What does it mean to think?

From The Trouble With Harvard:The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it by Stephen Pinker.

It’s easy to agree with him that “the first thing that college is for is to teach you to think,” but much harder to figure out what that means. Deresiewicz knows what it does not mean—“the analytical and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions”—but this belletristic disdain for the real world is unhelpful. The skills necessary for success in the professions include organizing one’s thoughts so that they may be communicated clearly to others, breaking a complex problem into its components, applying general principles to specific cases, discerning cause and effect, and negotiating tradeoffs between competing values. In what rarefied ivory chateau do these skills not count as “thinking”? In its place Deresiewicz says only that learning to think consists of “contemplating things from a distance,” with no hint as to what that contemplation should consist of or where it should lead.

That is a wonderfully succinct description of what it means to think: "organizing one’s thoughts so that they may be communicated clearly to others, breaking a complex problem into its components, applying general principles to specific cases, discerning cause and effect, and negotiating tradeoffs between competing values." It almost serves as a checklist for major decisions. Have you:

* Organized your thoughts?
* Communicated clearly to others?
* Broken complex problems into constituent components?
* Applied general principles to specific cases?
* Properly discerned cause and effect?
* Resolved tradeoffs between competing values?

Each of these steps has, of course, plenty of subordinate elements. And for each, you have to be able to answer, "How would we know . . . ?" How would you know if you have communicated clearly?