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What is critical thinking?Critical thinking is broadly defined as “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.” Critical thinking takes facts and rules and puts them together to form a logically supported conclusion, or deconstructs arguments made by others to determine if they are logically sound.Some of the fundamental underlying skills for critical thinking are:a) Source evaluation, or the ability to determine the credibility and reliability of a fact in order to determine its objective veracity. It’s crucial to separate facts from opinions, and to determine whether those facts are objectively accurate.b) Understanding logical connections between ideas. There is deductive, inductive, and analogical reasoning here. Deductive reasoning is the application of general principles to specific facts; usually framed as a syllogism: if A = B, and B = C, A = C. Inductive reasoning works the opposite direction, deriving a general principle from specific cases. Analogical reasoning combines the two: deriving a general principle from one or more specific cases, then applying that general principle to a new case through comparison and contrast. The key here is understanding the relationship between the facts and rules.c) Determining the relevancy of facts to an issue. Facts are always meaningful, but sometimes they’re not meaningful to a specific conclusion. The sky might be blue, and that might be currently indisputable, but it may have absolutely no bearing on whether or not someone was speeding down the freeway. Being able to articulate how certain evidence relates to the issue and makes a logical conclusion more or less likely to be accurate is an essential skill for any critical thinker.d) Ability to self-reflect and change a stance based on contrary evidence. A critical thinker needs to be able to objective evaluate their own stance and argument and the weaknesses of it, to understand the possible rebuttal arguments and strengths of those arguments, and to have an awareness of personal biases and values that affect the formation of those arguments. Everyone has implicit assumptions about how the world operates. Awareness of those implicit assumptions is an important aspect of making sure that an argument is complete and resting on fully supported premises, rather than just deeply held opinions trusted as fact.How is it relevant in law school?Law school doesn’t really teach you the law. I mean, it does do that, to some extent, but the real purpose of law school is to teach you how to think like a lawyer.This means learning how to identify the relevant issues, find the relevant rules that govern those issues, discover the objectively provable facts and distinguish them from things that look like facts but aren’t, sort out the relevant facts from the raw mass of information, then marshal the facts and apply them to the rules in a coherent argument to come to a logically supported and persuasive conclusion.All of which is what the essential definition and skills of critical thinking are about.In the first year of law school, typically referred to as 1L year, professors will use “Socratic teaching” to develop critical thinking.Politely explained, they’ll pick a student and ask questions to draw out the desired answer. Less politely explained, they’ll choose a victim and grill them on a subject until they either give the right answer, or cry and quit the program.This is designed to instill the concepts and skills of critical thinking: how to break down a fact pattern into its constituent parts, determine the rules that govern a legal issue, and reconstruct all of this back into a coherent argument about a logically supported outcome.This involves research to determine the relevant rules. It involves discovery of the relevant facts and learning how to use various tools of the profession to find them. It involves learning how to check assumptions and biases at the door so that arguments are thoroughly supported and vetted. It involves understanding the logical connections between various concepts.Essentially, law school is a three-year doctoral program in critical thinking.How can you develop it?There’s a lot of things you can do to develop the skills of critical thinking.The first is to start by reading the work of critical thinkers, those who ask good questions.Basic philosophy is a great place to see this in action. The dialogues of Socrates and Plato are excellent. The Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Smith, and Bacon are excellent. Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau. Post-modernists such as Sartre or Kierkegaard.Then, practice the skills.I used to teach my students about critical thinking when I taught high school language arts with all sorts of things. We had a whole unit on it, usually to start the year or semester, and then refreshers the whole year long.I’d deliberately lie to them at least once a class during the unit, where they could earn points by identifying it and showing what the objective truth of the matter was. If they were wrong, they lost a point, so they had to be pretty sure. (The person at the end of the unit with the most points got to skip the test with a free “exempt” grade, and instead got to spend test day sitting in the comfy armchair in the back of the room doing whatever noiseless activity they wanted. You wouldn’t believe how hard they fought for that privilege.)We played rounds of a game similar to the NPR news show Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me’s “Bluff the Listener” quiz, where they had to make up two “facts” with stories that weren’t true and one that was per each group, then present to the rest of the class, where the other groups voted on which stories were the real ones.I made them do a scavenger hunt in the library entitled “You Can’t Google This,” where they had to find information using nothing but the electronic card catalog system, document where they found that information in MLA format, and explain the credibility and reliability of the source. I deliberately pointed them to debunked materials and occasionally even fiction to make them have to verify their sources and explain why they were credible and reliable. Once I included information in a book that I made sure wasn’t even in the library and didn’t have another in-library source to verify it. That one really irritated them.They learned about propaganda techniques and I had them practice using and deconstructing them with ad campaigns for household products that they brought in, or hypothetical devices they could invent. They had to deconstruct other students’ campaigns and explain the logical flaws in the use of the propaganda to sell those products.We’d play “minute mysteries” where they’d get a brief fact pattern and could ask yes or no questions to solve them for candy rewards to the winners, or “Psychiatrist,” where we’d send one student out of the room, the rest of the class would pick a common quirk, and the “psychiatrist” would have to diagnose what that quirk was with yes or no questions.We’d do murder mysteries where they were given a scene on paper with clues and they used their analysis skills to document the evidence, generate procedural rules about what they commonly knew about that evidence, and then apply those rules using Burke analysis to make an argument about what occurred in the scene.Once I flipped the entire room around, rearranged the posters on the walls, rearranged their desks, and added clues in all of these as to their new seating chart. They had to look for clues in all of these to figure out where to sit for the day. (I arranged everything alphabetically on the walls, though some of it was a little subtle, like added post-it notes on various items.)I made them give “alien tour guides” for common human activities, describing them as though to visitors to our planet with no frame of reference, to challenge their basic assumptions about the importance or workings of things. I made them explain sports like football and soccer, the playplaces at fast-food and children-focused restaurants and its significance, and why we need to brush our teeth (because aliens don’t have any). They got 30 minutes to think about how to explain it to the alien, me, who would barrage them with questions. Their dumbfounded looks as they attempted to explain the purpose of football always made me have a hard time keeping a straight face. (What are “teams” and why is it so important to participate on them? Why must you move an oblong object 94.3 yobtras and why do you only get a specific number of attempts to move it a certain fraction of that distance? Why do you expend your societal resources on this activity while members of your species die of preventable diseases and you have not yet developed sustainable energy sources that do not poison your planet?)And I made them constantly stop and reflect on their own ideologies, challenge their own personal assumptions about how the world works, and question their fundamental beliefs and values so they knew why they believed what they believed about any given topic.I’d have them write an argument about something they were passionate about, then make them write the rebuttal against their own argument and grade them on the quality of their rebuttal instead of on their initial argument. (They hated that one.)All of these were designed to force them to gather facts, generate rules, and apply the rules to the facts to generate supported conclusions with a self-critical reflective attitude.Now, if you don’t have a cool teacher, you can do a lot of this on your own.Do logic puzzles.Take implicit bias tests (check out the Harvard Negotiation Project for some great ones.)Play chess, Tak, or other turn-based strategy games against yourself to start thinking several moves ahead. Practice a daily reflection ritual like the examen.Read news articles from various biased sources and identify how those sources present information in such a way as to promote a certain conclusion - best if done with the same set of facts.Look up common conspiracy theories and debunk them, like flat earth or moon landing hoax.Do a bunch of trolley problems with different circumstances.Buy a book of writing prompts and spend fifteen minutes a day freewriting from them.Listen to debates from Intelligence Squared.Think about your own “alien tour guides” for activities you perform during the day. (Side effect: you may come to realize your daily routine is utterly meaningless or pointless at times.)Imagine what it would be like to be the opposite gender for a day, write that all down, and then go ask a person of the opposite gender how accurate you are. (Be prepared to have some assumptions challenged.)There are dozens of things you can do in your everyday life right now to practice critical thinking skills that will prepare you well for law school, or even just to be a thoughtful citizen of the world.

