The Rise Of NPCs: Why Critical Thinking Is Dead

what is happening to critical thinking and why does it feel like in a time where we can more readily access the truth we've only become far more divided December 25th 2003 it was 6 a.m the frost surrounding the outside of my bedroom windows was nearly melted by my excitement to go downstairs I quickly ran to my parents and shook them back and forth while saying it's Christmas it's Christmas but like in a kid's voice as I made my way down the stairs I was greeted with exactly what I had envisioned the night before a decorated

tree surrounded by presence of all different colors and sizes in typical fashion my sister and I took turns opening gifts until I got to my last one it was a box with bright red gift wrap and a tag that said to pull from Santa when I unwrapped the first quarter of it I immediately knew what it was the Spider-Man dual action web blaster that I had been wishing for the entire year my parents had their old camcorder routes and were filling my screams as I stood up and started pacing back and forth in that moment

it was everything I could have hoped for the worries I had back then in a time where the internet was basically non-existent and the culture of America was so vastly different were little to none I trusted in the belief of a man named Santa Claus and no one could tell me otherwise all that I was surrounded with were other kids my age or parents who were also dedicated to telling me about the magic of Christmas day now the reason I bring up this story is because I think that many adults and teenagers have gotten back

to the state in which I was in as a child but instead of that lack of critical thinking coming from their brain not being fully developed yet and not having the ability to question their Authority like me during that time it is now because we have a thousand different belief systems that can be easily accessed at our fingertips and we are being faced with information overload the fighting in Ukraine continues collectible sneakers you're not being polite to the pronouns because modern day women don't offer much value one theme that is commonly brought up amongst people

who grew up in the 90s or early 2000s whether they were a kid or an adult is this sense of awe and wonder there was space to breathe and in many different cases you were the one that had to figure out the best course of action towards thinking about something or doing something in other words life was more uncalculated and I think this is massively important towards developing better critical thinking skills think of how new and exciting everything felt during this time period all of these Technologies like the internet cell phones and more television networks

were just emerging I remember how many TV shows there were that I watched that felt more like an experiment rather than a show that was trying to do as good as possible when's the last time we had a show like double dare where kids had to grab a flag out of a bunch of goo in a massive nose or Legends of the Hidden Temple where they had to climb between two walls to put a wig on a mannequin's head I don't know it just felt like each new way of presenting or expressing something felt more

inventive rather than so Bound by a preconditioned rule and other people's opinions other than the people that you surrounded yourself with in real life were much more scarce which allowed the individual more of a chance to form their own opinion but ever since the internet became the number one source for all information we now supposedly have all the answers want your business to do as good as possible run it exactly like this want to figure out the best diet just eat these things you want to be happier all you gotta do is this of course

having more answers rather than less is extremely beneficial in many cases like Diet exercise sleep or how to unclog your sink but there has to be some sort of downside to not being able to figure out things on your own and having that room to wonder and that downside I believe is a lack of deep critical thinking that comes only when one doesn't always have an answer or think they have an answer to everything now before you can even conceive an opinion on something your opinion has already been decided for you by the internet just

like how your parents tell you who Santa Claus is and why he exists as a kid the internet is like that parent that tells you their own viewpoint on the world and doesn't give you any room to question it and it seems so counterintuitive because you'd think that now that we have access to all the information and every single Viewpoint we need in order to form an objective opinion our ability to form rational critical thoughts would increase but I think for many people it's been the exact opposite because it's so much easier to get the

immediate answer your brain is looking for online which in most cases isn't the critically thought out answer you have more confirmation than ever that your opinion is the right one so you really don't need to use the brain power required to believe in anything else other than what's presented in your internet bubble but I'll explain that aspect of all this in more detail later I also think that because there was much more space for people to think for themselves the world also moved much slower in general and what's now taken its place is an extremely

capitalistic society that thrives on hyper competition now competition has always been prevalent since humans have been around we are wired to compete with each other over resources relationships and status in order to survive the more animalistic parts of our brain form to ensure we would continue to progress and reproduce and that's a good thing but sometimes too much progress too fast can do more harm than good and I think that's what we are seeing now in a world where you have practically zero time to situate yourself with your job or other Pursuits before the next

big thing or trend is announced one must always be improving and always innovating and what many companies must be doing now just to survive and thrive is be as flashy clickbaity and fast as possible no matter how objectively true their statements are in my video on gen Z's lack of purpose I talked about the idea of hyper reality which essentially means that the online world starts to become indistinguishable from the things in the real world it's trying to represent and the part of hyper reality that is being brought upon by click bait and controversy that

is now affecting everyone's critical thinking skills is the increase in polarization and superlatives I want you to take a look at these video clips and see if you can figure out what they all have in common in the city revealing the laziest way to make money online the worst advice you will ever hear in this chair how to learn a language as fast as humanly possible she's the worst mayor in America right now the most important factor towards building the life you want did you pick up on it well if you didn't it's that every

