Shaun is a YouTube critic who composes a lot of excellent videos critiquing various other YouTube content, from social commentators to entertainment media. He does a good job of summarizing, fact-checking, logic-vetting, and illustrating his finds in the video medium. I am about to re-start my one-month Critical Thinking course next week (check out the link if that interests you), and I needed an essay for it covering these kinds of skills and insights. So I built the following, and am posting it for everyone’s benefit.

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Shaun’s entry So, About That Amazing Atheist Video is a good example of how to “critically think” YouTube media. So are Am I Controlled Opposition? and Paul Joseph Watson is Wrong About: Art. So these three examples, you should watch, and then keep an eye on my commentary below on how to draw general lessons from particular cases.

In fact I will draw out the general principles Shaun exhibits in every point and every fact-check he thinks to do in these videos. This analysis of mine can serve as a model for you to follow yourself, for extracting and learning new skills from other exemplary agents. That way, whenever you find a really excellent critical take-down from anyone online, you can do the same thing I do here, and try to figure out the general principles each element of their take-down exhibits and teaches us. So you benefit from even more than just an excellent debunking of a bad argument or idea.

Following is my commentary according to timestamp, for each of these three example videos:

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In So, About That Amazing Atheist Video, dealing with questions of racism, sexism, and transphobia, and related socioeconomic theory, Shaun exhibits important skills of self-correction as well as narrowing in on points that are actually essential and provable with evidence and examples. In the process, his specific moves illustrate general principles good critical thinkers should always have activated and running as firmware in the background of their mind, not just when they confront claims they are suspicious of, but also their own beliefs and opinions. In other words, all the time.

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2:13 : After some explanatory introduction, Shaun covers how he has updated his work to correct himself, as he had previously credited Amazing Atheist’s apparent racism to “stupidity” or insanity, and now considers that unfair to Amazing Atheist, and to everyone struggling with a mental disorder (always something to think about). This illustrates a valuable critical thinking tool: admitting you are wrong and correcting yourself. It also illustrates a general principle of being socially conscious (also something to think about) and thus avoiding “splash damage” (thus helping those whom your words can inadvertently harm or malign that you aren’t even thinking of as your target and don’t deserve the insult) and “lazy explanation,” e.g. crediting everything to mental illness or stupidity rather than merely error or malignant values.

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6:10 : Here Shaun cuts to his original video, the one that this video of his is meant to replace and improve upon. What Shaun then gets to illustrating soon enough (within the next minute) are two important principles of critical thinking: (1) don’t straw man a view you intend to critique, always steel man it instead (which means not just finding the best rather than the worst advocate of a view to engage with critically, but also making sure you are engaging with what the person advocating that view actually meant) and (2) semantics matters, so make sure you are using terms correctly and consistently, and when that means you wish to critique someone else, you need to make sure you are using the terms you are critiquing the same way they are. If you fail at this, even just out of ignorance or hasty assumption (two faults we all suffer from time to time), you will have built a straw man and thus only engaged with that; thus invalidating your critique, and thus producing in you false beliefs. The very thing you should want to avoid.

Notice what Shaun did here. He asked: Wait, is that what that person meant? Could there be something else they meant that makes more sense of what they said? Excellent questions critical thinkers should always ask.

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Importance of Semantics: The end result is that at this stage Shaun educates viewers on the most fundamental point here, an ignorance of which set Amazing Atheist off the rails: “minority” in the discourse of the person Amazing Atheist was attempting to critique does not mean “fewer in number” but more specifically means “a group with a minority of power in a society” (as opposed to a group with equal power or a majority of power relative to other groups). Thus, for example, women are a minority, even when they outnumber men, as long as woman have a minority of power (fewer members of congress, police, judges, mayors, multimillionaires, CEOs of corporations, are listened to less, and so on). And minorities can gain power and still be minorities (women have a lot more power in American society today than they had over a hundred years ago, but still have demonstrably less overall power than men). And access to power, whether in an obvious form or in the form of any social advantage (like, how much you are allowed to get away with, how much suspicion you must face, and so on), is, in actual scientific fact, intersectional.

Misunderstanding this (and other economic and social science) terminology is actually quite common and leads to a lot of misunderstanding and error. Which demonstrates how important a careful semantics is in critical thinking. Semantics can also be a tool of trolls and demagogues, who will use it to accomplish mere rhetorical tricks, or even generate further error. But that’s misuse. A careful semantics attends to the most appropriate semantic framing: if you are addressing or trying to understand what someone said, the most appropriate framing is what they meant by it, unless your point is that they are illegitimately using an aberrant meaning to obfuscate rather than illuminate. If you are addressing or trying to understand “common usage” and thus what “most people mean,” the most appropriate framing is conventional usage (an empirical fact of how a word is actually, commonly used; rather than, say, how someone wished it were used or erroneously claims it is used); and if you mean usage only in one particular linguistic community (say, biologists, as opposed to grocery store clerks), then the most appropriate framing is conventional usage within that community (which you should explicitly identify and explain the relevance of). And so on. (See 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong.)

