Higher Order

Bloom's Taxonomy is a mainstay in education circles. It provides a structure for thinking about cognition, and how we learn. Basically, we structure knowledge by refining information through a process. This starts with lower-order thinking, and moves through to higher-order thinking skills.

Wait! Forget Bloom for a moment. Those two concepts, let's focus there:

1. Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS)
2. Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS)

Understanding what these are is absolutely essential in an world where LLMs are at our fingertips.

Especially since MIT has noticed that LLMs have been turning people into sheep:

The LLM undeniably reduced the friction involved in answering participants' questions compared to the Search Engine. However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to critically evaluate the LLM's output or ”opinions” (probabilistic answers based on the training datasets). This highlights a concerning evolution of the 'echo chamber' effect: rather than disappearing, it has adapted to shape user exposure through algorithmically curated content.

(Based on my subjective experience with ChatGPT, the echo chamber effect is further amplified by the "memory" feature.)

So what is lower order and higher order thinking? Let's return to Bloom's Taxonomy. This is typically presented as a pyramid, to represent the fact that each level of thinking skills is built upon the one below it.

HOTS        *        Creating
  ↓        ***       Evaluating
          *****      Analyzing
         *******     Applying
  ↑     *********    Understanding
LOTS   ***********   Remembering

It's a simple framework. We build knowledge by remembering information, then understanding it. In order to master that knowledge, we must apply it, analyse it, evaluate it, and ultimately, create something new with it.

Those higher order thinking skills are absolutely essential to critical thinking, problem solving, and innovating. Cognitive fitness requires regular training. If we get in the habit of using LLMs to do the hard thinking for us, we'll naturally fall out of practice! It's a terrifying, but very real, possibility!

LLMs are helpful for practicing our lower order thinking. Using ChatGPT to practice a language, recall key facts, or explain a new idea can be incredibly effective. However, we should be very mindful and careful to structure our prompts to target lower order thinking.

Get excited! Higher order thinking isn't a chore that you want to farm off to the machines! it's what makes us human. And if we can use LLMs to help reduce cognitive load for lower order thinking tasks, we'll have more in the tank for higher order thinking.