Probably not thinking enough about it!
💡 12 years ago, as an ignorant and self-confident (the two often come as a bundle) founding Dean of Computational Sciences, I discovered Allen Downey's blog and books and used them as inspiration to create a critical thinking curriculum at Minerva University, a first-year cornerstone course titled "Formal Analyses" 😱 . I was also convinced that computational thinking was an important skill for the 21st Century and imposed python as the thinking language (even though I was not super good at it) because I thought it was going to dominate statistics, machine learning and AI. I may have been wrong about statistics, but Allen's examples came with python and we never looked back. The more "arts- and humanities-inclined" students were not so sure it was a great idea, but I hope they look back more keenly on python in hindsight and feel empowered by it. Of course, "Are first babies more likely to be late?" may have been a fundamental category error for 18-20 yr old students 👶.
The philosophy of Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, where Allen Downey was/is a professor, very much infused my perspectives. Allen's blog, "Probably Overthinking It" is worth reading, and a recent post made me nostalgic. It also made me realize that critical thinking is a continuous improvement project and that sometimes I am not overthinking enough. Thank you Allen Downey! ❤️
Richard Miller, Avery Spiel, Guillaume William Picard, Roujia Wen, Zoey Haar, Ian Van Buskirk, Eynat Grof, Justine De Caires, Yoel Ferdman, Alisha Fredriksson, Marion Grahek, Heyu Huang, Tanna Krispil, Xiaoning Lyu, Arvvin Maniam, Ailén Matthiess, Or Segal, Guilherme Nazareth