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On earth it's entirely true that heavy things fall and light things float (like dust, feathers, etc). So you can't blame someone for applying this experience to the moon if they've never thought it through. Also, I wonder if the "heavy boots" part comes from the fact that the Apollo astronauts on video look like they're underwater. In water, you'd need heavy boots to stop yourself from floating. I wouldn't call these misconceptions. More like non-conceptions: there was no preexisting idea before the question was asked that could have been incorrect.

There's also the issue of quality of effort. If you apply effort to reason something through, you can weed out obvious misconceptions on your own and give a better answer. Part of the reason why the people that gave ridiculous answers got lower test scores could be that they are not in the habit of applying much effort when asked science-type questions, so they blurt out the first thing that comes to mind and move on. I suspect that on a more-favored subject most of those people would apply effort and give higher-quality answers. Otherwise, they'd be crippled in all aspects of life. This explains why my mom can't use a computer and I can't use her ultra-sophisticated microwave. She doesn't want to expend effort on the computer and I don't want to expend effort in preparing food.

I think this is an accurate guess as to what is going on.

I wonder if there's a reliable way to get people to start using critical analysis on a subject. Such as when you're training someone how to send an email, this would be helpful information!

They need some internal motivation and the belief that their effort will pay off, i.e. the subject is within their reach to comprehend, and the effort invested (and risk) will yield an acceptable return. If they don't like a subject, there's going to be a debt of remedial knowledge that's missing. Like fully understanding that gravity affects dust and feathers, even though they float in the air.

> This used to get on my nerves, how can people be so stupid? Why won't they just think for a moment!? But recently I've been focussing some effort on learning a language (Spanish) and realise that in that this case the first-principles style of learning that works so well for physics and maths is largely useless

I had the exact same experience. I'm an Engineer, and my entire life I've only been able to learn (and self-teach) by reasoning through first principles. When I can't reason it through, I don't want to learn it "just because"

I never put any effort into learning a language, and always thought it was "dumb". In high school I could say hello and count to 10 in a couple of languages, but that was it.

When I was 27 I started traveling through Central and South America, and wanted to learn Spanish. I honestly didn't know if I was capable, or if my brain and learning style would allow for it.

For the first couple of months I was frustrated and always saying things like "but that doesn't make any sense", "It should be like this" etc.

After a few months, I just stopped trying to reason it through and started going with it, like you said. After about a year and a half I stopped translating into English in my head, I started dreaming in Spanish, and I can now guess words and verb conjugations without consciously realizing I even know that given word. It first started happening when I was a little drunk, which is a good time for me to actually get stuff done in my head, because I stop trying to reason everything through and just go with it.

Stick with it, you'll get it. I can't more highly recommend immersing yourself for a prolonged period.

Thanks! Yeah, getting a little drunk may help, although there's definitely an optimal point after which it has the opposite effect!

Actually I'm living in Madrid now so kind of immersed, the problem is that my girlfriend and I tend to always speak English with each other and I don't need to use Spanish to work either. It's what led me to create my current project: http://readlang.com

That's a nice site. Having seen what you can do with live webcams, e.g. livejasmin (NSFW), I was thinking a similar model could work for language learning. The teachers could be paid. They wouldn't be contracted and they'd be minimally screened, but they'd accumulate popularity. Maybe this could be combined with the readlang model so that you could learn by reading a text together with a teacher. I think it's evident that learning from an actual person, especially one you can hear and practice with, is the most productive way of acquiring a language.

I haven't tried it but I hear that http://www.italki.com/ is pretty good for online Skype lessons where the teachers are paid and have reputations as you describe. Completely agree that interaction with a real person is very important.

I consider it a sign of a good idea when someone else has beaten you to it. Some of the XXX cam sites draw people in by allowing non-paying users to watch and chat, and once you get involved, you pay only for what you use. The home screen shows captures of current action, so it always looks like there's a lot going on. I think there's a formula in there for getting a self-sustaining system going.

I grew up as a space junky, with NASA still running manned missions when I was a kid. It didn't take me very long to understand the concepts of gravity on the moon vs. earth. I trust that if I asked grade-school me, I'd get the right answer.

