Examining texts on the fly?
March 15, 2016 2:38 PM Subscribe
How do you look at something biased and pick out the good points being made from the bad points? How do you pick up on 'spin'?
Funny thing, I was going to post this in the Tyson thread but thought better of it. It would be more than off-topic to say the least. So, back in the Tyson thread, I asked whether I should re-watch Cosmos to figure out what bothered me about it. It's a rhetorical question.
I mention that because putting aside whether it's worth the time or not I want to see the complete picture. How do you look at something biased and pick out the good points being made from the bad points? How do you pick up on 'spin'?
It's ... quite a jump from Twitter to there, but... Moving on.
The maddening thing about this is that I discovered that I do have the ability to do this. But it took me a year plus change, examining a single work and related works front to back, largely focused on one, specific character and their context and... I mean, this ability to judge something on their merits is likely applicable elsewhere, is what I'm getting at.
People can do this without much preparation. I'm at a loss as to how. My first exposure to a text tends to overwhelm me if I read it too deeply, so I expose myself to it in increments.
I will do things like leaving a video running in the background as I mostly ignore it, and then later re-watching it more closely. Subtitles available? Okay, I'll read those and ignore the video. Then watch the video later. I will read books from back to front if that helps. Spoilers don't faze me as much as they should, I guess, because I just consider that another vector of exposure.
Sometimes my thought processes seem to take several days to complete. No, make that normally the case. I can't be a participant of debates or interesting conversation because of this... Can't hack it. As such I'll talk in shortcuts and be brief to the point of inanity. I think it goes both ways and affects my ability to better read what other people say. Even if I never get into a debate, I'd like to figure out how to make following one easier.
Any tips on examining texts ranging from formal essays on the first reading to debates on the internet as they happen will be appreciated. Anything with words, basically. Spoken or written. What elements should I focus on?
Funny thing, I was going to post this in the Tyson thread but thought better of it. It would be more than off-topic to say the least. So, back in the Tyson thread, I asked whether I should re-watch Cosmos to figure out what bothered me about it. It's a rhetorical question.
I mention that because putting aside whether it's worth the time or not I want to see the complete picture. How do you look at something biased and pick out the good points being made from the bad points? How do you pick up on 'spin'?
It's ... quite a jump from Twitter to there, but... Moving on.
The maddening thing about this is that I discovered that I do have the ability to do this. But it took me a year plus change, examining a single work and related works front to back, largely focused on one, specific character and their context and... I mean, this ability to judge something on their merits is likely applicable elsewhere, is what I'm getting at.
People can do this without much preparation. I'm at a loss as to how. My first exposure to a text tends to overwhelm me if I read it too deeply, so I expose myself to it in increments.
I will do things like leaving a video running in the background as I mostly ignore it, and then later re-watching it more closely. Subtitles available? Okay, I'll read those and ignore the video. Then watch the video later. I will read books from back to front if that helps. Spoilers don't faze me as much as they should, I guess, because I just consider that another vector of exposure.
Sometimes my thought processes seem to take several days to complete. No, make that normally the case. I can't be a participant of debates or interesting conversation because of this... Can't hack it. As such I'll talk in shortcuts and be brief to the point of inanity. I think it goes both ways and affects my ability to better read what other people say. Even if I never get into a debate, I'd like to figure out how to make following one easier.
Any tips on examining texts ranging from formal essays on the first reading to debates on the internet as they happen will be appreciated. Anything with words, basically. Spoken or written. What elements should I focus on?
Best answer: This is a big question! Critical/active reading is a crucial skill that lies at the core of a lot of high school and university level training, so I'm a bit at a loss as to where to point you first. Off the top of my head, a good model is Paul Edwards's brief How to Read a Book. It's pitched at university grad and undergrad students and (obviously) at people reading books in an academic context, but a lot of his recommendations apply more generally: know the intellectual context, having a purpose and a strategy, etc.
posted by col_pogo at 3:08 PM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by col_pogo at 3:08 PM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]
Best answer: I agree that this is a huge topic (^). My first thought, consistent with thinking in the general direction of active/critical reading skills, is that you want to develop an eye for picking the arguments out of longer texts/conversations/exchanges. I mean arguments in the formal sense: premises that infer a conclusion. Being able to identify premises and conclusions and the logical form of the inferences being made will help in evaluating arguments presented. This takes some practice. Some basic formal logic would help a lot with this, but that might be too demanding. However, I do think looking at philosophy oriented resources related to informal logic might be a good way to go. "How to win and argument" and "Critical Thinking" are popular first year philosophy classes these days, so there are a number of recently developed resources that are aimed at just the kind of critical evaluation it sounds like you are interested in.