single person in these Cliffs use superlatives to describe what they were talking about a superlative is an exaggerated or excessive adjective used to describe something the absolute worst to the best to the biggest the smallest I hate I love all of these words are becoming more and more commonly used to describe things that aren't actually fit for that type of description when things are labeled as the best worst fastest or slowest it gives people no space to wonder if there might be some information related to what you're consuming that is better out there in other

words people would much rather click or read something that says the worst advice of all time rather than the advice that's pretty bad because it leaves no room for doubt in skepticism and appeals to our egos constant search for certainty and yes I am using one of my videos as an example here to show you that I have to play this game of polarization in my titles and thumbnails too but I do just want to say that everything I present in my videos once you get past the clickbait title and thumbnail is nuanced information and

that is the way I will always present information but for many cases online people aren't doing this hyper competitiveness has pushed us to a state in which people are promoting incomplete sometimes inaccurate opinions and ideas disguised as absolute truth just so they can retain their relevancy in other words misinformation is being spread ever more rapidly just so people can get the bag now let me ask you a question what's the easiest way to convince someone you are right and worth following well in my experience you just need to give them no space to question your

stance speak with confidence and conviction entitle everything and say everything with those superlatives that we talked about earlier this type of Devotion to one person isn't new it's been prominent throughout history because life without guidance meaning and certainty is extremely anxiety inducing after all you are spawned into a world you have no previous knowledge on and you are supposed to figure out what to do with this unlimited freedom of thought and an action you are given for most people the idea of that is too much to bear and so naturally people turn to the leaders

aka the people that seem to have everything figured out and have all the answers because at least then they have something to believe in and a direction to strive towards but the one person you should be wary of more than anything is the person who claims to have the absolute truth about everything they talk about and they give you give you face to question them or think for yourself now I will say the people with meaning and direction in their lives that were given to them by a leader do tend to live much happier healthier

lives than those with absolutely no meaning and we need leaders because at the very least they give us strength and help to give us some sense of the world but the problem arises when you completely lose your ability to see outside of that bubble or leader that has given you that certainty meaning and Direction and since almost anyone with an internet connection some confidence and a general understanding of human psychology can amass a following now there are tons of new different bubbles with different gurus that all seem to have the supposed right answer to your

problems and this is where a very dangerous thing starts to happen which is referred to as brandolini's law this law states that the amount of energy required to refutable on the Internet is an order of magnitude greater than it takes to produce it in other words it takes way more cognitive energy to question the information that you are presented with online rather than to just accept it as truth and since most people think like a bot they're just going to take whatever is presented to them the most as truth and in turn that is going

to make misinformation spread more rapidly than ever so this is where everything we've been talking about so far starts to pile up the internet has created every type of answer you can think of and the technology behind it has made progress speed up exponentially because of that speed and extreme obsession with Improvement we are now seeing companies are forced to be ultra competitive to the point where they have less time to think about their decisions and instead just keep up with the times and because of this our society has become much less accepting of average

so the only way most of these companies or any prominent voice on the internet can stand out and beat the competition is to be as polarizing flashy and controversial as possible even if nothing they do or say is for the greater good or has some objective rational truth behind it therefore Echo Chambers or Bubbles as I like to call them have now become the norm and what happens when every Echo chamber you can think of exists well it means it's much easier for people to not think critical and simply resort to confirmation bias which is

our tendency to look for information that validates our already existing beliefs for example when one gets traumatized by a woman they fall in love with and they start to think all women are untrustworthy they may end up going to the internet to see if other guys have experienced something similar and that in turn could lead them down the red pill rabbit hole and have them only consuming red pill content that aligns with their biases or if one has always gotten rejected by women they might turn to the black pill bubble and start believing looks and

height are the only things that matter when it comes to getting a girl to like you no matter how biased your opinions are they're sure to be an internet community that is spewing your already biased beliefs as absolute truths red pill black pill purple pill liberals conservatives all of these communities and political groups can help an NPC or bot with a serious lack of critical thinking skills fall into the Trap of thinking their life experiences that created the biases they have is the only way the world actually is and that their Solutions are the only

right solution when the truth is that all of these communities that are clashing with one another they all have a certain bit of Truth to them and they all spit a certain bit of objective truth but not one Community itself has the objective right answer to everything this problem is only further exacerbated by social media algorithms which will show you things you have already been searching for following and watching so instead of using the internet as a way to broaden their view on the world and become more open-minded most people are just picking and choosing

the information that best suits their Echo chamber of subjective truths and this is why I think everybody seems to disagree with or hate everyone else now not just because there are so many different opinions on what is true or not but also because it seems like the validity of one's bubble they find themselves trapped in is so much stronger due to how many more people are giving them social confirmation online The Divide between humans feels stronger than ever and it feels like if you have just one different opinion than someone they will immediately label you