An example I encountered once is when a certain someone who will not be named kept referring to the virgin birth of Jesus Christ as the “immaculate conception.” I wrote that this demonstrated their ignorance of the subject of religion and theology, because an actual expert would know the immaculate conception was a much later, medieval doctrine regarding the conception of Mary, the mother of Jesus: she was believed conceived “immaculately,” such that her flesh was cleansed of that awful magical fluid called “sin” and therefore imparted no “stain” on the flesh of the fetal Jesus. Their response was that other incompetent scholars made the same mistake, so it’s clearly okay. This is to get everything wrong about appropriate semantic framing. This was a very specific phrase historically invented for a very specific purpose; there is no legitimate sense in which you can just redefine it and claim to know what you are talking about. Whereas many words, like “minority” or even “vegetable,” do in fact have legitimate variations in meaning depending on context (you will often still find tomatoes, biologically a fruit, in the vegetable section of the grocery store—and might need to know that if you want to buy a tomato).

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7:41 : What Shaun does here is reflect a general principle we should always remember—that we are W.E.I.R.D.: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. And that’s literally weird. It’s all a fairly recent phenomenon in human history, and isolated to a fairly small section of cultures that dominated the world through various accidents of history. And here, again, we are counting cultures, not the number of people adopting those cultures or those cultures’ share of global power. By that measure, North Americans, Europeans, Westerners in general are actually unusual in the ethnographic record, on almost every relevant measure; especially compared to cultures we did not descend from or overwhelm and transform—hence the importance of historical imperialism to understanding why our societies are the way they are today, which was the subject of the video Amazing Atheist was attempting to debunk.

(And yes, side note, even poor Westerners are Rich compared to many peoples not in the First World, even just in access to public infrastructure, like roads and schools and libraries, but also in their relative incomes and the products and services affordably available to them. For example, Fox News once claimed there were no poor people in America because everyone has a refrigerator—to be accurate, most of them don’t own that refrigerator; but they nevertheless “have” one. This is an example of relative poverty: it’s easy to have access to a refrigerator in America, even for the poorest of the poor; whereas, not so much in, say, Africa.)

The tendency is to incorrectly assume everyone is just like us. This error operates even at the individual level: we have an unfortunate tendency to assume even people in our own culture are “just like us” (have the same skills, knowledge, abilities, resources, limitations, personalities, emotional reactions, preferences, handicaps, and so on), which is actually a grave error that leads to a lot of false beliefs about how the world is, and how it should be; but even more so we often erroneously assume our culture is universal and “always has been” and therefore must be a product of evolved human nature (hence I now suspect 90% of all Evolutionary Psychology on this point is false).

In reality that’s not the case. Before assuming you can extrapolate “human nature” from what is normal in your culture, you’d better actually check if that feature is actually universal in all human cultures. Not just several; all. Because if it’s not in all human cultures, it can’t be universal. At best, if you do check and find it’s universal to at least by far most cultures, even highly isolated and divergent cultures, there could still be some kind of convergent cultural evolution involved (e.g. agriculture was independently hit upon in several cultures because it’s a likely direction any culture will go), so you still can’t claim it must be biological. You need more evidence than that. But if it’s not biological, it’s cultural. And if it’s cultural, it can be changed.

But relevant to critical thinking here is the general rule: don’t make false generalizations by over-relying on what’s normal in W.E.I.R.D. cultures. Being objective means being able to step outside of your box and look in.

What’s normal in W.E.I.R.D. cultures, might actually in fact be weird. That tells us little as to whether it’s therefore bad or good. That requires rather different criteria than whether it’s universal or weird. Weird features can be better, even far better, than common ones; indeed common ones can be unhealthy and dysfunctional. And the reverse is also the case. This is true even of biological features, which we routinely seek to correct for owing to their being so bad (e.g. eyeglasses, insulin shots, wheelchairs, medicine, writing, electricity, guns, armor, even counter-intuitive mind-hacks like scientific methods and formal mathematics and logic). Biologically innate does not entail “good.” Nor does it entail “we ought to conform to nature.” If you hadn’t noticed, civilization is pretty thoroughly defined by going against nature. That’s pretty much everything good about it, in fact.

Another general rule here is: make sure you actually know the history of a thing (of how and when it actually got that way and why), before making arguments that depend on assumptions about that history. You may be surprised how often some reasoning you engage in relies on assumptions about history. And you may be surprise how often those assumptions are wrong. False beliefs ensue—and not just false beliefs about history, but about current events, solutions to current events, and human nature or the nature of particular people or groups of people. Correctly understanding history is surprisingly important to correctly understanding the present.

