Truth Pizza

A friend recently pointed me at Bob Korn's site Responsible Thinking. Responsible thinking is really nothing more than critical thinking, but Bob named it differently in order to emphasize some key differences, namely a focus on avoiding false beliefs rather than identifying false arguments, and on inspecting and critiquing one's own thinking rather than other people's. Plus of course the common wisdom that critical thinking is dry, boring stuff! <g/>

Bob's site is plumb stuffed with interesting reading that took me days of lunches to get through. Which is fine, since it's the kind of information that I find best to read in small chunks, with lots of musing time in between. Bob sees a lack of critical thinking as one root of many of the problems society has today. He provides copious examples covering just about every topic imaginable. And if you don't agree with him on a particular point, I expect he would be the first to say you should apply Responsible Thinking to his argument in favor of Responsible Thinking!

So why is this in a blog about testing? Because critical thinking helps me test better. I find it useful for the same reason I find systems thinking useful (despite I. M. Testy's belief that it's not): they remind me to step outside of my normal context and look at my application/my team/my problem-of-the-moment from other points of view. I have yet to find a program or person that is not part of at least one system; thinking about its/their relationships to that system always (thus far, at least) helps me gain different understandings of the program/person, which oftentimes gives me ideas of new ways to break it/work with them.

Some people think systems thinking or critical thinking or insert-favorite-methodology-here is Da Bomb, others think it's bunk. Me, I'm more pragmatic: if it helps me do my job, I'll learn about it and use it but leave the philosophizing about it to others. How about you?

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink