1) This is a thread on this idea that ‘we should teach all students in every discipline to think like scientists.’ Please share this widely, because this is absolutely crucial, and speaks to a pernicious misunderstanding. scientificamerican.com/article/we-sho…
2) I agree with just about every word in this article. It’s just that the framing is wrong, and kidnaps the core mode of analysis in humanistic disciplines and calls it ‘thinking like a scientist.’ For example, the crux of the argument: 
3) Being inquisitive, weighing the quality and ideological bent of evidence, and changing our minds according to the evidence is not ‘thinking like a scientist.’ It’s the *core* method of humanistic study. It may also be as important to science, but it doesn’t belong to science.
4) In fact, we should understand just how essential this thinking is in e.g. literary studies and history. Weighing competing evidence and evaluating its quality and where it takes you is the *only* way to say anything meaningful about our objects of study...
5) The irony of this attempt to kidnap a core analytical method for virtually all knowledge workers and call it ‘thinking like a scientist’ is stark: all the complaints in the arrival about people rejecting climate science, etc. stem from precisely its scientistic premise. E.g.:
6) The article demonstrates its own ironic error by pointing out that people trained in science—presumably ‘trained to think like scientists’—were *not* the most concerned about climate change.
7) The tendency to believe that A) doing science makes you more ‘objective’ & B) facts can change minds by themselves gets us into this cycle of hand wringing about why no one listens to scientists. And as the article notes (self-defeatingly): training scientists doesn’t fix it.
8) Now this is key: the tendency at this juncture is usually ‘teach everyone to think like humanities,’ wherein ‘humanities’ = good communication, rhetoric, generalized ‘critical thinking.’ So the scientists can learn to convince us all of the facts. THIS IS JUST AS PERNICIOUS.
9) One of the reasons it’s possible for smart, educated people to think careful, rational, evidence-based analysis belongs to the sciences is because humanities folk are always pushing this ‘communication’ and ‘imaginative thinking’ angle. Stop!
10) Stop portraying humanistic work as a handmaiden of science—they make the knowledge, we help them ‘communicate’ it—because we are not all rhetoricians. We have and produce specialist knowledge, like any scientist.
11) (To avoid misunderstanding, so do rhetoricians). The point is that doing science doesn’t necessarily make more objective humans, and doing literary studies doesn’t necessarily make more imaginative ones. We are not what we study. So back to the topic at hand...
12) What scientists trained as scientists are often missing isn’t just or necessarily ‘communication skills,’ but a more subject-specific understanding of how to work rigorously with ambiguity. That’s really the core ability the author of this piece is trying to get at...
13) And that certainly is crucial to and within humanistic study. Books have facts, but, like climate data, their facts don’t presuppose a value conclusion or a path of action without further thinking and analysis. This thinking with ambiguity is key to humanities & science both.
14) But in practice the skills of working rigorously through ambiguity are much more front and center in a literature classroom than a chemistry classroom (as lab and quant reasoning skills are in the latter). So I won’t say ‘all should be trained to think like humanities,’ but
15) That’s because, unlike the author, I’m not trying to kidnap core analytical methods useful to all knowledge workers and say they belong to only my discipline. /end