Conversely, people defending false beliefs often become committed to creating and defending false histories. You might have noticed that on occasion. And my online course on Historical Methods for Everyone (available in any month) serves to help with that.

Notice what Shaun did here. He asked: Wait, is that actually true? Historically and cross-culturally, are gender and sexuality, and attitudes toward gender and sexuality, uniform and always the same? Excellent questions critical thinkers should always ask, when assertions about cultural and historical norms are being declared as premises in arguments. (Gender and sex are way more complicated than most people think.)

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9:40 : Shaun at this point illustrates two general strategies important to sound critical thinking: (1) aim to get right the argument you are arguing against, otherwise you will end up arguing against something no one actually said, or that the person you are arguing against never said (and if you aren’t sure, you can always ask); and: (2) if you are going to argue to a conclusion from a scientific premise, make sure your scientific premise is correct. That means, actually check. And not by cherry picking studies, but collating all the most recent, pertinent findings. (Also, of course, make sure your premise is relevant, or that you use it in a logically valid way.)

Many people have strange assumptions about what science has “found,” such as (in this case) that all species have a strong sexual dimorphism and distinct gender roles (false); that when they do, they are always the same (false); that because some species do, therefore the human species does (non sequitur); or that when a species does have that, it is universal within that species (false; e.g., occasional homosexuality and role switching are actually well established in nearly all species relevant, at least to the same percentages observed in humans). In such a case, actually looking at what we’ve found regarding the science of animal ethology would generate a more informed critique and understanding; because often, science has found things, and they might not be what you assumed (not just things like this, but more importantly, things like this and this and even this).

Of course, science has also found humans are extremely cultural. More so by far than any other animal. And in fact our sexual dimorphisms are substantially weaker than in most other primates and sexually dimorphic animals generally. The ethnographic record shows far more diversity in human ethology than biological determinism entails. For instance, the vast number of polyandrous human societies refutes the biological-determinist thesis that humans are biologically monogamous or polygynous; and that same diversity shows on almost any marker you might think is universal, yet which turns out not to be, but instead looks more like an adaptive and thus alterable cultural construct. Hence most of what we associate with gender (e.g. clothing and hairstyle and other cosmetological dimorphism; job preferences; differences in skills, behaviors, and aptitudes; and so on) end up being wildly divergent in history and across cultures and thus clearly not biologically determined. This is why confusing sex with gender is scientifically illiterate. And we have to make sure we overcome any scientific illiteracy before we rely on premises in science to reach conclusions, if we are to avoid forming false beliefs.

Notice what Shaun did here. He again asked: Wait, is that actually true? Is what Amazing Atheist said about animal ethology true? Is all animal ethology the same? Do all members of even the same species always conform to the same or usual ethology? In other words, is what is being claimed scientifically accurate? Or has science discovered the truth is something different or more nuanced? Excellent questions critical thinkers should always ask, when assertions about scientific facts are being declared as premises in arguments.

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14:20 : Here Shaun displays a more advanced level of critical thinking skill: checking sources. In this case, an image, usually a really difficult source to check in the absence of a citation. Though now, Google’s Reverse Image Search will do it automatically for you; Shaun lucked out: he did it the hard way, which worked only because Amazing Atheist was so lazy; though to our benefit, people espousing bad arguments often are. This one I can’t do justice by describing. You just have to watch Shaun do his thing here. But the general lessons I can extrapolate beyond a mere image search, without having to go into the face-palming racism of Amazing Atheist, who pwned himself with an epically bad photo illustration (Shaun really covers all the angles on that already, which creates a lot of its own lessons on how maybe to be a smarter racist—or better yet, not a racist).

In general, this is always a valuable tactic: Actually check the sources someone cites as backing their assertions.

• Often those sources won’t say what they claim, or will say something importantly different (e.g. they may be leaving out something that undermines their case, or their source might say something more nuanced or different than what they are using it to prove).
• Sometimes those sources will simply be wrong (a lot of bad science exists out there; even more so in academic philosophy and history) and sometimes that’s been exposed already by experts or subsequent studies you can then hunt down to show this; but sometimes it hasn’t yet, which gets to the problem of relying on single, unreplicated studies employing demonstrably flawed methodologies. Studies that use small sample sizes and haven’t been replicated, especially, have alarmingly high rates of turning out to be false.
• And sometimes those sources will be crank or bogus. 
• And sometimes more reliable sources report different results or paint a different picture.

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18:39 : One last thing Shaun displays here is catching people out at not actually listening to the person they are critiquing. It is actually quite common to hear A complain that B is inconsistent or a hypocrite because they say X but not Y, when in fact they do say Y. Which demonstrates that A did not even consult or know what B has said on the subject. Once you catch things like this (or worse, a critic actually lying about what their target said), you’ve discovered a really important fact worth emphasizing: A has a highly uninformed—and therefore highly unreliable—opinion in the matter and therefore cannot be trusted to have any true beliefs or assertions about it. Which really should remove them and everything they say from any consideration in public discourse.