Well there’s several reasons, but I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of some kind behind the question. (Edited to add: this ended up being a whole essay answer, and answers more than you asked. But it relates to a larger information about the topic, you might say.)First: Fat is not an inert substance, like little adipose cell suitcases, as if it’s luggage we just carry around. Science used to ‘kind of’ believe that, but that’s been better understood for a long time now. Adipose cells do all kinds of things, as other organs do, and they also “hold” all kinds of things in addition to fatty acids. Adipose tissue or “fat” is a distributed organ. Like skin.Skin is also an organ, and both can be removed in small part. But if in large part, the person would likely die from physical shock. (And by large part, I mean that even liposuction usually has about an 11 pound limit. Sometimes slightly higher for really huge people. So, not large at all. Morbidly obese people are 100+ pounds overweight.(Also: aside from skinny people already, just trying to improve their inner thighs or something, it’s mostly pointless. The effect is brief, especially with the very fat: It changes nothing in how the body works, and the body will redeposit fat to that location — often redistributing existing fat to the area, so you don’t even have to gain more for that to happen. It’s mostly a very, very lucrative cosmetic surgery which creates lymph-damage risk from the incision, every time. It is not a serious nor healthy ‘solution’ of any kind for severely obese people.)Second: Fat is not merely an outer-layer like you see on a steak in the store. It’s true that there are different areas for it — near the organs, near the skeleton, and closer to the skin — but even in the most near-the-skin subcutaneous adipose tissue, it is woven with millions of blood vessels, lymph vessels, protein-fibrous supporting tissue, and nerves. You can attempt to remove the adipose tissue, but in doing so you take a ton of other tissue with it.Third: Surgical incisions cut through blood vessels, lymph vessels, and nerves, and the side-effects of even small surgical cuts — such as people have for operations or injuries — very commonly lead to serious lymphatic problems, such as lymphadema. (Ironically, many morbidly obese people probably suffer from lipedema or a degree of lipolymphedema already. The “lipedema” condition affects an estimated 10–11% of the USA female population. No amount of ‘diet and exercise’ makes that fat go away, and it can pile on at astonishing rate through an inflammation cascade, particularly in times of hormonal stress.)There isn’t currently any way to, for example, melt fat out — like cause the adipose cells to spontaneously open up and allow the fats to leave them (this is a chemical reaction which must happen), and pour out of some opening in the body or something. I can imagine some tech like that in the future, which would be very interesting, but doesn’t currently exist.As you know, the understanding is that adipose cells are created to store ‘extra energy’ that the person has consumed “compared to” whatever energy their body is using at a given time. There is a big missing piece of this puzzle though that is not mentioned when people bring that up.The diet industry is at least a $100 billion industry at this point; it’s not that people are not trying to lose fat. (And they do. Repeatedly. But the body actually conspires hormonally to forcibly put it back on. But that is a different post.)*The missing piece most people don’t realize, I describe in this analogy:Say Jack lives in a world where ‘greed’ is frowned upon. Everyone’s bank account balance is visible to everybody else. If you have too much money, people think less of you. You are hoarding! It implies you are greedy, morally bad.Jack has a job, and his paycheck is auto-deposited into his bank. He can use his debit card for expenses. One day, Jack tries to buy dinner and his card is refused. He’s told that $10 clears; not the rest. He has the same kind of experience at the gas station. At the department store, again, a small part of the debit is approved, but not the rest.He has the money in his bank account, so why won’t the bank’s computer approve the withdraw??The bank will not talk to him. The people say “the computer makes the decisions.” Every time Jack tries to use his debit card, he can only access a little of his money. Meanwhile, his bank balance keeps growing, because every paycheck, all the money goes into his account, but he can only take a little bit of it out, a percentage. (Which begins maybe at 95%, but gradually gets smaller and smaller, until he can only access