AI and Critical Thinking

Monday, 9 February module 3 (weeks 5 and 6) lessons and lecture recordings will be released. R/ Dr. Russo

Intelligence analysts: let’s stop pretending “critical thinking” means “I read a lot” or “I have opinions with citations.” Most analysts don’t actually think critically in the conceptual sense. They summarize. They pattern-match. They default to institutional narratives. They confuse confidence with rigor. And they call it “analysis.” If you want to prove you can actually think—not just produce words—answer these four questions (without Googling, without hiding behind jargon, and without turning it into a memo): When you make an analytic judgment, what would have to be true for your conclusion to be wrong—and what evidence, specifically, would force you to update or abandon it? What is the strongest alternative explanation to your current assessment, and what observable indicators would discriminate between your preferred hypothesis and that alternative? Identify one assumption you are treating as “background fact.” Now justify it: what’s its evidentiary basis, what’s its failure mode, and what happens to your judgment if it collapses? Separate “evidence” from “interpretation”: name two facts you’re relying on, then show how two different reasonable analysts could interpret those same facts into opposing judgments—and explain why yours is more valid. If you can answer those cleanly, under time pressure, with intellectual honesty, you’re doing critical thinking. If you can’t… you’re doing narrative maintenance. Want to learn more about Critical Thinking: https://drcharlesmrusso.substack.com/ & https://www.skool.com/the-analytical-edge-3643

Great discussions about Critical Thinking, analysis, Intelligence, AI and books.

Schools, training pipelines, and certification ecosystems are not “failing by accident”—they are optimizing for retention, throughput, and revenue while calling it tradecraft. ABSTRACT I have recently argued that analysts who cannot distinguish misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda (check out my Substack account) are functionally unprepared for modern intelligence work. This article targets the upstream cause: the education-and-training ecosystem that produces and legitimizes that deficiency. This article critiques three complicit layers—government/contractor training pipelines, university intelligence-studies programs, and professional certifications—for treating critical thinking and philosophy as optional enrichment rather than core analytic infrastructure. Using evidence from Intelligence Community competency and analytic-standards directives, documented critiques of intelligence education’s lack of evaluation research, and broader higher-education research and reporting on grade inflation and declining rigor under student-as-customer pressures, the article argues the system is structurally incentivized to keep students, not sharpen them. It concludes with reforms: competency-based gatekeeping, performance-based assessments, mandatory reasoning/philosophy sequences, and an external validation model tied to real analytic tasks. KEYWORDS intelligence education; training pipelines; certification; academic rigor; grade inflation; student retention; critical thinking; philosophy; epistemology; logic; ICD-203; ICD-610; program evaluation INTRODUCTION If you want a scathing diagnosis, here it is: the U.S. intelligence education ecosystem has increasingly adopted the logic of mass higher education—keep students moving, keep completion rates high, keep customer complaints low—and then acts surprised when the workforce can’t reason clearly about influence, deception, uncertainty, and competing hypotheses. The problem is not that institutions never mention critical thinking; they mention it constantly. The problem is that many programs do not enforce critical thinking as a measurable performance standard, and they rarely build the philosophical foundation that makes “critical thinking” more than a slogan.