Thanks Bacc, I read constantly throughout the day (online and print combined). A lot of my work is overseas, so I work at night a lot when not on travel. I read the prominent philosophers, but often use comprehensive philosophy references. I don't have time to suffer through ancient and reformation philosophers trying to prove the existence of God. I am usually taking a graduate level course at any given time. I will select Stanford or MIT courses and order their texts used online, and take the course myself (genetics mostly).
I read celebrity skeptics (both their books and journalistic garbage) and keep up with what they determine to be 'good science' - this sharpens my ability to discern, not the what-where-when-who of that which composes peoples' rationality (facts), but rather
how and why they think it (soundness and logical calculus). I have to be honest, there are not many books which bear depth into such a topic. Wittgenstein's
Tractus? Schopenhauer? Nietzsche maybe?
Inside an elevator scene in the movie
Zero Dark Thirty, when the Director of the CIA, John Brennan asked his intelligence lead, what he thought of Maya, the CIA operative who was given credit in cinematic-society for finding Bin Laden, "What do you think of the girl?" His project lead replies, "I think she's fuckin' smart." To which Brennan replies, "We're all smart, Jeremy."
We're all smart. But for me, I do not care what a person has memorized. I do not care what quiver of pattern recognition tricks they have up their sleeve - nor what clever sounding one-liner they can whip off. I don't care if they have a PhD. I look for the ability to start from a position of innocence (
epoché ) - then carry a framework of and leverage, inference versus probative critical path risk (hypothesis). THAT... is the essence of acumen.
Those who (non-innocently) dwell at the bottom of this chart... and practice what is called '
Nelsonian inference or Nelsonian knowledge'. I tend to be pretty hard on them. And for good reason -
cultivated ignorance causes suffering.