Fake Explanations
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
The lecturer, a person in a position of trust, starts with a query coming from a place of deception. The students trusted the teacher to be asking them something relevant and they gave it their best shot. Sure, it's great to always keep a sharp mind and not make assumptions, but it's also a waste of time to question each and every pre-supposition, which is what's required to get to the correct answer of "because you rigged it."
I used to be a middle school science teacher. One year, near the beginning of the school year, I taught an entire lesson on why the Earth was flat. The point of the lesson, of course, was to encourage them not to simply take my word for things but to base their beliefs on evidence and reason.
"Many people believe things based only on what they hear other people say, not based on real evidence. This makes it easy for people to have misconceptions (wrong beliefs). One common misconception is that the Earth is a sphere. The majority of Americans believe this in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
"The Earth is actually a disc (circle). The sky is a dome above the Earth. The sun, moon, and stars are all attached to this dome. The dome rotates, giving us day and night. Underneath the Earth there is water. Around the edges of the Earth is a vast, impenetrable ice sheet. The north pole is at the center of the Earth.
...
"Point #7: The United Nations’ logo correctly shows the shape of the Earth. Since they are the supreme governing body of the Earth, they should know how it is shaped!
...
"Point #9: This one you can try yourself! If the Earth is a sphere, then the ground must be slightly curved. This means that the floors of buildings must be slightly curved. Lay a ball or a pen on the floor. Does it roll?
"Point #10: If the Earth is a spinning sphere, then all of the water in the oceans would be flung into space!
...So you get the point. If I had more time, I would have made the lesson more compelling.
Most students exhibited some form of cognitive disequilibrium. About half ended up going along with the concept of a flat earth. About half were skeptical. A few, especially one student, got quite interested and came back at me the next day with lots of evidence and reasons to the contrary. So it had the intended result for at least a few students. And at the end of it all I think most got the point that we should rely on evidence, not simply what people say.
...well...yes and no. For basically all of our beliefs about things outside of our immediate environment, we rely on evidence that other people have collected. I can't determine that the earth is a sphere by my own observations any more than a man could 5 thousand years ago.
The way the stars and shadows change with even a small shift in latitude was a dead giveaway to men ~2500 years ago. Even if you never left home, you might notice that the masts of ships on the horizon come into view before the hulls. And on second thought, why would a horizon exist on a flat world anyway?
For this example at least, you certainly could rely on first-hand evidence. You might need people to put the pieces together for you, but you can make the raw observations yourself fairly easily.
If the radius of the Earth is r, and you have height h, then from the top of your head to the center of the Earth to the horizon and back to the top of your head is a right angle triangle. The hypotenuse is r+h, one side is r, and the other must be sqrt(2rh + h*h). Under the assumption that r is much bigger than h, that means that the distance to the horizon varies as the square root of the height.
This assertion is surprisingly easy to check with ships. Furthermore if you pay close attention on a commercial aircraft, you can actually see that the horizon is a little bit below level!
Still, there are empirical studies on how people, when presented with information of the form "not X", "X is a myth", etc, will forget the "not" and "is a myth" parts of the information first and thus be left more ill-informed than had they never been presented the information (I'm in the middle of packing, so no link, sorry; but I seem to recall something about a "Myths about the Flu" pamphlet in one such study). Other studies address people's fallibility when it comes to usefully remembering where they learned particular facts. So if you are going to keep doing such lessons it might be helpful to look into such research and perhaps try to assess later just how your lessons had done, aging-well or breaking-down over time, in memory.
Depending on how you did the lesson of course. I could see it as valuable if you were asking the students to explain why your observations don't fit with the actual world.
Yes, you're right. You have to do this well. I ended up having a great relationship with my students that year. But I think my principal had to field calls from confused parents.
"lying"
Right, you wouldn't want to betray their trust. However, my personality and teaching style led me to "pull their leg" every so often which I think is quite age-appropriate for 8th-graders. That's right at the age where the brain is developing new types of abstract thinking, and so the occasional tongue-in-cheek communication really exercises their brain well and if done well can establish a playful rapport with the students. I found that this doesn't work with 6th-graders, though. They are still rather concrete in their thinking.
Indeed, I see this as a kind of QA for science education. If you can trick your students into believe unscientific bullshit then you've failed to teach them science.
Heaven forbid (pardon the expression) they stop automatically trusting everything anyone in a position of authority says to them, and start keeping an eye out for bullshit and/or forming their own opinions. Won't somebody please think of the churches!
> "Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day."
Except this is very often going to be exactly what you are doing. Take nearly any scientific subject you had in school. How much of what you learned still holds? Not to even mention that the text books the children are reading often contain information that has already been disproven.
