Albert Rutherford

inherent skill needed for critical thinking—asking questions. We need to be able to ask questions, sometimes very difficult ones that cause the personal evaluation of values

Thinking and knowing are not the same things.

The goal of an argumentative debate should always be to find any underlying fallacies or faulty premises, not to destroy the other side

Everyone is a bit of a conspiracy theorist at heart. People love the idea that broad organizations are what is keeping them from achieving their goals, instead of their own flaws and mistakes. This is because humans developed pattern-recognition traits as an evolutionary tool to aid in survival;

However, history is full of strange events—this is how the world works. There are coincidences all the time! This is part of something called "the law of large numbers," where the number of events and circumstances happening in the world every day is so large that strange things are bound to happen.

Having awareness of how your thoughts work is the first step toward developing critical thinking skills.

Emotions and "gut instincts" tend to guide us to conclusions that

part of critical thinking is being able to hold a well-reasoned, calm, intellectual debate.

Arguments from authority are the "because I said so" argument; the argument that just because someone is in charge, their argument is correct. This type of fallacy can also apply to people who seem believable just because they have traits perceived as positive; for example, "Shelly volunteers at a shelter and is a good person, therefore what she believes about organic food is right." The darkest side of this fallacy is often found in cults, where people fall prey to the tendency to believe people in authority who are charismatic. People evolved to want to exist in cohesive social groups where they can follow a leader. This respect helps keep society together, but it cannot override rational thinking