about 25% of his most recent deposit, maybe within 12 hours or so, and that is all.) He manages to pay rent and for his car, but he doesn’t have enough money available to him for bills and food and so on. Eventually even getting enough to pay rent is tough.So Jack starts taking odd jobs, and a part time night job, to make some extra money, because he’s got to live after all, and he can’t seem to access the money in his bank account (which keeps growing, and now his neighbors are openly sneering at him, because he’s greedy! He’s clearly hoarding!). He doesn’t know why this is going wrong.All the magazines and his doctor says the problem is he’s working too hard. He needs less employment because that’s just putting money in his bank account so he looks like a greedy schmuck to everyone, and clearly “too much money” is his problem. “But I need the money!” he says, frustrated. “Nobody needs that much money,” he’s told, dismissed. He’s even offered the chance to buy an “app” that will talk to the bank computer and automatically suppress some of his wages, so that less is deposited into his bank account. That just makes everything worse. He still doesn’t have any money accessible to him.None of these actually solve the REAL problem: Jack cannot get his money OUT of his bank account. It’s his, it’s there, everyone can see it’s there, but for some reason the bank’s computer will simply not allow him to have it.He has to work extra jobs just to be able to survive. And every extra job, he only gets a percentage of that money too, so the bank balance he cannot access keeps getting larger.This is pretty much what is going on with the human body, where “money” equals “energy.”Some people, they eat, and their body gives them that energy to use, and they are all but bouncing off the wall with that energy — we all have known someone like that. They eat like a horse and they expend that energy promptly! Other people eat, the body holds a little as glycogen in the liver and muscle and stores the rest in fat cells, and then empties out those fat cells when the body requests energy as needed. That’s ideally how it works. And then there are other people who eat, and their body stuffs it into fat cells and once it’s there, the body will not release the energy to them when they need it.But their vital organs and brain and muscles need energy, obviously. So what happens? First, they have to eat more — because they need energy to survive. Their body drives them to eat of course. Second, they are driven to eat high-energy foods — generally foods very high in carbohydrates especially, and to a lesser degree fats (but especially both combined), because these are the energy foods. (And/or they are driven to eat a LOT of food, to get that much energy.) The worse the energy situation (the lower % of their “deposits” they are allowed to access), the more extra they have to eat.Third, because they are so low on energy, their voluntary “motive” energy drops dramatically — that means less moving around, it’s harder to do even small things, but energy also affects the personality, the psychology, and more, so it can lead to depression and other symptoms. (Much of today’s mental health crises are just as much part of “metabolic syndrome” as obesity.)What is the underlying difference between Jack, who is ‘hoarding’ money in our analogy, he’s the big fat guy who “eats too much and moves too little” — and John, who is lean and energetic and eats normally? The difference is in how their body’s hormonal “regulation of adipose tissue” is handling their energy-intake, and most importantly to this topic, their energy outflow.Author Gary Taubes wrote that people do not get fat because they are eating too much, but rather, they eat too much because they are getting fat. Like my money and bank analogy, it is when the body keeps the energy for itself, and will not allow it to be accessed as needed, so it just keeps growing, but the person can’t get to it for survival.A person is forced to do whatever they can to get more energy then, because they need it. The problem is not that they have to eat more to get energy — that is a symptom. The underlying problem is something causing the body to not release fat for energy like it is supposed to.It is a health condition — not a moral failing like sloth and gluttony. Long before a person is even visibly getting fat, it is already a health condition. And many people have the condition and do not get fat, or not very — genetics control a lot of this — but the energy problem will manifest in some other way; they might get a disease for example, that the body just doesn’t have the internal energy to fight off. This is commonly referred to as “metabolic syndrome” but that’s really just a label on a gigantic consortium of symptoms.