled fluff, desperately hoping for a lifeboat of actual information 🚢. But hey, who needs critical thinking when you can have 12 identical answers wrapped in digital cotton candy? 🍬"
https://blog.8ball.space/what-we-lost-when-search/ #searchnostalgia #SEOinformation #criticalthinking #digitalfluff #informationoverload #HackerNews #ngated -
What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think
https://blog.8ball.space/what-we-lost-when-search/
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388446
#HackerNews #search #technology #criticalthinking #digitalculture #lossinquiry
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How Do We Know Whether AI Is Actually Helping People?
What several AI models said when we asked them the same question
Artificial intelligence is getting more capable very quickly. It can write, analyze data, create images, translate languages, help with research, and solve problems that once required trained specialists.
But greater capability does not automatically mean a better life for people.
That was the starting point for a small cross-model experiment. We asked several AI systems the same basic question:
How would you determine whether increasingly capable AI is actually benefiting human life?
We also invited each model to question the premise, redefine the problem, or suggest something better than a single index. The models were instructed to answer independently without browsing the web or using outside tools.
The responses differed in style and emphasis. Some focused on measurable outcomes. Others focused on human dignity, democratic participation, meaningful work, or the danger of becoming dependent on systems we do not control.
Yet a surprisingly clear agreement emerged.
Capability is not the same as benefit
Technical progress is easy to measure. We can count how many problems an AI solves, how quickly it works, or how well it performs on tests.
Human flourishing is harder to measure. It includes health, safety, freedom, relationships, purpose, knowledge, creativity, and the ability to shape one’s own life.
An AI system may become better at achieving a goal while the goal itself harms people. A highly effective system might increase surveillance, spread convincing scams, replace human judgment, concentrate power, or keep users engaged at the expense of their attention and well-being.
So the important question is not simply, “What can AI do?”
It is:
What becomes possible for people because of AI—and what becomes more difficult, fragile, or impossible?
Look at human outcomes, not just machine performance
Across the responses, the models repeatedly shifted attention away from the machine and toward human life.
They suggested asking whether people are:
- healthier and safer;
- more financially secure;
- better able to learn and create;
- more connected to other people;
- more informed without being manipulated;
- able to understand and challenge important decisions;
- free to refuse the technology or choose another path.
This also requires examining harms, not merely counting success stories. Time saved by one group may come with unemployment, stress, lost privacy, or reduced opportunity for another.
A true evaluation must ask who receives the benefits, who carries the risks, and who has the power to decide.
Agency belongs at the center
One of the strongest shared themes was human agency: our ability to understand, choose, refuse, act, and take responsibility.
Convenience alone is not agency. A system can make life easier while quietly reducing a person’s choices or replacing their judgment.
Helpful AI should strengthen people’s ability to participate in their own lives. It should make important decisions more understandable, provide meaningful options, and allow people to correct mistakes or appeal harmful outcomes.
People need more than access to AI. They need power in relation to it.
Assistance should not erase human competence
Several responses warned that a tool can help us today while making us less capable tomorrow.
If people lose the knowledge needed to check an AI system, operate without it, or recover when it fails, short-term convenience may create long-term fragility.
This suggests a simple test:
If the AI disappeared tomorrow, what knowledge, skill, judgment, and institutional capacity would remain?
The best systems may act more like scaffolding than substitutes. Scaffolding helps people reach farther while they continue developing their own abilities. Substitution can slowly remove the very competence that makes human oversight possible.
Benefit is not one number
Another broad agreement was that a single “AI Benefit Score” would hide too much.
An average can make widespread gains look impressive while concealing serious harm to a smaller or less powerful group. One number can also allow gains in productivity to cancel out losses of privacy, dignity, freedom, or democratic control.
A better approach would combine several forms of evaluation:
- Outcomes: Are people healthier, safer, more secure, more connected, and materially better off?
- Agency: Are people more able to choose, understand, refuse, create, and govern their lives?
- Resilience: Are human skills, social institutions, alternatives, and the ability to recover being preserved?
Each of these should be examined across four additional questions:
- Distribution: Who benefits, and who is harmed?
- Power: Who controls the system and can be held accountable?
- Time: What happens months, years, or generations later?
- Causation: Did AI actually cause the change, or did it merely appear alongside it?
Some harms may also require firm boundaries. Violations of basic rights, unaccountable concentrations of power, irreversible dependency, and catastrophic risks should not automatically be traded away for higher productivity.
We may need to preserve meaningful difficulty
One especially challenging idea was that a good life is not the same as a frictionless life.
Learning, creativity, courage, responsibility, trust, and mastery often grow through effort. If AI removes every difficult step, it may produce more output while weakening the human development that once occurred during the process.
The goal should not be to preserve suffering for its own sake. It should be to distinguish pointless burdens from meaningful challenges.