A few quick reading suggestions :
For a very brief taste of the kind of thing I am talking about, try Jim Pryor's (very short) Guidelines on Reading Philosophy
If this seems like it represents the kind of skills you are developing, one of my colleagues is using Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic as a textbook in his current "How to Win an Argument" class. (You can get a copy for a very reasonable price at Abe Books, especially if you buy an older edition. It probably isn't crucial to have the 9th edition for your purposes!)
posted by jamaal at 4:30 PM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]
A few quick reading suggestions :
For a very brief taste of the kind of thing I am talking about, try Jim Pryor's (very short) Guidelines on Reading Philosophy
If this seems like it represents the kind of skills you are developing, one of my colleagues is using Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic as a textbook in his current "How to Win an Argument" class. (You can get a copy for a very reasonable price at Abe Books, especially if you buy an older edition. It probably isn't crucial to have the 9th edition for your purposes!)
posted by jamaal at 4:30 PM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]
Best answer: I would posit that your premise is wrong. People are generally in a position to think 'critically on the fly' about a given text because they have spent a long time gathering the related information necessary to have a fully formed opinion of the text.
If you spend a long time with a subject, you don't need to think critically about any given text. You can feel confident in your existing knowledge, and reject information that contradicts that knowledge. With gray areas, you can weigh the probabilities and expect a ballpark answer.
Thinking critically takes time. Thinking on the fly takes experience. They're complementary but different things.
posted by politikitty at 5:06 PM on March 15, 2016
If you spend a long time with a subject, you don't need to think critically about any given text. You can feel confident in your existing knowledge, and reject information that contradicts that knowledge. With gray areas, you can weigh the probabilities and expect a ballpark answer.
Thinking critically takes time. Thinking on the fly takes experience. They're complementary but different things.
posted by politikitty at 5:06 PM on March 15, 2016
Best answer: I think most people, when you get the sense that they're reading something and quickly synthesizing thoughts on it, are basically doing a combination of Jim Pryor's steps 1 & 2 from jamaal's post and kevin_belt's suggestion (broadly interpreted) of looking for argument smells (for lack of a better phrase, and because I have code smells, a similar topic from programming, on the brain), places where there's something off with the argument, even if you aren't sure on that first pass what the problems are.
If you have knowledge of how arguments are typically structured (see many of the links above) and knowledge of some common logical fallacies and skim an argument that has some flaws, a lot of times you can start to see those fallacies pop up - oh, that's an unsourced appeal to authority, this is an ad hominem attack, that's confirmation bias - and diagnose whether they're a major issue (i.e., does the primary claim rest on a fallacy?) or a relatively minor point. Those are the spots where you can start digging a crowbar into the argument and prying it apart (if that's all you want to do; this approach has its flaws).
But I agree with politikitty - this isn't something you "just do". I don't know who you're engaging with, but the people that I know who do this kind of thing well are good at it because they have spent years analyzing the way people structure logic, and so they can rapidly do this kind of analysis. My father is a lawyer, and he's remarkably talented at listening to an argument or quickly reading something and finding the pieces that have issues. But that's less because he's brilliant and more because he's spent 40ish years pulling apart and crafting arguments and he can apply that experience quickly.
One way I have practiced this is by dissecting opinion columns - they tend to be shallow enough that you won't get lost, and many of the people who write them aren't very smart, so they make bad arguments that you can pick apart. That might be a good way for you to work on diagnosing argument structures and fallacies in a sort of controlled environment.
posted by protocoach at 6:59 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]
If you have knowledge of how arguments are typically structured (see many of the links above) and knowledge of some common logical fallacies and skim an argument that has some flaws, a lot of times you can start to see those fallacies pop up - oh, that's an unsourced appeal to authority, this is an ad hominem attack, that's confirmation bias - and diagnose whether they're a major issue (i.e., does the primary claim rest on a fallacy?) or a relatively minor point. Those are the spots where you can start digging a crowbar into the argument and prying it apart (if that's all you want to do; this approach has its flaws).