The lecturer, a person in a position of trust, starts with a query coming from a place of deception
That's a far more important lesson to learn. Certainly it would be time consuming to question "each an every pre-supposition" but some situations may warrant it more than others - particularly when something's happening that defies what you already know about nature.
But why shouldn't students presuppose that they don't understand everything about the subject material (and thus the way they form guesses reflects it)? Why shouldn't they assume that there might be some counter-intuitive wrinkle that was not covered yesterday which will today be explained? The experience of finding such things out is common for them, that is a major reason they are there at school... finding out things they didn't know, and being told things about the depths of a topic that isn't always obvious on the surface.
Do you not see anything the least bit odd about holding them so guilty for making that presumption in this case?
If they see something that is specifically contradicted by theory of x, they should assume there's some wrinkle or some theory of y. They should not say theory of x explains something that flies in the face of theory of x. It means they don't understand theory of x.
You still haven't given a reason for why their formation of guesses should be constrained to only those guesses that presuppose that they understand well "theory of x".
For instance, if their previous lesson on heat conduction included a statement about how different materials conduct differently (meaning but not specifying the differences in thermal conductivities or the dominant type of heat transfer), then that "different" might easily be thought to extend to something that behaves like a Peltier cooler.
If you went to a building regularly and when there, once a week at least, your current understanding of topics was shown to be quite incomplete, at best, then how long is it really rational to continue constraining your guesses about "how" to only just those allowed by your current understanding of all the terms. Eventually it becomes reasonable to start considering that no term is so sacrosanct that you can't revise or extend it in the face of the teacher showing you some clever corner of the great mass of human ingenuity that we have built up over a few millennia for, among other thing, impressing our children.
See, they may have simply built up a reservoir of something like intellectual humility in the face of their own possible ignorance. Something, that if you can't see at least the possibility of, I have to think you may have all but lost entirely.
I neither said nor implied any such thing. No such meaning could be reasonably derived from my statements. I don't appreciate strawman arguments, or suggestions that I have "lost entirely" my "intellectual humility" even though my first post stated "I don't know" is not a stupid answer.
It's not that they had an alternative model of how it could have happened, and tried to offer a explanation with a technical term. It's that they were just throwing out technical terms.
If a teacher shows an egg being pushed into a bottle with a match in it, and one student guesses 'quantum tunneling', that answer is just as wrong as the answers in this essay, and driven by the same process of inserting magic words.
If they had mentally searched through potential technical explanations and couldn't find an answer, and were unwilling to take the time to question every pre-supposition, the correct answer is "I don't know".
Imagine a more natural, everyday scenario. A student gets into a friend's car and notices that the seats on the sunny side of the car are cool and the seats on the shady side of the car are warm. They would easily conclude that the car had not been parked there long. They may even consider that the car had recently been parked on the other side of the street.
And getting students to think about why something might happen before they are told is a very common tactic.
Also, extending a theory is also very common, where they are told something one day, and why it doesn't always work in all situations the next.
I am sure the teacher would love it if everytime she tried to explain something, a student came up with a smart ass answer about how she could have tricked them.
"So why does this cloth pick up the bits of paper?" "Cause you put glue on them" hahahahaha
That is going to be a great class from that point on.
For example, in a science class students are typically presented with a phenomenon, asked to speculate about it, and then presented with a scientific explanation. Do this often enough and a clear pattern emerges - phenomenon -> scientific explanation.
In the case of the article, it was actually phenomenon -> human interference, but it shouldn't be surprising that the students assumed it would fit the usual pattern.
You are given a candle, a book of matches and a box of tacks. You need to mount the candle on the wall in such a way that the candle won't drip on the table below it.
When the problem is presented as above people struggle to come up with a solution. When you simple changes the description of what you are given to: "You are given a candle, a book of matches, a box and some tacks." people are able to quickly solve the problem.
It's not that they had an alternative model of how it could have happened, and tried to offer a explanation with a technical term. It's that they were just throwing out technical terms.
If a teacher shows an egg being pushed into a bottle with a match in it, and one student guesses 'quantum tunneling', that answer is just as wrong as the answers in this essay, and driven by the same process of inserting magic words.
What is it: green, whistling, hanging on a wall? The answer is a herring. Wait, how? Why is it green? I painted it green. Why is it hanging on the wall? I put it there. But why is it whistling? So it would not be too easy to guess!
OK we get it, kids often struggle a bit in science classes and occasionally fumble for answers. This is nothing new as I imagine we have all done it at various points, and chiding students in blog entries doesn't help anyone.
We don't need to hear about what everyone does wrong, unless accompanied by how to do it right. I hardly think it comes as a surprise to most people that they make unfair assumptions in order to get on with life. A method of detecting false assumptions – now that would be nice. We could call it "science".