While it didn't take long to get the physics of the problem, it took a lot longer for me to grasp the social side of things. Specifically, if your grade six teacher says something stupid like this, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from correcting her. I wish I could go back in time and clue me in.

OTOH, if it's a university lab at a science and engineering school, then give 'em hell.

Don't worry, I get a feeling you wouldn't of listened to yourself anyway, just ask your grade six teacher! (I mean no offence by this)

You may not gain anything correcting your sixth grade teacher, but by not correcting her, something can be lost. A world where teachers can spout bullshit without any opposition is not one I want to live in. And given we only have one world...

Perhaps it was irrelevant in your case. Or perhaps your skepticism inspired a fellow student to become an engineer. Who knows?

> I think the people who answered wrongly aren't thinking in a first principles, physics-based mindset, but just instead just recalling previous memories and reasoning in an intuitive, fuzzy kind of pattern-matching.

In the Niven/Pournelle book The Magic Goes Away, one of the wizards takes his apprentices up to a high peak and casts a spell to enable his apprentices to walk on clouds. There is a hidden purpose: In every group class, some of his apprentices goes up the peak and tries to jump on a passing cloud without knowing the spell. This had the effect of raising the intelligence level of his students.

Heinlein proposed that colonists living on the moon would be more intelligent than the general earth population -- simply through natural selection.

Check put the PhD thesis and TED talk of the guy running veritasium. It is all about sciencrofic misconceptions and education. Veritasium is an extension of that work.

TED talk link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQaW2bFieo8

This mention of "gravity boots" blew my mind! You're right, for someone regularly exposed to American TV, this phrase will sound very familiar [1]. I am seriously wondering if that could have measurable impact.

Also, your way of learning Spanish is impressive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_boots

That advice only works for endeavours that are similar to things we've been selected for. Otherwise, the human brain will fall remarkably short with plenty of built-in biases. The fuzzy matching heuristics are broken in well-determined ways, and even being consciously aware of them isn't enough to overcome the problems.

One guess is that you can directly see the blackness of space from the moon (pictures of moon landing) so it doesn't have an encapsulated feel like the earth's atmosphere so one less layer of separation. It feels like (visual perception from photos) it is easier to float off the moon.

My intuitive, fuzzy pattern-matching immediately matched the concept of dropping a pen on the moon to the actual videos of astronauts dropping similar things on the moon, which makes it fairly easy for even the most science-ignorant person to figure out.

It would have been really interesting to ask people to draw a free-body diagram listing out each of force acting on the rock, prior to asking the question of what would happen when dropped. It would be hard to make up a force besides lunar gravity and any Physics 101 student should now answer correctly by analytic reasoning.

They would get it wrong, though. Even the physics 101 students probably wouldn't draw the gravity of the sun, the gravity of the earth and the Milky Way.

If we're discussing reasoning from first principles, is it really so intuitive to disregard the gravity of the Earth in this experiment? Why can you disregard it and still get the correct result?

Exactly right: you have to recognize that the moon is in orbit/freefall with respect to Earth, which means there is no gravitation near its center of mass and only tidal forces away from the center of mass. Then you have to estimate that the tidal forces on the astronaut will be small compared to the moon's gravitational forces on him. None of this even counts centrifugal forces from the moon's rotation or effects of the sun. Nested non-intertial reference frames play merry hell with the simplicity of a FBD sans prior knowledge (or solid logical reasoning) about what can be neglected.

Even with a physics degree, my kneejerk reaction didn't come from first principles. I, too, was doing "stupid pattern matching" -- the only initial difference between me and the floating-pen-people was that I happened to know that gravitational acceleration could be reasonably approximated as constant on large astronomical bodies (moon is g/6). It took a few seconds for the "otherwise the planetary body would disintegrate" argument to occur to me and even longer for the formal mathematical picture.

I'm still astonished at this idea though. I don't understand how a student of Philosophy could live life without regularly thinking about the behaviour of the universe outside our home. Thinking about it often enough that gravity on the moon is a concept close to the surface of awareness.