But I agree with politikitty - this isn't something you "just do". I don't know who you're engaging with, but the people that I know who do this kind of thing well are good at it because they have spent years analyzing the way people structure logic, and so they can rapidly do this kind of analysis. My father is a lawyer, and he's remarkably talented at listening to an argument or quickly reading something and finding the pieces that have issues. But that's less because he's brilliant and more because he's spent 40ish years pulling apart and crafting arguments and he can apply that experience quickly.
One way I have practiced this is by dissecting opinion columns - they tend to be shallow enough that you won't get lost, and many of the people who write them aren't very smart, so they make bad arguments that you can pick apart. That might be a good way for you to work on diagnosing argument structures and fallacies in a sort of controlled environment.
posted by protocoach at 6:59 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]
Best answer: It becomes a habit to "turn off" your feelings about assertions A, B, and C and see that A + C doesn't necessarily mean conclusion D logically and that B is totally irrelevant and just thrown in there for emotional effect. It annoys me even when people I agree with at work use faulty arguments to state the case.
Tells: Adverbs, and words with strong positive or negative connotations. Ask the same witness: How fast do you think driver A was going when he smashed into the other car? vs. when he bumped the other car? Throw in an editorial "carelessly" here and there. Too many of those tells and I get suspicious someone's trying to bullshit me.
(also, being able to give the same basic facts two wildly different connotations by switching out all the words like that on the fly while speaking, is a super-useful skill in the work place. Just saying.)
posted by ctmf at 9:48 PM on March 15, 2016
Tells: Adverbs, and words with strong positive or negative connotations. Ask the same witness: How fast do you think driver A was going when he smashed into the other car? vs. when he bumped the other car? Throw in an editorial "carelessly" here and there. Too many of those tells and I get suspicious someone's trying to bullshit me.
(also, being able to give the same basic facts two wildly different connotations by switching out all the words like that on the fly while speaking, is a super-useful skill in the work place. Just saying.)
posted by ctmf at 9:48 PM on March 15, 2016
Response by poster: Sorry for taking so long -- I spent some time being afraid I wouldn't know how to respond and as it turns out, I don't but feel that I should. You responded, after all, and I need to thank you.
...
After reading the linked references (thanks col_pogo and jamaal) I'll note that I apparently read my fiction like a undergraduate trying to get an essay in on time. That's ... interesting to know, I guess. It's more of a coping mechanism I developed to not get too overwhelmed by the media I'm consuming. Books... shows... audio... anything, really. I frequently feel the need to confirm things so I know I have them straight even when I feel I'm unable to get near something directly. Psychologically speaking.
politikitty and protocoach, I didn't mean to suggest it wasn't something that came with experience. I agree with you, actually, and it was me and my poor wording that suggested the opposite. I just have such a hard time getting started and so easily knocked out of the flow that knowing where to resume, or roughly what to pick up when I try to resume... Well, anything helps.
Thanks for all the responses, and sorry if it seemed like I was floundering a bit, because I was. There was just something I had to ask and it doesn't look like I quite managed to ask it. But I'll take all your suggestions and advice and see what I can do with them.
posted by aroweofshale at 6:28 PM on March 25, 2016
...
After reading the linked references (thanks col_pogo and jamaal) I'll note that I apparently read my fiction like a undergraduate trying to get an essay in on time. That's ... interesting to know, I guess. It's more of a coping mechanism I developed to not get too overwhelmed by the media I'm consuming. Books... shows... audio... anything, really. I frequently feel the need to confirm things so I know I have them straight even when I feel I'm unable to get near something directly. Psychologically speaking.
politikitty and protocoach, I didn't mean to suggest it wasn't something that came with experience. I agree with you, actually, and it was me and my poor wording that suggested the opposite. I just have such a hard time getting started and so easily knocked out of the flow that knowing where to resume, or roughly what to pick up when I try to resume... Well, anything helps.
Thanks for all the responses, and sorry if it seemed like I was floundering a bit, because I was. There was just something I had to ask and it doesn't look like I quite managed to ask it. But I'll take all your suggestions and advice and see what I can do with them.
posted by aroweofshale at 6:28 PM on March 25, 2016
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posted by kevinbelt at 2:54 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]