Question your relationship to the media, your cognitive biases and your ability to sort information… Since 2022, the Spring of Critical Thinking, organized by Universcience, the Public Institution of the Palais de la découverte and of the City of Science and Industry, offers two weeks of events, workshops, conferences and training to raise awareness of the importance of critical thinking.
For its third edition, which starts on March 21 until April 3, Spring becomes national with about fifty participants all over the territory, actors of scientific culture and media education. Most of them have integrated a focus on artificial intelligence, this year’s theme. It is structured around two axes: a knowledge and measurement tool – the Barometer of Critical Thinking – and a programming with multiple formats, between workshops, debates and exhibitions dedicated to a wide audience. The point with Bruno Maquart, President of Universcience.
This year will be the third edition of Critical Thinking Spring. Why dedicate an event to this subject?
Critical thinking is one of the pillars of the Universcience establishment project. It responds to the contemporary information paradigm marked by overabundance, deregulation – at a time when traditional institutions such as the media no longer have a monopoly on information – and finally by the horizontalization of dialogue, linked to new forms of communication and social media in particular. Hence the growing importance of promoting critical thinking, that is, the ability to become aware of cognitive biases, to sort and qualify information, in order to build one’s own opinion in this ocean of information in which we are immersed.
There is also a strong link between critical thinking and scientific culture, which we promote. The experimental approach is a way to develop critical thinking, which in turn needs to be nourished by science. Because without solid scientific foundations, one can doubt everything, question everything, relativize everything, or even fall into conspiracy...
Precisely, in the face of the information overload you mention, critical thinking often appears as a besieged fortress. Is it threatened?
We must be wary of prejudice and not see everything in black. In last year’s Critical Thinking Barometer, we have seen that our fellow citizens are quite open to these issues since nearly three out of four French people say they are critical and 77% think it is important to question traditional beliefs with logical and rational evidence, which is a very good base. Nearly 78% consult many different opinions before making an idea and 80% respond that a statement has more value if it has been scientifically validated. So I wouldn’t say that critical thinking is threatened, but that the way we build an opinion changes because the world itself changes.
What are the other lessons of the Barometer?
Going into detail, we find disparities in gender, socio-professional category and place of life. If we look for example at the profile of the 15% of respondents who are the furthest from critical thinking, we discover a more female population, more from small towns and popular socio-professional categories than the rest of the panel, with a lower degree level. This points out, for example, the importance of taking action towards all territories, as the Minister of Culture pointed out. This is what Universcience does with two territorial action tools, Science Actualités – exhibitions regularly updated on scientific news that we make available free of charge to public operators – and the Fab Lab at school, a cultural education system that provides partner schools with a complete fab lab to develop technical culture and learning by doing.
Finally, beware of blind spots! Only 14% of French people recognize being suspicious of their own intuitions, the first of our cognitive biases. This means that 86% are not suspicious of it! We must therefore remind everyone if we want to reason in a useful way. Critical thinking is participatory citizenship. Everyone has the opportunity to participate in public debate. The conclusion is that we must develop information on cognitive biases and the Barometer is for us a privileged instrument of action.
How I know what I know
is the basis of critical thinking
For the first time, the event is taking on a national scale with about fifty participants throughout the territory. Do you see this as a mark of growing interest in this subject?
Critical thinking is a subject that concerns everyone – teachers, families and professionals – because it must be cultivated from an early age and then throughout life. When we had the idea of proposing to others to join the Spring of Critical Thinking, we said to ourselves that it was also necessary to mobilize libraries that have a privileged relationship with the population. The requested networks responded massively and we were overwhelmed by the success!
What is interesting is that we are embarking on a cultural struggle in the service of information a great plurality of actors, beyond libraries or museums and science centers, higher education and research institutions, NGOs... This shows that it is a unifying theme that brings together committed cultural and social operators, well beyond our usual scope of activity. All these actors want to make collectively useful work in the service of critical thinking. This is what is very joyful!
Together, we are able to irrigate the territory and be present everywhere, in large cities as well as smaller ones. The idea is to address everyone and everyone, not to exclude anyone. The richness of this Spring is that there are several ways to talk about this subject and you have as many interesting proposals as actors mobilized.
On the Universcience side, the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie offers a special course on Critical Thinking and Artificial Intelligence. How did you build this course and what should the public expect?
Three themes will allow us to enter into the subject. The first is the definition of a cognitive and argumentative bias. The second is the distinction between fact and belief and the third is media and image education. The proposed content refers to examples of everyday life around artificial intelligence. There will be short mediations, dynamic workshops that invite us to question the perception of artificial intelligence and its understanding with a common thread: how I know what I know, which is the basis of critical thinking.
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and its role in the production of information is therefore at the heart of this event. How did you choose to approach this subject?
In parallel with Spring, we produced, with the Quai des Savoirs, the exhibition « IA: Double I » on artificial intelligence, which is shown in Toulouse until 3 November and will be presented next year in Paris. Then, each year, the Critical Thinking Barometer proposes, in addition to the permanent questions related to this subject, a common theme related to current events. In 2022, we were dealing with the health crisis, in 2023, understanding global warming. This year, the spectacular emergence of generative AI like ChatGPT has led us to propose AI as a common thread.
This theme involves the entire scientific culture sector and will continue to be explored in the coming years. As with all new technologies, Universcience offers a vision that is neither technolâtre nor technophobe. We want to give everyone the means to be free and to form an opinion. What we practice is the demonstration and debate of new technologies; both Spring and the Barometer participate in this approach.
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