Beneficial AI should reduce needless hardship while leaving people room to practice, struggle, discover, make mistakes, and grow. Human beings may need not only a right to privacy and refusal, but also a right to be wrong.
The deeper question is democratic
There is no single definition of a good life that a company, government, researcher, or AI model should impose on everyone.
The people affected by an AI system should help decide what benefits and harms matter in their communities. They should be able to question the system, challenge its decisions, and participate in setting its boundaries.
That means the process used to define “benefit” may be as important as the final measurements.
What this first experiment suggests
The most striking result was not that one model found the perfect answer. It was that multiple systems, responding independently, converged on a common warning:
More capable AI is not necessarily more beneficial AI.
To know whether AI is helping, we must look beyond benchmarks, adoption, and economic growth. We must look at people—their health, freedom, competence, relationships, opportunities, and ability to shape the future.
The next stage of this project will ask the same models to respond after receiving a fuller human-flourishing framework. That will allow us to compare what the models recognized on their own with what changes after they are deliberately oriented toward compassion, agency, resilience, and stewardship.
The question is not whether AI will become more powerful. It almost certainly will.
The question is what conditions we cultivate around that power—and what possibilities those conditions make available tomorrow.
This article is a public-facing summary of Round 01 of the CompassionWare AI Human Benefit Index benchmark project. Read the comparative synthesis report.
#ai #AIAlignment #AIAndDemocracy #AIBenchmarks #AIEthics #AIEvaluation #AIGovernance #AISafety #AlgorithmicAccountability #artificialIntelligence #BeneficialAI #ChatGPT #CompassionWare #criticalThinking #DigitalRights #DigitalWellBeing #ethicalTechnology #futureOfAI #futureOfHumanity #HumanAgency #humanDignity #HumanFlourishing #HumanResilience #humanCenteredAI #HumaneTechnology #philosophy #responsibleAI #SocialImpact #technology #TechnologyAndSociety -
The law of causality is a fundamental principle that states every effect has a cause. This concept not only shapes our understanding of the physical world but also influences our moral decisions and relationships. How do you see causality playing out in your life? Share your thoughts! #Causality #Philosophy #Science #LifeLessons #CriticalThinking
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A personal illustration of the effect of moving beyond reflex behaviour by a little #CriticalThinking
A hardback book from Amazon arrived yesterday with damaged packaging and a dent in the cover. Reflex was to seek remedy and revenge or compensation!
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Offloading work tasks to AI comes with a cost – to our brains
#Technology #AI #Brain #CriticalThinking #AIAtWork #DigitalLiteracy #FutureOfWork #HumanIntelligence #WorkplaceAI #AIEthics #Cognition #Work
https://the-14.com/offloading-work-tasks-to-ai-comes-with-a-cost-to-our-brains/ -
Teachers Warn That Students Are Losing the Ability to Think as They Lean on AI for Everything
image via futurism.com
#ai #criticalThinking #learning #reading #teachingStudents across the country are using AI models to complete assignments and write entire essays. Some of this constitutes cheating, but in many cases schools are allowing students to make some use of AI tools. This is a slippery slop. As some experts argue, any intrusion of automation into the writing process isn’t just threatening students’ composition skills, but their entire ability to think.
https://futurism.com/future-society/students-lose-ability-think-ai -
🚨 Breaking news from the intellectual deep end: 🧠 six academic wizards discover that sometimes, just sometimes, thinking isn’t... reliable. 🤯 Who knew?! But fear not, they've graciously provided a PDF for those eager to dive into this earth-shattering revelation. 😂📄
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08679 #BreakingNews #AcademicResearch #CriticalThinking #PDFDownload #MindBlown #HackerNews #ngated -
This interview to Stuart Firestein is a really interesting Mindscape Podcast episode
https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/17/364-stuart-firestein-on-how-science-relies-on-ignorance-and-failure/
#science #education #CriticalThinking #interview -
HEADLINE
🗣️ "AI might be conscious."DISCLAIMER
This depends on one's definition of the words #AI, #consciousness, and #be. -
#Money, the interesting thing about it is if you #exist in #poverty, you desperately need it for your day to day survival, then if your on the opposite end as in being a multi million or billionaire in reality money means nothing, because everything you own and do is leveraged off of debt that you one don't actually own and second can never actually satisfy, and the rules of the game are very different for those in poverty, and the rules are slightly different if your in the middle, but if your on top, the rules don't apply to you unless somehow your generation and hoarding of wealth imposes upon another top income holder, basically if your in poverty all the way to the bottom end of double digit millions, your beholden to the entire state if it where, and beyond that the entire state apparently is beholden to you and your ability to leverage debt, it is a rigged system of epic inequality and strongly embraces prejudice against the rest of us whom simply would appreciate the basics in life to be readily available without so much turmoil, and stress to our mental and physical wellbeing, money is an illusion of power and has left far to many of us going hungry, literally;
