How to Think ①: postponing value judgement

English Creative Education Psychology

I learned a lot of things in graduate school.

Surely, I leaned a lot of new knowledge, facts and frameworks. Of course, that is important.




However, I also learned "how to think." I believe that this is more important than learning knowledge itself because knowledge is available anywhere at any time, especially because of Professor Google.

As Einstein said, why do we have to remember what is written in books and notes?

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I like thinking.

And I realized that Im following certain pattens of thinking when I try to think deeply.

Also I realized that I try to be careful about certain things when I try to think deeply.

I want to write a little bit about it.

Its like a how-to list to think deeply. (I actually hate this kind of book. I never read this kind of "how-to" book, hahaha)

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First thing that I always try to do is postponing value judgement.


We tend to make value judgement when we come across some phenomenon. Laziness is a bad thing, making effort is a good thing, flirting is a bad thing, etc etc.

The problem about making value judgement is that it tends to stop our thinking.


"Oh, he is a lazy guy, that's bad. That's why he dropped out of the school." That's it.






In stead of that, you can think "Hnnnnnnn, it seems like he is lazy. Why? Is there any reason behind his laziness?" Then, you can think a bit deeper about his laziness.



By postponing value judgement, we can think deeply about the phenomenon.

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To be sure, even after making value judgement, we can think deeply by asking "why" question.

"He is a lazy guy. That is bad. Buy why is he lazy from the first place?"



The problem of this thinking is that if you make value judgement first, you tend to collect information that supports your idea/ideology.


Let's take another controversial example, nuclear power plant.


"Oh, they are constructing nuclear power plant. That's terrible. But why are they constructing it?"


Then, we tend to collect information that criticizes or condemns nuclear power plant.

This bias is called "confirmation bias" (Kahneman, 2012)


This is a psychological bias that we have. Kahneman confirmed this bias with an interesting experiment.


He showed the same dataset to left wing people and right wing people. After taking a look at the dataset, both group of people said that "there you go, this dataset supports my argument."



What happened was that both group of people picked up convenient information from the dataset to support their ideology and said "this data supports my idea."






By not making value judgement, we can fairly collect information from different perspectives.
(More accurately speaking, we can increase the possibility of collecting information fairly from different perspectives. We can never collect information in a completely fair manner because there is no such a thing as neutrality.)


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This is NOT to say that we should not make value judgement. Rather than that, we should make a value judgement in some case.



But my point here is that it seems like too many people make moral judgement too easily based on limited information.






I believe that not making moral judgement easily is a respect for knowledge that extends in this world.

It is not difficult to find an idea that does not go well with your moral judgement. And behind that idea there is an accumulation of knowledge that many people have worked on. It is definitely worth paying attention to it.






By postponing value judgement, we can think deeper. And that is a form of respect for people with different opinions.