Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

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> But in a classroom setting, the students should feel free to debate the composition of the moon.

No, they shouldn't, and I'll follow-up as to why below.

>Very quickly, the proposal that the moon is made of Vince Foster would be dismissed as false. This is critical thinking in action.

Given sufficient rhetorical skill and sufficiently many appeals to "open thought" or "questioning assumptions" or "viewpoint diversity" - in short, various forms of postmodern denial of the external world and the strict rules for reasoning about it - a sufficiently motivated student or professor will manage to make "the moon is made of Vince Foster" the center of attention.

We are living in the same world, with the same academic institutions, which was fooled by the Sokal Hoax, and we are also dealing with the human psychology of social proof, in which giving time and energy to considering an idea in-detail is considered evidence for the idea's truth (rather than evidence for its vagueness or logical complexity).

We cannot allow academia to be consumed with discussions over whether gravity is a social construction, especially not because right-wing partisans feel that only mostly owning the field of economics means that academia is engaged in conspiracy against them.

But I think you have indirectly hit upon the solution.

The rules of good arguments, good logic, and relevant evidence are the points to emphasize and enforce.

So disallow any and all appeals to social proof, and you eliminate the ability for these people to waste everyone else's time.

If someone wants to argue the Earth is 6,000 years old, let them take a couple of cracks at it. But once it's clear they are deviating from the rules of scientific reasoning in science class, make it clear that is the reason for disallowing their arguments and move on.

"We cannot allow academia to be consumed with discussions over whether gravity is a social construction, especially not because right-wing partisans feel that only mostly owning the field of economics means that academia is engaged in conspiracy against them."

Take this sentence, for example. It's not clear at all how the second clause logically follows from the first.

Yes, because it is imperative to teach and learn by rote. If any idea is commonly held to be true, there is no reason to have any discourse. Even for ideas that seem to be binary this is just ridiculous -- you will note that this position would preclude discussing topics and discoveries regarding a round earth, DNA, electricity, and many other understood "truths" over human history.

Discourse and unpopular ideas drive discovery and learning more than memorization ever will. It does not mean that unpopular views are "right" it means that the act of understanding, listening to other perspectives and being able to construct your own beliefs in that discourse is a net win and absolutely core to higher learning; even if the unpopular view is garbage.

Who gets to decide which ideas are off limits?

The group with the most power evidently.

The right-thinking people.

The epistemological method in use in the class, so for instance in theology appeals to faith or words written thousands of years ago would be acceptable, while you'd probably want to reject appeals to logic/rationality.

In science you'd want to use the scientific method and reject appeals to faith.

> The epistemological method in use in the class, so for instance in theology appeals to faith or words written thousands of years ago would be acceptable, while you'd probably want to reject appeals to logic/rationality.

Theology, while its foundational principles may be established on the basis of revelation such as scripture, often proceeds from foundational principles by logic.

The foundational principles are usually logically inconsistent with each other.

Please explain how you proceed logically from the position that eating from the tree of knowledge is sin?

Given that eating from the tree of knowledge is sin ...

=)

"Please explain how you proceed logically from the position that eating from the tree of knowledge is sin?"

This doesn't seem hard. Apologist hat on.

It wasn't the knowledge that was bad, it's that the knowledge was attained by doing what God said not to. Certainly, we can condemn things done in pursuit of knowledge - Mengele being probably the easiest example.

That hat fit kinda funny.

> It wasn't the knowledge that was bad, it's that the knowledge was attained by doing what God said not to.

This is merely an interpretation (incidentally, of which all text requires). How do you know it is the correct one?

Personally? I've no idea if it's the correct one. Not subscribing to a school of thought that admits supernatural origin of these stories, I'm not really sure what "the correct one" would mean for me.

I interpreted fleitz (in the bit I quoted) as saying "if knowledge is bad, then we shouldn't be using logic to get us more knowledge, so the whole exercise is absurd." I was pointing out that there's at least one out.

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