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That completes that example. The next one is much briefer. In Am I Controlled Opposition? Shaun demonstrates critical thinking excellence in just eight short minutes. The central takeaway? Don’t be lazy. Be a good critic of your own assumptions. That way, you won’t get a video like this made about you—and have every minute of it be embarrassingly right. Indeed, a good critical thinker’s goal should be to hit “zero instances” of this after adopting critical thought as a lifestyle choice. This video is so brief, I strongly recommend going and watching it all right now, before coming back to read my commentary below.

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Minute 1: Right from the start Shaun sets up the situation very efficiently, in under one minute: in the U.K. social worker Poppy Noor wrote an article about the need for more free housing, which YouTuber Sargon of Akkad tried to shit on, by fucking up literally every morsel of fact and logic he tried throwing at her; and Shaun caught him at this, proving every point decisively with evidence.

Noor was basically advocating the new, “brilliant” idea that the cure for homelessness is…giving people homes. Which isn’t just, you know, obvious, ranking right up there with “the cure for a broken faucet is fixing the faucet.” But it’s also, it turns out, cheaper than literally every other thing we could decide to do about homelessness (and yes, including “nothing”). And this is becoming mainstream, having been multiply tested in practice, and is now known as the Housing First Model. The science is pretty conclusive on it by now (and already was by 2017 when the Shaun-Sargon fracas over Noor occurred, although it wasn’t getting as much press then).

Sargon tried trashing Noor and her idea (even though it’s not, in fact, her idea, but the idea of hundreds of experts, nations, and municipalities) by first claiming—without thinking to check first—that “this person has never lived in a council house,” referring to the type of free or subsidized housing provided in the U.K. at the time (similar to what Americans might call “the projects”), because “if she had, she wouldn’t be advocating for everyone to be housed by the government.” He then called anyone agreeing with her a “commie.” (Actually, Noor wasn’t suggesting everyone get a free house from the government, just people who can’t get housing on their own; she’s talking about a social safety net, not communism.) When Shaun did what Sargon didn’t—actually checked Noor’s background—he videoed a demo of Sargon’s laziness by pointing out that in fact Noor grew up in poverty, had been homeless, and had lived in homeless shelters as a child (which were even worse than council housing).

Minute 2: As Shaun now explains, he had also pointed out how illogical it was to discount a person who is not only an experienced homeless person but also an actual investigative journalist and social worker, the trifecta of knowing what life in council housing means. It’s not clear which of those three kinds of authority Sargon could claim in this matter. But Shaun notes there wasn’t really any good reply Sargon could make to this fact, other than just mea culpa, own his mistake, and explain the prejudice, laziness, and lack of critical thinking skills that led him to declare such a falsity with such stalwart confidence (the one thing, if anything, that critical thinking skills should prevent you doing). But, Shaun noted, there was a bad argument he could try, to save face. Lo and behold, Sargon face-palmed right into doing exactly that. Which led to this video by Shaun.

Minutes 3 and 4: Shaun goes over Sargon’s response, not just his attempt to claim living in a homeless shelter isn’t as bad as living in a state-provided home (there is almost no honest way to imagine how that could be the case, unless you literally did not know anything about either), but also Sargon’s doubling down and trying to “one up” Shaun by “proving” Noor was lying about being homeless and poor. The real lesson here is in how Sargon attempted to prove that—which shows he had no actual knowledge of Noor lying, but needed that to be true, so he went on a crank-worthy error-binge to try and “rationalize” evidence of it. This is exactly the opposite of how a critical thinker behaves. How Shaun approached all that same evidence is how a critical thinker behaves. And you really need to watch it to see what I mean and get the general lesson here.

This gets us back again to the importance of history in critical thinking. Sargon tried to show that the neighborhood Noor grew up in “has” relatively high home values, and therefore “cannot” have been a neighborhood a poor person lived in. This is already illogical. It’s actually a little hard to think of any neighborhood in the world that lacks poor and homeless people—even Beverly Hills, which even despite its infamous wealth has many homeless people and quite a lot of high poverty households. And Noor’s neighborhood has never been Beverly Hills. (Oh, and by the way, did you see the thing I did just there, fact-checking actual poverty in a neighborhood before making claims about it? That’s critical thinking. By contrast, a critical thinker would never have thought “average home value” would tell us anything about the presence of poverty in an area. And yet, that’s where Sargon went. Foot, mouth. You might see where this is going. Wait for it.)

