My Favorite Liar (2008)
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
I did this with some lectures (law, but to undergrad forensics class) and ran into a cultural limitation. A large subset of my students were Asian, kids of Asian immigrants. They had significant issues with speaking up when they disagreed with the obvious lies I told. They internalized the conflict and assumed that they were misunderstanding the lesson. Or they thought that I was making a mistake and didn't want to embarrass me by pointing it out. Then when someone else was brave enough to challenge me by pointing out the absurdity, these students felt left out. I really noticed this cultural limitation while talking about a historical US supreme court case. I said that the judges were wrong, that they were showing an improper bias. Then one kid challenged me saying basically "who are you to criticize a Judge!" He was genuinely offended and more than a little scared that I would so casually "disrespect" a legal authority. It had taken him a while to build up the courage to say what he did. That is when I realized teaching techniques reliant upon students challenging authority might not be the best idea for all students.
(I did explain that cases at the supreme court only gets there because someone openly disagreed with the decisions of lower courts. The western legal system is based on constantly challenging authority.)
That depends. Do you just want to teach the material? For some people the cultural thing is so strong they won't ask questions because it may imply that you're a bad teacher and offend you. You have to at least address it that much or you're not going to be able to teach the material effectively.
Teacher: Murder is illegal.
Students: take notes
Teacher: A man kills another who was threatening him with a deadly weapon. Was this illegal?
Asian Students: silently unwilling to contradict the earlier statement from the classroom authority
I don't think that's an accurate generalization of Asian or any other culture. From what you've described, it sounds like you ran into was a very specific circumstance where you voiced an opinion about a real court decision which a student disagreed with, and they challenged you to justify that disagreement.
I wonder what OP's professor's experience was with various cultures. I would bet that nobody struggled to catch on to the game, even those raised with a relatively high default respect for authority who would usually be unwilling to challenge it.
I think what you've described in your anecdote is a clash over a contradiction of real authority, opining that a judge was incorrect. I wouldn't be surprised if upbringing was a good predictor of the likelihood that a student question a teacher who questions somebody perceived as an even higher authority.
That's a qualitative difference.
For OP's prof, the students know from the beginning that if they catch the prof in a lie they "win the prize" per the explicit protocol. Even for a student like me who is reluctant to participate in such a lecture, I'd feel both a responsibility and a measure of safety in blurting out that I caught the prof in a lie!
For you, a critical mass of undergrads almost certainly didn't know how most law lectures happen. Maybe "arguing" with you gets them "the prize," but maybe it gets them in trouble, or just brings them more confusion, frustration, etc.
Or maybe-- just maybe-- this undefined behavior leads to a clever optimization that ends up deleting all their harddrives. (Sorry, I couldn't resist an undefined behavior joke.)
The guy was an absolute genius. He helped write some amount (a lot?) of the FORTRAN compiler for at least one of its variants. And... we used state of the art numerical methods. We had a textbook on numerical methods, sure, but this was always just a starting place for what we used. (To this day, I've got some numerical algorithms I coded in FORTRAN that can crush those from common libraries.) If you missed a lecture, there was no making it up by reading the book. You were SCREWED if you didn't get a really good copy of the notes.
Another thing: When lecturing, he barely glanced at his notes even in the middle of complicated derivations of error bounds and things like that.
But here's the real point of this discussion: He had a way of testing that produced similar results to what this article is talking about.
We wouldn't be tested on a general survey of the methods we covered in the class. No. We would be tested on just one or maybe two of the methods we had learned over the entire semester, and the exam questions would be a DEEP, DEEP dive into that method. (I had this guy for 3 semesters, always the same.) When asked what the exam would be on, he'd basically just say: "The numerical methods we've covered thus far". So you had no idea which method you'd need to learn to the maximum degree of depth. This forced you to simply study the shit out of them all. I mean, you had to know some really subtle things about the method if you wanted to get a reasonable grade on the exam.
I actually grew to appreciate this as a testing method. It was the first class I'd ever had where I actually really needed to study. And study I did. Every other class would involve at most a cursory review of a couple of example problems I thought I might run into. This class though was always a minimum of like 3 full days of complete and thorough review, in teams with the other students.
