The 19-year old former Duke standout-turned-NBA-phenom Zion Williamson is what people call, raw. Exceptionally raw, in fact. The next LeBron James raw, rawer than Kobe when Kobe wore an afro, raw. But everyone knows that raw isn’t enough. The lethal three-point jumper, the Oracle-like vision that converts fast breaks into points…takes skill - developed through a lot of hard work over a long time. Tom Brady may have been born with the physical prerequisites for a Howitzer-like arm, but there has yet to be born a quarterback endowed by his DNA with the ability to diagnose and surgically dissect NFL defenses to the tune of six Super Bowls and nine AFC championships. The world’s best electrician doesn’t execute eye-catching rows of breathtakingly-complex rigid conduit because the parents handed down their genes. No, silly apprentice - those rows come from skill. There’s a career-sized scrap pile of misbends, mismeasurements and darn-its! bearing witness to an ineluctable fact: being good at something is learned, through practice and over time by employing well-established rules, until…perfection.
Thinking is like that. Not a happy byproduct of genetics, a matter of being smart, but a skill to be cultivated. Disagree? Consider politicians (and to a lesser extent, Facebook users), most of whom earned college degrees and in many cases, law degrees - that’s, Doctor of Jurisprudence, to you. But few areas of public discourse include more instances of smart people uttering dumb things than politics, which they do when they forsake sound thinking for political expediency (and when charlatans on social media remain oblivious to it). The mounting heap of intellectual refuse contaminating public discourse owes much more to the disregard of thinking than it does to a lack of smarts.
If your conduit runs make all the electricians say “ooohhh”, it’s because you follow the rules of geometry, know code, know your bender, take accurate measurements, foresee obstacles, know what tools to use and, of course, bend gobs of pipe. Thinking is comparable. Rules dictate how to think well; students of thinking must know those rules, faithfully adhere to them and know what tools are at their disposal. After lots of studying and lots of practice, she becomes skilled enough to spot leaps of logic and shield her mind from deception.
My editor - bless her heart! - limits me from expounding too voluminously on the rules of thinking - there are many - so I’ll pass along just one.
Argument from Authority. The grizzled electrician’s been at it since before you were in diapers, and the early-term apprentice has next to no experience in the electrical trade. Yet, even though his years of experience make him an authority, he’s proven quite capable of getting things wrong. Similarly, even as a newcomer and hardly an authority, the early-term apprentice is known to propose ingenious solutions to complex problems. Authority is far from decisive when it comes to settling a question or debate. Sure, expertise is relevant - I’d consult a medical doctor about those chest pains before I consulted my local shaman. But being an authority isn’t the final say. Authority doesn’t enshrine an opinion in truth any more than coming from the mouth of a “stable genius” magically imbues a policy with effectiveness.