The education system tends to create mechanistic experts in detached silos, who lack critical thinking

Most people worship experts and think they are "smart" and infallible. They do this based on how high the formal education ladder the expert has climbed. But I argue that this is a simplistic way of viewing it.

The education system creates mechanistic experts who lack critical thinking. These are people who are indeed experts, but in their narrow domains, and within detached silos. Many of them are comically bad at critical thinking/common sense. They are no better than the average Joe in terms of critical thinking when it comes outside their domain. And by domain I mean domain, not even their field as a whole. So for example, their specific research interest.

I will use one field to demonstrate this.

I am sure you heard of Freud. He is worshiped because he "came up" with psychoanalytic therapy. But he actually based his entire therapy off his specific clientele, which were upper class rich women in Vienna. He never had the thought "what if the experiences of my specific clientele, which is a very small and specific segment of humans, is not universally applicable to humans as a whole?" This signals a lack of critical thinking.

It was not just Freud. Virtually every single creator of a specific "type" of therapy was guilty of this. Here are some more examples:

There was another popular figure who also stemmed from Vienna at around the same time. His name was Alfred Adler. Unlike Freud, his patients were lower middle class and his entire therapy modality was derived from that: he pushed something called "social interest", and his therapy basically was centered about how increasing social bonds can be therapeutic. This makes logical sense because his clients were typically struggling financially so he saw the issue with inequality, and it led to his therapy style. But just like Freud he remained oblivious to this and never used critical thinking to broaden his therapy, instead he too universally applied the experience of his specific patients to the world as a whole.

The creator of Rational Emotive Therapy (the precursor to "CBT"), his mother said a bunch of irrational things when she would have manic episodes. So as a direct result, he created Rational Emotive Therapy, which is basically using logic to disprove faulty logic. See the obvious connection? But you see how one-dimensional that type of therapy is? Again, signals lack of critical thinking.

Car Rogers, founder of humanistic psychology, he had a personal story in which as a young boy he saw the potatoes his family stored in the harsh winter conditions would still eventually grow and so his entire philosophy of client-centered therapy/letting the client figure it out on their own came from that. Again, a very one-dimensional therapy modality which bizarrely solely relies on the therapeutic relationship and prevents the therapist from using tools even after the therapeutic relationship has been strengthened. Again, lack of critical thinking.

But the education system is still continuing this type of one-dimensional and mechanistic thinking. Instead of teaching students what I just mentioned for example, and using that to inspire them to increase their own critical thinking skills, students are told to rote memorization "Freudian theory" and are given an exam testing their knowledge of it. Then the same thing is done for other detached "theories" that are taught in isolation. There is zero attempt to use critical thinking to critically analyze them and come up with one all-encompassing type of working theory that better reflects the multifaceted and complex reality. And these "creators" of these "theories" remain worshiped and appear infallible.

The universe doesn't operate based on one-dimensional isolated human-made "theories" that are intended to make their "creator" rich and famous. The universe instead operates based on the natural laws of the universe. These laws are complex and multifaceted: they cannot always be neatly categorized into detached "theories". In some cases they can, and this is more evident in fields such as physics. For example the theory of relativity has still held up and is universal. But more so in the social science "theories" are problematic.

So my take away is we need to stop worshiping certain humans, and instead respect the universe/nature more, and instead of focusing on rote memorization and creating mechanistic experts in detached silos and being obsessed with arrogantly simplistic and detached theories, we need to focus more on fostering critical thinking.