*I believe this is the data-return on the largest nutrition experiment in human history, which began by accident about a century ago with man’s modifying and synthesizing foodstuffs (which on the bright side did save much of the planet from starvation), and exploded intentionally back in the 1970s when food became ‘politics.’The US government agency tasked with selling grains and produce, dominantly corn, wheat and sugar, is in charge of nutrition in our nation, and our nation influences the world — and sells to the world. The earlier science that this ‘political takeover’ of nutrition was based on, later turned out to be (seriously) actual fraud. (I am referring to the Seven Countries Study by Ancel Keys, which had to do with fats. It was this fraud about fats — epidemiology should simply be banned from anything more than the armchair of consideration for future “real” science when it comes to the nutrition field, in my opinion — that led to driving toward carbohydrates instead. Because the body has a limit to protein, and there are only three macronutrients. So if you kill off most fat, you have to add in carbohydrates. Which, conveniently, were one of the largest sources of income for US corporations and government, so that worked out just fine.)At this moment, US university textbooks teaching nutrition to the future nurses, doctors and nutritionists, still parrot that approved government line of fraud, miseducating yet more generations. (“Low-sugar diets are a dangerous fad!” “Saturated fat and cholesterol in eggs will kill you!” “Nutritional supplements are useless, just expensive urine!” “You can’t be healthy unless you eat grains!”)The resultant massive shift toward carbohydrates in the national diets of the west, has created a similar situation as happened with native tribes around the planet when they were shifted from their natural food supply and onto the “flour and sugar (and in modern days, soft drink)” diets of the west: they became fat, diabetic, etc.It’s not merely the occasional eating of these things that is the problem — it’s the ubiquitous, constant eating of them, often daily through one’s life. It creates an insulin problem (both directly in relation to blood glucose from the food, and indirectly through other pathways that raise insulin [including stress]).Insulin is the hormone that tells the body “build muscle and store fat!” — and prevents the body getting fat out of storage to use as energy. Because when insulin is active, it is chemically telling all the cells “store this!” — so they are not “letting anything out” because they’re in storage mode.Eventually, in the morbidly obese, insulin may be nearly always too high to allow the body to use most of the stored energy. (Often this situation continues even for a long time (years) after someone has adopted a low-sugar diet to try and deal with this. It does improve, but it can take a long time.)If the body needs more energy to survive, it has to eat again, and the body wants the highest energy foods and plenty of them. Most energy they intake at that point will store as fat, and they won’t be able to get to it, and they’ll keep getting fatter. But the person gets some of that incoming energy. Enough for their body, their vital organs and brain which require tons of energy, to survive for a while. Hopefully enough for their internal body to fight off any lurking disease conditions.Sometimes if people don’t get fat, really fat, they don’t even know they have metabolic syndrome (from the “ingestible entertainment” AKA food supply). Sometimes they don’t know for many years after they already have worsening conditions in their body, because we only usually measure blood glucose — not insulin, which when over-elevated can make glucose tests seem normal. People can have hyperinsulinemia for years and years, worsening all the time, before finally the situation’s so bad that the body’s cells are so resistant to the onslaught of it, that finally the blood glucose is seen raising, and then they are said to be diabetic. Chances are the situation was present for years before it got to that point. Getting fat — a genetically determined issue to a great degree[1] is often what saves someone, by making them realize something is going wrong.[1] Fat is the second most heritable trait next to height, to which it is very close. The “obesity epidemic,” while quite real, is extremely skewed toward certain ethnic subgroups.Fat people would love (love!) to be able to just surgically remove ‘the fat.’ Teeny little pockets of fat on people can be removed. As I mentioned, these generally return, but for people with plenty of money and willing to do the incisions and risk the lymph issues, it’s often a repeat cosmetic surgery. But that’s pretty well the equivalent of putting pancake makeup over acne or something. It does not a single thing to actually solve the real problem — and in the case of a serious problem, cannot begin to truly hide it.Thanks for the question: it’s a perfectly reasonable question I suppose.

