Nobody likes to be proven wrong, but in order to form strong opinions on topics people need to have discourse that may prove their initial ideas to be false.
An opinion is defined as a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
But with critical thinking, the objective is to analyze and evaluate an issue in order to form a comprehensive judgment.
There are various examples of people reaffirming their opinions without critically thinking about what they say, but the most notable are people like conservative political commentators Steven Crowder or
Ben Shapiro.
Forming coherent opinions without going off onto random tangents is a nightmare for most people, but everyone should learn how to voice their opinions.
Even if it is a taboo opinion, it creates valuable discussions within communities.
But people like Crowder and Shapiro live in these echo chambers, where they read one headline or pick out one statistic from an article that supports their agenda, and take it as fact.
Morris Fiorina, a Stanford political science professor and Hoover Institution fellow, goes more in depth on these echo chambers in an essay on contemporary American politics.
“As social media, personalized search, and other technological “advances” proliferate, concerned observers have expressed the fear that Americans will isolate themselves in “ideological silos” or “echo chambers” that reinforce their views and insulate them from the views of the other side,” Fiorina wrote.
“The new study highlights the difficulties of measuring the small changes in ice height happening in East Antarctica,” Ben Smith, a glaciologist with the University of Washington in Seattle, wrote in a NASA study on the Antarctic ice sheet.
This is the same article Crowder pulled his information which directly counters his original argument.
For Shapiro, the latest instance of him saying “I’m right and you’re wrong” is when he criticized hip-hop and rap music and said objectively they aren’t real music.
But again, his opinion is buried underneath layers of confirmation bias.
His argument begins with him laying a foundation of credibility, such as explaining how his dad went to music school and studied music.
Shapiro trained musically as a violinist and that combined with his father’s background, gave Shapiro the green light to say things like hip-hop isn’t music because he knows more about music.
Facts must be verified through evidence, but even facts by themselves are worthless unless people put them in context, draw conclusions and give them meaning.
People can come out of discussions learning something new by after developing common and useful critical thinking techniques.
