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re: the psychologist Jonathan Haidt: In Haidt's view, the philosophers' dream of reason isn't just naïve, it is radically unfounded, the product of what he calls "the rationalist delusion." As he puts it, "Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason. We all need to take a cold, hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is." Haidt sees two points about reasoning to be particularly important: the first concerns the efficacy (or lack thereof) of reasoning; the second concerns the point of doing so publicly: of exchanging reasons.

"...we're probably measuring the wrong things and the right things are not amenable to measurement. If this is true and it is also true that the culture of measurement is in the ascendancy, we might expect that things that resist measurement - quality, poetry, insight - would be dismissed and set aside, on the reasoning that if it can't be measured, what good is it? A new technology typically turns its limitations into a mechanism of evaluation and consigns phenomena outside its capacities to the margins, not merely to its margins but to the margins of what is generally significant and worth worrying about. "

If form tends to follow function in design, what would the equivalent be in critical thinking? Are there forms of argumentation (assumptions, evidence, reasoning) that constrain the function (in contrast to the desired function dictating the form)? This line of inquiry led me to this reference.

The comments are especially interesting -- strong views expressed but lots of room for scrutinizing the assumptions, evidence, reasoning of the writers.

Put the article together with the readers' comments and you have a year's worth of critical thinking exercises (assessing evidence, reasoning, and assumptions).

"What would institutions look like if their core rationale were scalable learning?  What if the reason we'll come together in institutions in the future is that we'll learn faster as participants in these institutions than we ever could on our own? "

"We still need more tool-building but there is much benefit in putting the remarkable tools we now have to work. So we will have a better understanding of both animal model brains, but to me very importantly, the human brain that makes discoveries relevant to disease actionable. And also advances basic neuroscience. We've been focusing on brain disease but in the end basic science is the well from which everything comes, and we should not forget it. But that said, understanding all the different cells, understanding how they're wired together, understanding the language of neurons - that is, when they fire, what are they saying to each other? Understanding how this information integrates. Understanding how activity spreads in the brain and how it's decoded is much more than a 10-year project. But I think a focused push like this could lead to a platform of ideas, of tools, of testable hypotheses, of new observations, that could power both basic neuroscience and translational neuroscience interested in disease and therapeutics."

"For Musk, going to Mars is way more than just cool. "Are we on a path to becoming a multiplanet species or not?" he has asked. "If we're not, well, that's not a very bright future. We'll simply be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us." Impey makes much the same point. "Humankind evolved over millions of years," he observes. "But over the last 60 years, atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later we must expand beyond this blue and green ball, or go extinct." So does Petranek. "There are real threats to the continuation of the human race on Earth, including our failure to save the home planet from ecological destruction and the possibility of nuclear war," he writes. "The first humans who emigrate to Mars are our best hope for the survival of our species.""