I’ll tell you that such skills *are* valued in the free market. People capable of critical thinking are much more valuable than automatons only able to follow orders, and you can be sure this is reflected in paychecks and advancement. Often it’s not *direct* training in logical fallacies, but the ability to know when you’re being bullshitted and act accordingly has value.

This isn’t very true in jobs that exist in black and white, but there’s a large category of jobs where you exist in a world of gray. You don’t have complete information of your own position, you don’t have complete information on the competition’s position, and you’re thrust into the situation to accomplish a goal. In sales it’s trying to figure out who your competition is, what their price is, what their value proposition is, and how to market yourself to a customer to offer more than your competitor (whether that’s a lower price, or a differentiated product, etc). In internal medicine you only have a portion of understanding what’s going wrong in your patient’s body, only a portion of understanding how they’ll respond to certain treatments, and yet you may have to make the right decision on the first attempt to actually fix the issue. Often the decisions made in the “world of gray” are time-critical and non-iterative, so you can’t simply try something and try something again — you’ll lose before you get a second chance.

As for why these skills are waning, I think there are probably a lot of reasons. I do think there are societal changes of a more general nature responsible for it (i.e. greater consumption of “passive” media, more laziness, less of a “hard work” ethos, contributing to less math/science education). Greater affluence certainly does make it harder to convince people to struggle at intellectual pursuits and train their minds to see these trends. And I’d be remiss as a libertarian if I didn’t mention the greater federal dominance of education, teachers’ unions, and removal of true discipline and expectations from the classroom.

Hopefully the internet age might reverse some of these trends. It’s a chaotic mess of technology, global communication, and more “active” media consumption. It’s a whole different world than the cable TV generation, and I suspect it’s changing the pathways of the mind in very interesting ways — hopefully for the better, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have much value in the marketplace, and that is the main reason why these skills have started to whither in the general population. The common wisdom seems to be that if a skill cannot be marketed it is worthless. Is the free market really the sole arbiter of value, or is there something more here?

Emotions are the engine which often drives our efforts. Rationality is the steering wheel. Having one without the other is always problematic.

Well put.

Quite a while ago, I saw in an excellent PBS Nova program called “Ape Genius” which contrasted ape and human skills and societies. Beside the ability to actively teach and learn (as opposed to unwittingly model and emulate), one the core differences the researchers highlight is the human capacity to manage emotional responses more effectively than apes.

This is not to say that emotional responses are “worse” or “less evolved”. Emotions are the engine which often drives our efforts. Rationality is the steering wheel. Having one without the other is always problematic.

It’s easy to get the mob torch and pitchfork ready if you appeal to our emotions. Without enough practice in logic and rational thought, we tend to go after whatever golem is conveniently out to hand (real or imaginary).

A: Socrates is a man.
B: All men are mortal.
C: All men are Socrates.

- Boris Grushenko