as wrong or a add person so now that we have a better understanding of how a lot of people and maybe you lack in critical thinking skills we must now ask this question how can each one of us become better critical thinkers and not be so inclined to instantly believe or look for information that confirms our biases well in order to do so we first need to understand the two systems of thinking that our brain usually uses that I've been referencing throughout this video the two systems of thinking that we typically use are called Fast

thinking and slow thinking and these terms were popularized by the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel conman and like conman does in the book we're going to refer to fast thinking as system one thinking and slow thinking as system two thinking our system one of thinking operates automatically and quickly with little to no effort and no sense of voluntary control examples of this are detecting that one object is farther than another reading a simple sentence or driving a car on an empty road the system 2 of thinking allocates attention to be effortful mental activities

that demand it examples of system 2 Thinking are focusing your attention on a particular person in a crowd exercising faster than is normal for you or as it relates to this video thinking critically if we want to stop letting our biases triggers and close-minded worldviews govern all of our actions then we must learn how to use our system to thinking more and how to use it properly and I say properly because it's very easy to have a lazy system too that doesn't actually do the critical thinking work especially given our modern Information Age you see

system 1 automatically generates suggestions feelings and intuitions for system two and if endorsed by a lazy system too intuitions end up turning into beliefs and impulses turn into voluntary actions so basically if you have a very lazy improper system too it will accept the faults of system 1 and not question them and just believe them as fact which will then lead to you developing those cognitive biases that we talked about earlier and most notably confirmation bias so the next time you're watching someone or you're presented with a question take a quick pause and ask yourself

am I seeing this without trying to impose my own beliefs and biases on the situation is there more to this than my immediate reaction and how can I consider this from a Viewpoint different from my own pay attention to how your body and mind is reacting and how it is simply a process of the ego not being able to come to terms with potentially being wrong this usually presents itself as an increased heart rate and Adrenaline Rush racing thoughts and sweaty Palms to manage the stress of a decision or piece of content go for a

quick walk before reassessing what has been presented to you take prolonged periods to do simply nothing but stare at a wall and as I've said before and I'll keep saying again meditate mindfulness meditation helps your system too to not be so lazy and will help you to be more objective when the time is right now as I always say there needs to be Nuance even with Nuance itself if you are always trying to think critically about all your decisions actions and thoughts then that will lead you to overthink and just do more harm than good

and if you don't stand for anything and you let anyone's opinion overtake your current one you're simply a human pinball bouncing around one belief to another and you are far more easily taken advantage of and less respected because nobody likes a people pleaser who agrees with everything everyone says the reason you want to hone your system to thinking skills isn't so you can be completely agreeable all the time it's so you can become more open-minded to the possibility that maybe just maybe you're wrong and that there's more variables and experiences you need to have in

order to form an objective picture and it's about being more proactive instead of reactive so we can all be open to more conscious unbiased conversations that fuel progress now there is so much I left out from that book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel common and it really is one of the best books to teach you how to become a better critical thinker so if you're looking for a full detailed summary on that book I suggest you use the app short form which is is the sponsor of today's video if you aren't familiar with short

form it is a platform that is producing high quality guides to non-fiction books they provide all the books key ideas and Concepts plus smart commentary and Analysis and they also allow you to do exercises with each summary as well so you are directly applying what you've learned and that's what I think really makes short form Stand Out above all these other book summary platforms is that you can actually apply what you're learning and that specifically is super important to learning how to be a better critical thinker like I said I've gotten these ideas from thinking

fast and slow but I got them specifically from the short form summary that I read on there and the summary that they have for that book is excellent free genres I think you guys would really like are philosophy psychology and self-improvement so if you're interested in reading that summary along with thousands of other book summaries for the price of just one book a month you can go to the link in my description and that will give you five days of unlimited access plus an additional 20 off their annual subscription so go take advantage of that

offer and check out my favorite book summary platform ever by going to shortform.com Cole the link to that like I said is in the description now to help you become a better critical thinker I want to give you your first critical thinking exercise think about what you've just watched in this video and you can re-watch it if you need to and tell me what you agree or disagree about what I said when you're doing this be sure to ask yourself if you're using any biases in your thinking and explain to me in the comments why

you think what I said was wrong using critical thinking I look forward to having a more broader viewpoint on what I just talked about and sparking some useful conversations with you all thank you very much to all my patrons on patreon if you don't know what this is It's a platform separate from YouTube where I'm putting out exclusive content you can also talk to me one-on-one over the phone on there if you want to check that out Link in the description and if you like these videos where I make video essays about modern issues going

on right now and my potential Solutions and how I feel about them check out this playlist I just made a whole playlist on all my videos essays on Modern issues so if you're interested yeah go check them out maybe you'll enjoy them and that is it see you guys