I want to conclude (for now) my series on “Critical thinking in the age of A.I.” with an insight from my colleague and friend John A. List (a/k/a @Econ_4_Everyone), an experimental economist at the University of Chicago. When asked, What skills will A.I. models like ChatGPT make more important? Without skipping a beat, his response was “critical thinking skills”! (See his tweet from 21 May, which I have reposted below. Hat tip: information monster Tyler Cowen.)

But for me, even more important than this response was his economic reasoning: critical thinking is more essential than ever because A.I. models have reduced the cost of creating information to almost zero. In Professor List’s own words, “in the past there was value in creating large quantities of information. That is now costless. The new currency is how to generate, assimilate, interpret, and make that large amount of information actionable”. But this observation begs the $64 question: how can we teach critical thinking or improve our own critical thinking skills?

As it happens, Professor List has written up a new paper titled “Enhancing Critical Thinking Skill Formation: Getting Fast Thinkers to Slow Down”, which is available here, and now all I can say is that I wish I had discovered this paper sooner! Professor List has not only conducted some of the most ingenious field experiments of all time; he is also my favorite living economist. I have therefore decided to hit pause on my series on “Critical thinking in the age of A.I.” in order to go back to the drawing board, so to speak. I will study List’s new paper as well as this devastating critique of education research by my colleagues James Rebele and E. Kent St Pierre and will report back soon …

Works cited:

John List, “Enhancing Critical Thinking Skill Formation: Getting Fast Thinkers to Slow Down“, Artefactual Field Experiments 00726, The Field Experiments Website (2021).

James E. Rebele and E. Kent St Pierre, “Stagnation in accounting education research”, Journal of Accounting Education, Vol. 33, no. 2 (2015), pp. 128-137.