You can encourage my continued useless #poetry, creativity and expression of self, #commentary, random thoughts, #philosophy and ideas, and by doing so your helping to feed, house and clothe a #disabled man living in #poverty, $5-10-15 It All Helps, via #cashapp at $woctxphotog or via #paypal at paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=…
#Austerity #Awareness #BrokenSystem #Capitalism #Change #ChronicPoverty #CorporateGreed #CriticalThinking #DailyStruggle #DebtSlavery #DisabledVoices #DisabilityJustice #EconomicInequality #EconomicJustice #EconomicViolence #Economics #Education #ExistentialThought #Financial #FinancialTrauma #FinanciallyDistressed #FoodInsecurity #Hunger #Homelessness #HumanCost #IllusionOfWealth #Inequality #Justice #LateStageCapitalism #MarginalizedVoices #MentalHealthMatters #MutualAid #Neoliberalism #Oligarchy #PhilosophyOfMoney #Plutocracy #Politics #PovertyAwareness #PowerAndControl #PowerDynamics #RealTalk #Reform #RiggedSystem #SocialCommentary #SocialEconomicWarfare #SocialJustice #Society #Solidarity #SpeakTruth #StatusQuo #SupportDisabled #Survival #SystemicOppression #SystemicPoverty #TaxTheRich #TruthBomb #TruthToPower #WakeUpCall #WealthGap #WealthInequality #WorkingClass #WorkingPoor
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It hasn't been an easy year for me. If last year was one of the best of my life, this year so far has probably been one of the worst. Through loss, being stranded for a week, and newly discovered mental health struggles, I haven't been able really to do what I envisioned with JMHQ. That ends now.
First video release: Friday, August 28th. YouTube. Be there.
Link to the channel 👉 https://zurl.co/25YNA
#MentalHealth #MentalHealthAwareness #Skepticism #Paranormal #CriticalThinking
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DATE: August 17, 2026 at 05:01AM
SOURCE:
NEW YORK TIMES PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS FEEDTITLE: What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/us/student-writing-essays-ai.html
Educators are worried that many students can no longer write essays without A.I. And it’s costing more than just grammar skills.
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/us/student-writing-essays-ai.html
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Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #WhatDoStudentsLose #StopWriting #StudentWriting #AIEra #EssaySkills #EducationTech #AcademicIntegrity #WritingEducation #CriticalThinking #LiteracyLoss
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The laws of logic are the foundation of rational thought, guiding us through complex arguments and helping us discern truth from falsehood. Ever wondered how these principles apply in everyday life? Let's explore how they shape our understanding of the world! #Logic #CriticalThinking #Philosophy #Rationality #Debate
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Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love. -
Before schools embrace AI, Canada must protect children’s learning
#Canada #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Education #DigitalPrivacy #Schools #Students #Children #AIinEducation #EdTech #Teachers #ChildSafety #CriticalThinking #Tech
https://the-14.com/before-schools-embrace-ai-canada-must-protect-childrens-learning/ -
Interesting video: "The End of Reading is Here: Will Literacy Be the New Marker of the Wealthy Elite?" by thisstoryaintover
(ca. 33 minutes)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02IB3LcSedM
#criticalthinking #medialiteracy #reading #readingcommunity #notoAI
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I am starting to unroll a yarn on imaginaries: growth versus care 🧶
#imaginaries #beliefs #progress #polycrisis #commoditization #commodification #faith #hope #conversion #reconversion #climateMitigation #emissions #ecologicalTransition #transition #energyTransition #lockIns #power #knowledge #traditions #transformation #ecofeminism #technoCriticism #technique #development #sustainableDevelopment #hegemony #mindsets #ideologies #collectiveSafety #desire #narratives #growth #modeling #modelling #forecasting #exploitation #extraction #civilization #tech #technology #domination #philosophy #criticalThinking #resources #commodities #acceleration #criticalTheory #digitalization #engineers #separation #exploration #discovery #degrowth #growth
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Just got a text message for survey that is pushing a very specific message about data centers.
This is how wildly wrong ideas become injected in the bloodstream of otherwise normal people.
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Are you burning the midnight oil? #criticalthinking #psychology #philosophy
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The laws of logic are the backbone of rational thought. They help us navigate arguments, discern truth from falsehood, and understand the world around us. Ever wondered how these principles apply to everyday life? Let's discuss how logic shapes our decisions and beliefs! #Logic #CriticalThinking #Philosophy #Rationality #Debate
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Season 2 Episode 2
'The Courts Have Angels'In the latest podcast episode of 'Jennifer's Angels'
Judge Anna Perez is interviewed by her daughter to discuss her judicial philosophy & how she helps kids develop a healthy self-image.
HS Teacher Sarah Behrens offers a Teacher Hot Tip: English class as a way to support critical thinking.
#podcast #law #education #CriticalThinking #judge #prevention #PublicHealth #nonprofit @stopTDV @gamingagainstv
