§7-5. What are some useful Critics?
“Don’t pay any attention to the critics. Don’t even ignore them.”
—Samuel Goldwyn We are always developing new ways to think—so we also need to make Critics to help to select when to use each of those techniques—by recognizing which kinds of problem we face. This means that our Critics must serve as ways to classify all the barriers, obstacles, impasses, or snags that make our problems hard to solve. Indeed, it would be an important goal, both for people and for computing machines, to have a systematic catalog of the types of problems we most frequently face.[135] However, we do not yet have adequate, orderly ways to do this—so here we’ll merely try to describe a few types of Critics that people seem to use.
Innate Reactions and built-in Alarms. Many types of external events arouse detectors that make us quickly react, as when an object is quickly approaching you, a light is too bright, you touch something hot, or hear a loud sound. We’re also born with ways to detect abnormal conditions inside our skins—such as wrong levels of chemicals in the blood. Many of these have built-in connections that make us react to correct those conditions, in ways that work so automatically that we react to them without any thought.
However, an unexpected touch, sight, or smell—or a sense of hunger, fatigue, or pain— does interrupt the flow of our thoughts. Indeed we’d never survive through our infancies unless such emergencies (or opportunities) could pull us away from our reveries. We can sometimes suppress some of those alarms; for example, when we suppress a sneeze, or stop ourselves from scratching an itch. But if you try to hold your breath, you can’t resist the alarm of asphyxia—and it is hard to ignore a baby’s cry, a constantly ringing telephone, or an amorous opportunity.
Learned Reactive Critics. An infant will cry when it is exposed to high levels of noise— thus summoning a parent to help. However, later we learn other ways to react, such as moving to a quieter place. And eventually we learn to ‘figure out’ ways to deal with more difficult obstacles—by using higher levels of what we call ‘deliberative’ thinking and then it would seem to make more sense to think of these as involving our Critics.
Deliberative Critics. Whenever your reasoning gets into trouble, you need ways to get around obstacles. Here are some tricks we can use for this:
Action A did not do what I expected. (Try a different Way to Predict.)
Something I did had bad side effects. (Try to undo some previous choice.)
Achieving goal A made goal B harder. (Try them in the opposite order.)
I need additional information. (Search for another relationship.)
Reflective Critics.[136] When you try to solve problems by trial and error, you need critics as ‘diagnosticians’ to either verify that you’re making progress or to suggest a better way to proceed.
I’ve made many attempts with no success. (Select a better way to think.)
I’ve repeated the same thing several times. (Some ‘mental manager’ is incompetent.)
Achieving a subgoal did not attain its ‘parent’ goal. (Find another way to subdivide the problem.)
This conclusion needs more evidence. (Propose a better experiment.)
Self-Reflective Critics. When your reflections fail to help, then you may start to criticize yourself:
I have been too indecisive. (Try a method that worked on a similar problem.)
I missed a good opportunity. (Switch to a different set of Critics.)
I yield to too many distractions. (Try to exercise more Self-Control.)
I don’t have all the knowledge I need. (Find a good book or go back to school.)
Self-Conscious Critics. Some assessments may even affect one’s current image of oneself, and this can affect one’s overall state:
None of my goals seem valuable. (Depression.)
I’m losing track of what I am doing. (Confusion.)
I can achieve any goal I like! (Mania.)
I could lose my job if I fail at this. (Anxiety.)
Would my friends approve of this? (Insecurity.)
I should note that we often say “Critic” to mean someone who points out deficiencies, and it would be hard to describe the Correctors, Suppressors and Censors [§3-5] without using negative words like inhibit, prevent, or terminate.
However, words like positive and negative usually do not make sense by themselves; here, detecting a flaw can be and essential step toward helping one to achieve a success—for example, by keeping you from changing your goal or from wasting your time on other temptations— and thus encouraging you to persist. Frequently, the key to solving a difficult problem can lie in finding ways to make yourself ‘stick to a plan’, although it may bring some suffering before you achieve your longer-range goal.
Indeed, after we solve a difficult problem, we may wrongly credit our final success only to our very last step, and tell ourselves, “What a clever solution I’ve found!” Then, of course, it makes good sense to remember the answer to that particular question. However, it would often be better to also ask, “What kept me from finding it earlier?” For, what often makes a question seem ‘hard’ is not knowing a good way to search for the answer. This suggests that after we answer a difficult question, it may be useful to remember which strategy led to solving it by reducing the size of the search for the answer. (A good way to ‘remember’ this would be to create a new Critic to recognize that problem-type, and connect it to a Selector for that strategy.)
This subject of “Credit-Assignment” is very important because it bears on the quality of what people learn. Indeed Chapter 8 will take a further step and argue that:
What we learn can be more profound, if we assign the credit for our success, not to the final act itself—or even to the strategy that led to it—but to some even earlier choice of a process or plan that selected the winning strategy.
Generally, lower-level Critics will tend to have shorter-term effects. Thus, “Make sure that your elbow won’t topple that block,” can alter your tactics temporarily, without changing your larger-scale strategy; then even if this leads to making a mistake, you may be able to correct it and continue with your original plan. However, high-level critics can cause longer-term changes—for example, by switching you to self-reflective thoughts like, “I’m not good at solving this kind of problem. Perhaps it is time to consider a different