The real punchline is what Shaun instead points out: Sargon was looking at current home values in Noor’s childhood neighborhood. Shaun instead did what a critical thinker would do, and looked at what that neighborhood was like when Noor grew up there. Lo and behold, it became an upper middle class neighborhood only after extensive development related to the 2012 Olympics. The Noor article Sargon is attacking was published only five years later. Prior, that neighborhood had much higher rates of poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness. Precisely when Noor’s family was treading homeless shelters there. So here’s that same lesson for us, once again. History matters. Shaun remembered that. Sargon didn’t.

4:40 to conclusion : It is here that Shaun displays the value of curiosity to critical thinking. Shaun is full of that. Sargon apparently lacks that virtue altogether. Because, as Shaun demonstrates, when Sargon tried displaying images of “how awful” council housing is (much of which, frankly, does not look that awful to me—I get the impression Sargon has never been properly poor; I grew up in poor neighborhoods, and much of what he thinks looks awful looks kind of nice, to be honest), Shaun asked himself two questions, which Sargon should have asked himself before even running with any of this line of argument, much less those images: (1) is there any council housing for the poor in that area? (An obviously much more appropriate way to test Noor’s biography; hell, even Beverly Hills has subsidized housing for the poor) and (2) are any of the images of council housing Sargon used to show how awful it is actually in that same area? Of course the answer to both is yes. And a critical thinker would have figured that out. Sargon didn’t. You do the math.

As with the Amazing Atheist above, we have here another example of critically thinking an image unraveling someone’s irrational arguments and false claims. Not only does Shaun catch Sargon claiming there can’t be any council housing in a district while showing images of council housing in that district, but he thinks again to actually fact-check Sargon’s images generally, quickly finding that some of the worst looking examples Sargon used were in fact abandoned, not places people actually lived.

Once again, history trumps rhetoric. But the important lesson here is: don’t just lazily use an image, or just lazily trust one. Check what its context is and whether it’s actually relevant to any argument you intend to make with it—or any argument being presented to you, especially one you might be predisposed to agree with. After all, how many Sargon fans caught any of this? Learn from that; don’t be like them. Instead, once you discover someone who doesn’t do even these rudimentary things, to fact-check their own evidence and falsification-test their own assertions, you know you can’t trust them anymore to do that. They aren’t a critical thinker. Their opinions aren’t critically thought, and thus probably aren’t reliable. It would be different if they admitted and corrected the error once caught; that would reestablish them as honest and reliable. But alas.

There are many examples in unreliable media sources (but especially social media and YouTube) of imagery being misused like this (the U.S. Republican Party just gave us one the other day). You may have heard “Pics or GTFO.” That’s not critical thinking. Don’t trust pictures. That’s critical thinking. But of course this does not mean don’t “ever” trust them. Radical skepticism, “don’t ever trust anything,” “everything’s a lie,” that’s not critical thought, that’s just being lazy again. A critical thinker checks to see what is trustworthy and what isn’t, and needs good reasons (actual, relevant, concrete evidence) to reject a source’s reliability. They trust vetted and vettable facts. They trust sources that prove more or less reliable. They don’t absolutely or blindly trust them. They don’t assume a source does or has to have a 100% reliability record. But they do expect standards; and a frequency of exhibiting accuracy, verifiability, and correcting errors. And of not making so many inexcusable errors—like not checking whether an image you are using of an awful place to live isn’t a place anyone lives, or checking the economic status of a neighborhood today to prove something about it twenty years ago, or not thinking to look for the thing you are supposed to be looking for, which is poor-housing in a neighborhood.

I’ll add a brief puchcline here:

I had wanted to make my live debate with Sargon be about this video and asking him how he explained his behavior at every step of it, and how his actual behavior, as I just viewed it, is guaranteed to ensure his worldview is bigoted and inaccurate, and that this is a serious problem with him. As it would be with anyone who forms beliefs this way. Critical thinking is the tool that is meant to prevent you from becoming Sargon of Akkad. Needless to say, Sargon belligerently refused. So that debate never happened (we got a completely different, and largely useless one instead). I suspect he just wants no one to remember any of this happened. Which is exactly the opposite of how a critical thinker would handle this.

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Finally, in Paul Joseph Watson is Wrong About: Art, also an easy short watch, Shaun again exhibits the general wisdom of a point I’ve made twice now: the importance to understanding history in every critical thinking task you endeavor on.

Minute 1: In exactly one minute, the entire first minute of the video, Shaun completely dismantles the argument his video was made to address, by applying a single general historical principle: always check for selection bias. In general, what you know or think you know about history is always caused by a selection bias, often several: some one or some thing has chosen what things you will have been told or shown about history. You are therefore ignorant of what this process has kept from you, and that ignorance can lead to countless false beliefs. Unless you take steps to correct for this bias.

