If you are told before reading a story what's going to happen, that's a spoiler. Many (but not all) people find that this detracts from their experience. If the story tells you in advance what's going to happen, that's not a spoiler. It's foreshadowing, a flash forward, a frame story, or some other common device. These devices may or may not improve the story. The study tested reactions to the latter, and the researchers called it the former, and then drew totally ungrounded aesthetic conclusions about the quality of the stories.

Roger Corman mostly directed (and later in his career, produced) films that, for all their faults, weren't knockoffs. He directed about a dozen a year at his peak, some over a mere weekend. His job was to produce movies quickly and cheaply, and not only was he one of the best at that, he also made them good enough that many became fondly remembered cult films. As a producer, he was mostly known for giving opportunities to upcoming talent, including Coppola, Scorsese, and Cameron. He's no hack, and no poor-man's substitute. He's the real deal. A better movie producer analogy would be David Rimawi, responsible for dozens of knockoffs in the last decade, including "Transmorphers" and "The Day the Earth Stopped".

His website: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy

Here's the argument, as far as I can tell.
1. Plato's dialogues contain certain patterns.
2. These patterns could only have been put there intentionally.
3. These patterns show Plato was a Pythagorean.
4. Therefore Plato was many centuries ahead of his time.

Regarding the premise (1), sure, everything sufficiently complex will contain lots of patterns. The late Martin Gardner has written some articles about common statistical fallacies that may be relevant here (some are in Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus IIRC). The more data there is to sift through, the more likely one can find a certain complex pattern. He's mostly looking at the lengths and locations of certain sections, within sizeable bodies of text, so it's no surprise he came across certain patterns, especially lengths in fractions of 12, and appearances of "positive" or "negative" issues (e.g., beauty or disease). The existence of the patterns does not support (2), even though some examples have been found that fit the author's specifications fairly precisely. It would take deliberate work to avoid producing any such patterns in long written works (like the Symposium, one of Plato's longest dialogues, which is one of the author's targets), so the patterns hardly show intention. (I'm simply granting the author's premises about the correct way to represent the dialogues, whose exact contents are not entirely known, due to transcription errors, small gaps, etc.)

Nor does (2) support (3). Pythagoreanism was a cult combining mysticism, mathematics, and music, and Pythagoreans worked out the "circle of fifths" from which we get the common 12-note musical scale, and some other very basic Western music theory. We know independently that Plato was influenced by Pythagoreans. But Plato's writing something that happens to contain a few 12-based patterns hardly constitutes an allusion to, let alone an endorsement of, Pythagoreanism or any principle of it. And the author's calling the collections of issues that come up at these intervals "harmonic" or "disharmonic" (rather than, e.g. "relevant", "contrary", or any other way we might connect the given pairs or triples of issues the author mentions in the paper) hardly shows any musical allusion on Plato's part.

Finally, (3) does not support (4), the sexiest claim mentioned in the summary and press release (and on the author's website). If it did, we could just as well say the Pythagoreans anticipated the scientific revolution, etc. Well, in a nearly empty sense they did, just like Democritus anticipated early 20th-century atomic physics (although the former "anticipation" is more vague and tenuous). Some people thousands of years ago said a few things that turned out to be more or less right. This does not show they knew things not widely known until much later, because they lacked sufficient justification for their beliefs. If you speculate enough, as early scientist/philosophers tended to do, you will occasionally get something right. Big whoop.

So as far as I can tell, this paper (and the other writings available on his website) contains a terrible argument for an obviously false conclusion. (Disclaimer: although I'm a philosopher, I'm not an expert on Plato or any other ancients.)

As someone who has taught a few of the suggested topics (philosophy, logic, and critical thinking), I have to agree that Critical Thinking is the best option. By that I mean a course covering argumentation, not as an abstract formalism, but as a practical activity people engage in together, whose function is to resolve differences of opinion. As such, it has as much to do with communication, understanding your opponent's views and goals, and the nature of evidence, as it has to do with premises, conclusions, and fallacies.

Critical thinking is a better option than skepticism because, although the latter term is sometimes used synonymously with the former, it more properly means withholding assent until sufficient evidence is given. But this is only a small part of critical thinking, which also involves knowing when to assent, how to assess reasoning and evidence, etc.

It's better than logic, for four reasons. First, the logic in almost all arguments outside of academic and legal contexts is very simple, simple enough that formal instruction is no more helpful than instruction in proofreading. Second, most unacceptable arguments are not due to logical errors, but rather their taking as starting points propositions that are false or not acceptable to all the parties in the debate. Logic is garbage in, garbage out.

Third, introductory logic courses almost exclusively teach formal logic, specifically classical propositional and sometimes first-order logic, but these logics cannot represent most ordinary types of reasoning (including inductive reasoning) without considerable distortion. There is an ongoing project in Philosophy and Logic to represent all valid forms of reasoning in something like first order logic, but most reasoning requires formalisms so complicated they are only covered in advanced courses (e.g., first-order modal logic, counterfactual reasoning, epistemic and doxastic logics), and some of it has resisted any convincing formalization (moral reasoning, i.e., deontic logic). E.g., not until well into graduate school did I learn a system capable of adequately formalizing "Galileo believed the Earth moves. The Earth moves. Therefore, Galileo believed something true" (Church's logic of sense and denotation, which is highly complicated and a work in progress). Philosophers and Logicians typically do not work on practical abilities to deal with simple arguments, but rather developing mathematically precise formal languages and semantics for them. Introductory logic courses, as traditionally taught, make an effective introduction to this ongoing project, but a pretty poor source of basic reasoning skills.

Fourth, although students who already have exceptional reasoning skills will get a lot out a logic class, and work on their own to apply the formal insights to discourse and thinking outside that class, in my experience most students have difficulty bridging that gap on their own. While logic is commonly taught in philosophy departments, what helps philosophy students understand and assess arguments is talking about them, not formalizing them (except for the most mathematically or logically inclined). Years of experience reading and teaching philosophy has done more for my reasoning skills than the logic courses I have taken and taught, and I think that is how it generally goes for people in my field. So I see little value in teaching formal logic, or even an informal version of basic classical logic, as an introductory course for everyone. However, it would be useful to teach a bit of logic to everyone, as a (relatively small) part of a critical thinking course.