> Here's an example, my friend always tells me he thinks we shouldn't take anymore refugees. [...] That's surface level thinking to me. How do you do that? [...] What do you do?
It’s funny you take this example because your point of view is precisely surface thinking too. I bet you don’t have any concrete plan to fund housing, education, healthcare for those people, nor you have one for them to become productive members of the host society. They are dozens of factors that makes irrational to allow any of them, and a lot of countries (Australia, Japan for instance) have in fact a successful policy of allowing only a bunch of them.
You're misquoting me. The surface level thinking refers to this segment: "He just think, whoever is letting the refugees in is dumb and shouldn't do that".
When people are coming to your border in large trove, not letting them in is easier said then done. You can't just "not let them in". To keep my analogy going, this requires an algorithm of some sort. First you need to find something that works, and then you need to take into account cost consideration, scaling, etc.
Your example would work as well. Someone who were to say, whoever is stopping them from coming in is stupid. This would also be surface level. What do you do with them once they're in? Housing, education, integration? Does our system have the capacity to handle such load or will it collapse? Just letting them in may not be enough, it could cause problems down the line, what are we doing to prevent those.
The right conclusion to take from my comment is that problem solving is hard, there's a lot of variable at play, a lot of considerations to take in, and it is never as easy as you assume at first. Recognizing this is part of being humble, and I think computer science teaches you that.
Thinking you have the answers because you thought about it for 5 minutes and not realizing you skimmed and hand waved over all the direct and indirect complexities and considerations and are skipping multiple steps of the solution. Thinking that there is an easy solution and then advocating for it strongly when you haven't begone to recognize and understand the complexity of the problem itself. This to me is an indication of a lack of some form of critical thinking. I think computer science can to some extent teach people better about this, by having them practice concrete problem solving exercise on a computer which can assess to the solution working or not. And learning formal problem modeling techniques and validation strategies. It's a useful skill.
>It’s funny you take this example because your point of view is precisely surface thinking too
But they're not...? GP didn't say he want to take refugees in, they merely said their friend want refuse refugees without specifying how exactly they want to accomplish that.
>I bet you don’t have any concrete plan to fund housing, education...
It’s funny you take this example because your point of view is precisely surface thinking too. I bet you don’t have any concrete plan to fund housing, education, healthcare for those people, nor you have one for them to become productive members of the host society. They are dozens of factors that makes irrational to allow any of them, and a lot of countries (Australia, Japan for instance) have in fact a successful policy of allowing only a bunch of them.