This is one of humanity's greatest puzzles. Often you will here people state thousands of risk factors for cancer. But all of them cannot be the cause of cancer, just catalysts - accelerators.Researcher often focus on genetic defects as the cause of cancer, yet researchers may not find a genetic defect known to cause cancer in a child with cancer.Cancer acts with some level of ability, that could almost be considered intelligence. It adapts when we try our best to slow or kill it. It disables our immune system. Turns on and directs vessel growth directly into the tumor to feed its growth (what a wound or placenta or fetus should only be able to do). Reprograms our cells to suit its own benefit. Turns up drivers of prolific growth like the amplification (copying of oncogenes) and overexpression (executing oncogenes) and producing oncogene proteins at a higher rate. It can disable or genetically damage tumor suppressor genes.It can change its behavior cell by cell, like metastasis. A cancer cell splits off from a tumor, begins traveling, finds a vessel and has a key ripen up the vessel and enter. Travels to another part of the body by blood vessel and opens up the vessel wall travels thru and sets up another tumor.All of these capabilities can't be explained by simple answers, by a carcinogen or by radiation. any rue plausible answer must be able to show how all of these features could be possible. Without that, the view is too narrow and the focus is just on a symptom or result from the cancer, not its root cause.So we are looking for something that shows a level of intelligence, different than ours, but clearly able to beet us so far in life's chess game.When you start from this point of view, so much noise is eliminated.Having gone down this path of elimination and hunting for what could be the cause, I have come to the answer of the virus as the true root cause of cancer.Viruses have been proven to recreate all the hallmarks of cancer (CMV particularly).Viruses routinely attack tumor suppressor genes like TP53 to stop the cell from defending itself from attack. They also routinely turn on Oncogenes like MYC to proliferate their growth. They have all the tools necessary to copy and paste genetic material in our cells and have been proven to cause the same genetic defects as cancer.Key viruses are found in most cancers. Key Oncogenic Viruses include many members of the herpes family including CMV or Cytomegalovirus, Epstein Barr, and Karposi Sarcoma Associated Virus. HPV is finally being agreed on as the cause of not only Cervical cancer, but many cancers on skin cells in external environments including vaginal, anal, penile, throat and tonsils. The fact that biopsies are so much easier with HPV has likely resulted in our ability to study and identify HPV as the cancer cause they all the mechanisms I have mentioned before. We also need to focus deeper at these key viruses. Several times I have debated a viral theory with oncologists and researchers stating if CMV is in 90% plus of the adult population then why don't 90% of the population have cancer, thus this isn't the answer. This logic is flawed unfortunately. While viruses as the root cause of cancer answers so many more of the unknown answers than any other potential cause, it alone may not be enough to unleash cancer. A damaged immune system appears necessary. While these viruses or perhaps two or more viruses attacking the same cell can damage the immune system enough to disable enough cellular defenses that cancer can progress unrestrained. Environmental contaminants, dietary inflammation, radiation, etc all can contribute to a damaging environment for healthy human cells, thus lowering resistance to both viral growth as well as cancer growth.Then the mitochondria that power our cells with respiration by burning glucose with oxygen, may be damaged by viral attack. This to has been proven to happen as mitochondria are another line of defense against viral attacks and thus are attacked to disable this defense. When mitochondria are damaged, they may no longer be able to respire and instead will ferment the glucose as a more primaries form of energy production that is innefiecient for healthy human cells, but are extremely useful energy source for cancer cells. This fermentation process also calls on oncogenes further driving cancer growth.We need a test to identify all know viruses in the human body so that we shine a light on the true infection rates in humans and correlate what viruses (and their specific strains) are most Oncogenic.As we have identified HPV as a true cause of cancer, with specific strains being much higher Oncogenic abilities than others, we need to create a line of vaccines for all of the Oncogenic viruses strains that can infect all animals including humans.Also realize today's standard of treatment with chemo, radiation and and antibiotics also further deteriorates the damaged immune system allowing the same Oncogenic viruses to spread further as well as other opportunistic pathogens further damaging the body and leading to many "late term effects".The Virus is the single cause that can answer all the open questions on what causes cancer.Once you have this background, many of these viruses are caught just like the common cold. Catching one or two of these Oncogenic strains of viruses attacking a cell in a immune compromised location of the body, reprogramming the cells, disarming the immune defenses and driving chronic inflammation causes cancer over some period of time. This is my hypothesis on how cancer is caught.Over decades, increased travel spreads more strains around the world. The widespread use of new technology like touchscreen phones and tablets are likely spreading viruses at a much higher rate.Thanks for reading, open to insightful questions, alternative opinions and additional input.Gary