>It was the first class I'd ever had where I actually really needed to study
I wish we had a way of challenging every smart kid with proper material. When I got to university and suddenly had to try, it was quite a shock to my system. I could, in theory, have used the first 18 years of my life much more productively.
The real tragedy there is that how to handle being challenged is a super important skill. And many of our best and brightest don't get to practice it all until it's too late. You can't learn a skill without practice. That's just not how it works.
It makes no sense to me at all that children from all different backgrounds and abilities go through an identical curriculum at an identical rate. Like, have the people that set that up never met humans and human children before?
My sister has the luxury of home-schooling her kids. And so they all have workbooks they can go through at their own individualized pace. As a result, one of them, my 6 year old nephew is now at about a 7th or 8th grade level in mathematics. He just loves doing math. Can you imagine how long that kid would have had to wait to actually be challenged in math if he went through the public school system? ...And they're actively trying to get rid of advanced study paths for such kids.
It's much easier when there's only a small group of kids - but who's to say the massive schools shouldn't be close to large groups of one-room schoolhouses instead of the age-segregated blocks we have now?
Done correctly this helps all kids, except those who just happen to be perfectly aligned with their age.
This can’t replace school - you still need socialization, disciple, adult supervision, sport, etc. But academically this would beat my high school experience six-love.
And part of that may be having the same teacher or group of teachers throughout the student's career, and with authority and flexibility to modify the curriculum as needed.
But we'd also have to admit that some students are going to do better than others, and the outcomes may not be all equal and at the same time.
When my report card came out, I was astonished to find I had a D (the lowest passing grade). My lesson for that quarter: it is impossible to fail at school (this lesson proved to generalize all the way through high school). At this point, I stopped putting any effort at school into something I didn't find personally gratifying. Most of my fellow cohort of "smart kids" were mystified by this; they would go through an existential crisis in the very rare event that they got a B+. Pretty much any of the straight-A students could have had almost-straight-As with 10% of the effort they put in to ensure they would never get a B+.
When I finally reached college, it became possible to fail, but still not particularly easy. I would skip evening exams to save myself the trouble of having to reschedule my weekly D&D session. I only studied when failing an exam would put me in danger of being kicked out of school (this happened maybe two or three times). I graduated with a C average.
I'm not sure what the moral of this story is other than to say that some kids will study no matter the difficulty of the material while other kids will not.
https://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/jgrice/psyc4333/FiveF...
I think GPA is closer to a proxy for (A + g) * (B + conscientiousness) with values A and B varying from school to school and department to department (as well as the threshold for "perfect" varying). I had 3 roommates with higher conscientiousness than me flunk out, so YMMV.
[edit]
While we are talking personality traits, I think a high GPA is probably also a proxy for neuroticism; certainly many of the straight-A students exhibited these traits (as does the child of mine who gets the best grades). FWIW I score low in both conscientiousness and neuroticism on a Big Five test.
[edit] changed from "not convinced this is true" to "not convinced it's a very good proxy"
“Proxy” isn’t great phrasing, “correlates with” is better.
One could argue it was a failing on your parents to set proper boundaries/discipline. I’m a lot of environments, you’d certainly not be helped by it.
If you did well though, then who is to say?
My gut feeling is that I was successful in spite of these things, not because of these things. With counterfactuals there's no way to be sure though.
> One could argue it was a failing on your parents to set proper boundaries/discipline. I’m a lot of environments, you’d certainly not be helped by it.
My parents did everything short of beating me to try and get me to do my homework. After school they sat me at the dining room table with nothing but my textbooks, pencil, and paper. I had to have my list of HW assignments signed off on by my teacher; if it wasn't signed I wasn't allowed to go out and play after school. All of that resulted in me sometimes doing my homework.
By the time I was in high school they loosened up on the structure just because they believed that I only had 4 years left to figure out how to do this on my own, but I still was banned from attending various social events because of my lack of effort in school. By the end of 10th grade, I had grown distant from my main group of friends just because I essentially never hung out with them outside of school so there was a lot of missing shared-experiences.
