My dear daughter,
Let’s talk about what will probably be the most useful tool you will use in life: critical thinking.
It’s important for you to get in touch with this concept at home, because the current government is set on banning it from schools. Knowledge is dangerous to authoritarian governments.
Critical thinking relates with the ability to reason and make sound judgement based on reliable data.
There are many definitions, actually. The common points are:
In a world with misinformation flying around at the speed of light and multiplying itself exponentially, it’s easy to make bad decisions or pass judgement based on prejudice. If that becomes commonplace, we have a recipe for civilization collapse. Every political decision will be based on lies and set to benefit a select few in detriment of everybody else.
Since that’s not desirable, the best way to prevent it would be painstakingly checking data, facts and sources to make sure they are reliable, all the way to the beginning of the chain.
With reliable data, one can apply logical principles and rules (formal and informal) to establish correlations, to test hypotheses and to find new facts. There’s also a great effort to avoid confirmation bias, memory bias, all kinds of biased thinking which might lead to a biased and invalid conclusion. Remember: we are an easily biased species, because it has been important to survival during our evolution. Many people of ill-intent in modern society know how to use bias against other people to achieve selfish goals.
With the tools of critical thinking, it should be easier for a person to make the best informed and objective judgement possible, making sure the arguments are not contaminated by fallacies or false premises. If suffering is directly associated with ignorance, that kind of reasoning and logical thinking should bring us closer to a world where human potential is not wasted.
Love,
Dad
Aspergers Dad 