In this particular case, Shaun points out that Paul Joseph Watson forgot to check that filter: what he knows as “the art of history,” which he identifies as “great art,” has been filtered by a process that actually removes from his knowledge lesser, terrible, bad, crass, awful art. Instead of checking the filter, and thus discovering this fact, he mistook what the filter fed him as the sum of history: in the past we only made great art. That is an error. And that error would have been avoided by checking the filter.

Watson should have asked himself first, “What selection bias has operated to limit which things I know about art history?” Of course, you should already be able to work out on your own that that filter will probably have erased bad art and only selected the great art for you to know about. But you should also know how to test that hypothesis, and actually learn something useful about the history of “pop culture” that might even improve your understanding of your own contemporary culture and of art generally. If you are going to pontificate on the subject, in other words, you should know you need to research what kinds of “bad” art existed in any historical period, what “popular” culture has looked like in past eras; in short, what has not survived the filter, such that you have to “look under rocks” now to find it. Which is just my euphemism for cracking open some books or digging through some reliable online articles for what has been kept from you in the domain of general knowledge—and would keep being kept from you if you didn’t make a personal effort to go looking for it yourself.

You’ll find the effort fascinating and informative, not only in respect to history, but even in respect to your present life. Anything you then go on to say about the subject will be informed and not ignorant. It will be a product of critical thinking, not lazy thinking.

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1:25 : Shaun then references two more video critiques of the same target that he checked the value of and recommends. This is a useful feature of any public communication process. It also illustrates good critical thinking: before pontificating on a subject, go see what the best critics have already said on the point. And employ a sound standard for “best critics,” which is not “critics who agree with me” or “critics who do the best video editing” or “critics who have the edgiest style” or whatever (they can be all those things, but that doesn’t make them a good critic). Rather, you need to look for (and thus recommend) critics who actually know what they are talking about (such as, possessing relevant graduate degrees or a directly pertinent profession), or have a well-tested rep for accurate fact-checking and logic, and who argue their every essential point with real examples that you can verify yourself have been accurately represented.

2:51 : Shaun then gives an easily-verifiable real-world example of how the kind of “complaints about art” he is targeting aren’t new, but have a long history, and have probably been voiced in every generation or two since the dawn of civilization. I am reminded myself of the chapter in Samuel Noah Kramer’s famous work History Begins at Sumer which includes the earliest known recorded “complaints” about the corruption of popular culture…three thousand years ago. Know your history. Are you about to stick your foot in your mouth exactly like some other embarrassing boob generations before you? You might want to check. And avoid the meal of foot. And if you still think “you” have a valid point in some way “they” did not, you really need to take seriously the need to test that hypothesis. What, if anything, are you saying that is really so different? How are you better informed? Or more correct? You need to have good answers to those questions. And yet answering them requires a much more solid grasp of actual history than you might have. It requires doing some research. And critically examining yourself in light of it.

5:35 : Shaun then focuses on an example used by his target, Marcel Douchamp’s 1917 art piece Fountain—infamously just a repurposed urinal, used by Watson as evidence of the supposed decline of Western culture—and begins illustrating how researching the actual historical context of that example, in other words actually understanding it as a product of history, in history, completely changes its relevance to Watson’s argument. Shaun thus catches Watson making a historically ignorant argument, and corrects this by taking the trouble to get historically informed before discussing it himself. That’s critical thinking.

Shaun does the same thing with more of Watson’s key examples: he actually checks the historical context of each one, and thus has informed things to say about it, rather than the ignorant things Watson does. This is almost the quintessential difference between a critical and a lazy thinker.

7:00 : At this point, well into his second example (Project for a Door) from Watson’s video, Shaun does another thing that exemplifies good critical thinking: he researches his target’s other discussions of art and finds a counter-example (Tennis Girl) that exposes his target’s hypocrisy (or inconsistency, however you want to characterize it). And he uses this to proper and good effect to make a key point about what Watson is getting wrong about art and the history of art. And the lesson in every case is simply: he just isn’t checking the history or context of any of the art (or even prizes for art) that he is going on about. Watson is a quintessential lazy thinker. Shaun is a quintessential critical thinker.

Shaun also by this point has repeatedly made clear he is not an authority on art or history and is not claiming to be. He is merely getting informed about any specific thing he decides to talk about and thinking critically about it, and he makes clear this is what he is doing, and how he is doing it, thus modeling for any viewer how they themselves could behave too. This is the essence of what makes someone a good critical thinker, and the sort of thing you should look for when looking for a “good critic” of something: yes, it’s nice when they have serious qualifications (like, say, being an art historian); but it’s comparably good when they are consistently, honestly and humbly, just doing a good job as a critical thinker—fact-checking facts, logic-checking logic—before coming to their own opinion about some claim or dispute. Which is what we all should be doing, all the time, to at least some pertinent degree.

