'ya think?

January has been holding true to itself, it's a l-o-n-g, hunker-down month, filled with new projects, goals and reading.
I'm offering no commentary on how these links synch up for me today, they just do.

...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

Later:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
--David Foster Wallace

His whole address found here:
http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words


And then this. T&S linked to this as a pdf. Well worth it:
http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/universal-intellectual-standards/527

More by the same Linda:
The single most important reason for deliberately evaluating your own thinking is that thinking, left to itself, just cannot be trusted. Everyone thinks, but everyone doesn’t think well. And no one thinks well all of the time. 

It is important to recognise that people already do evaluate their thinking. But they often fail to use intellectual standards to do so. In other words, they often fail to clarify their thinking, and to make sure it is accurate, logical, relevant, significant, broad, deep and fair (just to name a few intellectual standards).

http://www.hr-matters.info/feat2011/2011.jul.BecomingACriticOfYourOwnThinking.htm