As a parent now, I have no idea what they could have done differently. My own personal nightmare is one of my kids acting like I did (despite my parents saying I was the "easy kid")...
It’s far from perfect, and it has sometimes come at the cost of heavy mistakes before I figured out why something wasn’t working.
It does give me the ability to explain and help my kids try and find what works for them, and I have been materially successful enough to afford them options sometimes.
Which is huge. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve also faced many hard truths that others have refused to, and worked my ass off too, to get there.
I still do need to work my ass off every day.
One consolation perhaps - I have several friends who were similar that I grew up with whose parents didn’t stop short at beatings.
They succeeded very well in a specific environment afterwards (military), but at the cost of non-trivial mental health issues that are hard to properly describe. A inability to say No to an authority figure being one of them, perhaps, even when it leads to catastrophe. And a severe difficulty in trusting themselves to be independent thinkers.
They’ve objectively done well for themselves by societies standards, as have I. But each of us has our own regrets.
Such is life I guess?
Hard material with someone who doesn’t understand it or isn’t interested in it just burns students out, or doesn’t go anywhere.
There aren’t a lot of people capable and interested in doing it for every subject, and even fewer interested in doing it for the amounts typically paid in school.
It is unfortunate.
We do. It’s called acceleration. It’s not used because no one cares. The school system is not set up for learning. If it was students who were proficient at grade level could learn the material of the next grade up or two levels up.
https://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Nation_Deceived/ND_v1....
But it also has one major downside: Students may not learn all of the material equally well. If the random point in the material space that the exam focuses on happens to be a point that the student didn't learn as well, the exam result will appear as if the student learned all of the material poorly.
In other words, the exam has higher random variance.
That does not sound like it would promote good teaching.
I wonder how much of the effect is due merely to increased attention from the novelty. What I mean is, could a similar effect be achieved by some other method that grabs attention in some other way without introducing incorrect material?
It hadn't landed near me until the last lecture and the lecturer said "Is this the first time that it's landed near you?". I replied with "Yes", to which he responded with "Damn, that was I question I asked! Throw the plane"
My colleague asked how the students could be so disciplined. The professor said it was simple: they knew he would pick one at random, so they all had pre-prepared summaries of the lecture based on studying my colleague's submitted lecture notes the day before.
If students have to memorize a summary before the lecture then something feels wrong. Good for the lecturer, I guess.
For a true expert level example of this process, read the novel The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (no it is not science fiction and no, do not spoil it by reading Wikipedia)
The same is true for physics, but there it's the experiments that are mostly taken on faith; who has actually seen particles rebound from the dense inner cores of atoms? Yet we all believe in the structure of the atom as presented in intro physics/chemistry courses.
As far as economics, that's more like theological studies than math and physics, so the true / false determination probably just amounts to looking up the relevant passage in the appropriate holy text.
You definitely see enough that you don't need to take the models on faith.
If your math is adequate to the task (basic calculus) I suggest you check out an intermediate microeconomics textbook like Varian’s or McCloskey’s[1]. Macroeconomics is less firmly anchored but it too is very far from theology.
[1] Full text of The Applied Theory of Price
by this point, considering the amount of technical understanding around narrative, storytelling, and enganging media production, the fact that these matters are so dry, complex, and such a slog to work through, feels like a choice not to make them any more accessible.
For any given obscure field, the set of people who have mastered it is small. The intersection of that with the set of people who are great explainers is very small.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833984
Not so recent one from 12 years ago:
My favorite liar (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833984 - Jan 2022 (33 comments)
My Favorite Liar (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680424 - May 2014 (1 comment)
One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=959550 - Nov 2009 (58 comments)
* My Favorite Liar (Econ prof's lectures include a lie that students must find)* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124386 - Feb 2008 (2 comments)
The thing is, this rests on the (far more important) teaching skill of "presenting an actual, consistent, interrogable worldmodel to the students, rather than a list of isolated factoids to memorize".
If you don't have that -- if you're doing the latter -- you're just imposing a huge, tedious workload that doesn't translate into a persistent understanding.