It makes sense, obviously, to apportion resources, e.g. time, by importance of claim or belief. Opinions you aren’t so committed to or don’t see as particularly important or dangerous to be wrong about, you can spend a great deal less time vetting. But conversely, when that’s not the case, you should be spending more time on it, before committing yourself. The more damage being wrong about it can do, or the more important a claim or belief is to you, the more effort you should spend fact-checking, analyzing, self-questioning. Otherwise, what you haven’t put the time in to fact-check, you shouldn’t believe so strongly—until you’ve done the work, and know.

9:25 : “The point of a lot of conceptual art is to provoke exactly these sorts of boundary discussions.” Here and forward Shaun demonstrates two crucial critical thinking skills: (1) he actually went and read and listened to actual artists and what they mean to be saying and doing by creating the kind of art Watson is freaking out about, and (2) he educates the viewer on what that is, and why that changes a lot about what we might want to say about it, demonstrating how knowledge changes opinion, the very purpose of critical thinking itself. Which is again the opposite of lazy thinking, including the lazy thinking Shaun ably employs Watson as a perfect example of.

10:04 : By this point I’d like to point out how incredibly efficient Shaun has been in communicating important information and analysis in this video. Every single individual minute of this video is filled with knowledge and revelation, not a single second wasted with any goofing around or repetition or rambling. In just the span of the last forty seconds, look at all he covered.

And here, at this moment, Shaun switches to another good example of “fact-checking” as a fundamental skill of the critical thinker: he catches Watson saying the Tate Modern museum was just full of fringe conceptual art that could hardly be distinguished from literal garbage, in defense of his claim that “Western culture” as a whole has catastrophically declined. What does Shaun do? Actually checks what’s in the Tate. And shows us.

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the most widely respected rules of contemporary narrative art (visual and print), the sort of thing the Watsons of the world don’t know about, because they don’t actually do any research on art before pontificating on it. Shaun employs that principle as often as it’s economical to, as a critical thinking tool. It is a powerful and effective educational technique—when used honestly, and Shaun is using it honestly. Shaun also gave some examples earlier in the video of Watson using that same tool dishonestly. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which examples those are and why they are dishonest. But as I showed Shaun had also illustrated in respect to the Sargon and Amazing Atheist take-downs above, I now think dishonest “Show, don’t tell” techniques actually typify conservative visual argument. In fact, when you see that happen, I suspect it is more often than not a tangible record of the lazy thinking of conservatives generally.

Yes, sometimes when this happens it is a deliberate deception (an almost paradigmatic example being the latest Trump campaign manipulations of images in anti-Biden ads). But even more often, I suspect this is actually how conservatives think: they “see” an image (or event or text or statement or what have you), “interpret” it “from the armchair” as it were, and from that form an immovable, passionate belief. Lazy thinking. They don’t research the image or event or whatnot—its content and meaning and history—they make no effort to actually understand it. They aren’t reflective or critical of their own thoughts and reactions at all; they don’t competently test their immediate impressions against further evidence at all. And I think this drives a lot of false belief formation in conservatives.

And yes, this is true of many liberals too. But alas, I find, not enough to typify liberals or liberalism, least of all liberal authorities (such as actual journalists and experts). You have to ignore most liberals, and almost all their informational authorities, to think “most” liberals think and act like liberal fringe extremists or thoughtless reactionaries, whereas even mainstream conservatives, and even their informational authorities (their leading experts and influencers), often do this lazy thinking thing. That’s just a hypothesis, of course. But as good critical thinkers, I challenge you to go forth and test it, now that you know what to look for. (And note, I now always mean by “conservative” a status quoist, and by “liberal” a progressivist; I do not believe specific platforms define either anymore, particularly internationally.)

12:40 : Shaun then moves on to Watson’s critique of television, catches that Watson elsewhere in his video praises Shakespeare as the great art we’ve lost, and does what a good critical thinker should do: actually read Shakespeare, and duly finding every single thing in it that Watson criticizes modern television for! Broken families? King Lear. Emasculated male figures? MacBeth. One might even add that Shakespeare’s opus is infamously full of the nihilistic characters and irresponsible youths Watson laments on TV.

This illustrates a general principle again of taking history seriously: are claims about history having been different or the same or better in the past even true? But it also illustrates a good example of internal coherence critique: Watson is claiming he despises modern television culture for things that are in the very “great art” Watson is comparing it to. Which leaves us asking: what then is Watson really bothered by in modern television, since it clearly can’t actually be what he is claiming? Which calls into question Watson’s own self-knowledge and competence at external analysis (he can’t even coherently explain what it really is that bothers him about television). Or does Watson literally not know anything about Shakespeare and is just “declaring” it great because someone told him to? Either is a demonstration of lazy thinking, the exact opposite of critical thinking. Both might be true.

