Reagan had just denounced them as an evil empire and they had shot down a civilian airliner with a US congressman on board. “This was a really fraught time when tensions between the USSR and the USA were astronomical. Petrov was duty commander in a bunker just outside Moscow which was home to the Soviet Union’s early warning system to keep an eye on American activity. The book begins with a great example of critical thinking by Stanislav Petrov in 1983. It’s really exposed how much of a gap in our thinking there was.” Catastrophe averted And we really are reaping the consequences of that.

“Information has never been easier to obtain, but it also makes falsehoods and really dubious lies the ability to perpetuate further and faster than ever before. With the explosion of fake news, it’s even more important we learn to stop these reflective thought patterns, he says. We’ve always been collectively susceptible to falsehood, and there are so many historical examples.” “I think the explosion in misinformation that we hear online has exposed a flaw that’s always been there. He says we can’t turn everybody into rocket scientists, but we can get people to more critically analyse the news they hear and the information they read online. To actually get there requires training and to be encouraged, often from an early age.” “None of us are born critical thinkers, but we all have the capacity to be. “There’s a few definitions that are commonly used, but I try to give an intuitive definition for people it is to sceptically analyse things that you are told, check there is enough evidence for what you are accepting and also to employ an analytical mode of thought rather than the reflective one we often fall into – the reactive mode, if you will.”ĭr Grimes says we often believe critical thinking is intuitive, but it’s more a learned and practised response.

He tells Lynn Freeman the key to not falling for false information is critical thinking. Listen to the full interview with Dr David Robert Grimes

Good Thinking by David Robert Grimes