Critical Thinking

“What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.”
Joseph Campbell

I believe in the importance of diversity, not perfection.


Initially, the academic world teaches us to follow the footsteps of our forefathers and replicate justifiable results -- never do they teach us to be wrong, to seek the incongruities of our society.  Why?  It is the optimal path to completely understanding the mechanisms of our world.  I am not arguing against our education system, but identifying the unfortunate flaws.  Especially in the world of science, the fundamental foundation of principles are the product of successful experiments with reasonable explanations.  The time required to understand these concepts is massive.  The amount of time required to understand the concept and how much exposure to the concept must be optimize in order to efficiently educate a large population.  In other words, we cannot replicate the time spent by past scientists in order to expose their full thought process -- it's kind of like cutting introns from exons on a piece of mRNA.  I believe that the struggles that our forefathers went through, the thought process required to reach their goal, is as important as understanding their principles.  Yes, practical application such as labs help replicate their experiments (the practical application the better), but to begin from a basic idea and flourish into a new realm of thought is beautiful, but difficult.  This is also known as critical thinking.


Critical thinking requires time and guidance.  Understanding basic principles in conjunction with critical thought encourages research, curiosity of the unknown.  The US education is moving towards the right direction as we are in a time of an increasing number of researchers in many fields particularly in natural sciences.  What does this mean?  A higher traffic of idiotic ideas which sooner or later will cause a breakthrough.  Stupid ideas are proportional to breakthroughs.  


A random note,


Dan Huh