13:40 : Here Shaun exhibits another important critical thinking skill: when Watson, the lazy thinker, asks what has his generation contributed to “great art,” implying the answer to be “Nothing,” Shaun, the critical thinker, does what Watson should have done when this question came up in his mind, which is try to find counter-examples disproving his hypothesis before declaring his hypothesis true (and Shaun even finds examples elsewhere offered by Watson himself, embarrassingly). This is so critical a concept, I even just wrote a whole article featuring it. Here of course what we see is Shaun answer Watson’s question, thus debunking Watson’s point. But in the mind of a critical thinker this entire process would have played out in Watson, before ever landing in the production of any article or video. The only reason that did not happen here is that Watson is a lazy thinker. That’s the lesson.

14:50 : The importance to history in critical thinking about politics, society, and culture is not just about recognizing how things have always been the same (there has always been a crass pop culture, there has always been crap, mass-produced art, and there have always been “drunk uncles” like Watson complaining about it), but also, importantly, how they have changed. Not understanding why things are different now than in the past, is just as prone to saddling you with false beliefs.

Hence it is here that Shaun gives us a really astute example of recognizing how things have changed and why, and thus deriving sound beliefs rather than false ones. Watson complained, lazily, about there no longer being an established “Popular Culture” (by which in this case he means a mainstream culture) and a “Counter-Culture” (for example, in the 70s you had Disco, and the Punk Scene reacting against that; an over-simplification, but you get the point). Shaun points out that there is a reason why that is: the internet. Streaming broadband has essentially eliminated what Watson means by “mainstream culture,” creating an endlessly diverse media and art readily accessible to nearly everyone.

And he’s right. Movie theater magnates no longer control what movies get made or seen. Record labels no longer control what musical artists you get to hear. Big publishers no longer control what books or magazines you get to read. So there is no need of a distinct “counter-culture” anymore. Every possible counter-culture is already mainstream now. So even “mainstream” culture has to compete with that, and can thereby be improved. Accordingly it is easy to find new masterpieces of art today in film, fiction, theatre, television, painting, sculpture (and I just chose examples at random to link to). You just have to go look for it. If anything, we are now in a veritable renaissance of artistic brilliance, creativity, and innovation, certainly in respect to film and television and music, where every conceivable genre and innovation is out there now, and far more readily accessed today than such art was to our counterparts thirty or sixty years ago.

16:01 : Shaun then zeroes in on a huge contradiction in Watson’s cultural critique: all of it applies equally well to video game culture, yet Watson is an anti-feminist alarmist with a gamer audience who denounces any such critique of video games. The incoherence of this is very strange, and well-spotted. Personally I think it exposes something more fundamental is going on behind Watson’s critique; he doesn’t actually care about sex and violence and barely artful prurient content sold to the masses. He consumes it eagerly and defends it openly—whenever it suits him.

Which invites us to analyze what is really going on here. Whatever it is, in just a couple of sentences Shaun reveals that Watson has become the very person Watson hates: Anita Sarkeesian; only, directing his cultural critique of “over-sexualization” and “prurient violence” and “cheap marketing gimmicks” and everything else he despises at every other artistic medium but video games. Which kind of makes him worse than the person he hates. At least Sarkeesian only targets one art medium with Watson’s arguments. Of course, she does so far more thoughtfully and with actual research, but that’s of no help here; Watson is a lazy thinker, Sarkeesian a critical thinker. He copies only her angle of cultural attack, not its method. He became her—minus all her virtues. (And no, this does not mean I agree with everything Sarkeesian has ever said; but she has done a far better job at producing an informed cultural critique than the likes of Watson.)

In itself this isn’t relevant to whether any of Watson’s arguments are correct. Shaun already deals with that directly (he demonstrates they are not). And it was apt to wait until all that was done before bringing this up. But critical thinkers must also be aware of the role that hypocrisy, moral failure, or toxic ideologies play in inspiring the production of disinformation and ignorant cultural critique like Watson’s. If he is this hypocritical (and Shaun gives a string of further examples starting at minute 18:51) and morally questionable in his belief system, we have reason not to trust him. We should still fact-check his claims to be sure; but once we’ve caught him in enough ignorance and error, we no longer have a reason to pay any further attention to him.

17:14 : But then Shaun does one even better. He successfully links that last point to why Watson’s cultural critique is actually socially dangerous. By fabricating a completely uninformed, factually false critique of “popular culture” in order to blame all the world’s ills on it (such as, Shaun notes, Watson’s attempts to blame it for rising suicide rates), Watson is actually attempting to convince people (and among them, himself) to not pay attention to any of the real causes of these societal ills—like, say, income inequality. And that ensures the continuance, even growth, of all those evils Watson is erroneously claiming to have found the cause of. His ideology is thus making the world a worse place to live in. In actual practice, it literally has no other function.

And if critical thinking can do anything to help us as a species, it has to be this: helping us avoid adopting such toxic ideologies as this, and finding instead the real causes of our problems in the world—so we can fix them.