One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar

zenmoments.org

376 pointsyason58 comments

Excellent, excellent. Could this be applied on a wider scale, or would the loss of novelty dull the effect on students?

It seems like it would only work for subjects where students have the capacity to figure out errors on their own. It would be disastrous in a foreign language class if you were told the word for "mother" was "banana".

As I've mentioned in another discussion, I once had a math professor who would sneak in impossible problems into the homework (e.g. prove the continuum hypothesis). It worked very well to get us to spend countless hours just trying things out, and eventually to spur us to prove decidability of the problems, all of which made us much better. But I imagine it would get old fast if every class I took did something similar.

When I was learning Norwegian that happened to me. Every weeks lesson had new words, but we were not told what they meant and we were supposed to figure out them on our own. As you would expect I translated and memorized a few wrong every week. This had a snowball effect of making the class harder and harder as I tried to learn new words and unlearn the words/rules I previously memorized incorrectly.

It's interesting that you feel that way. I've taken two foreign languages at the university level, and they were both taught in an "immersion" style manner (that is to say, all the instruction was in the native language) and have found it beneficial rather than harmful. But perhaps I reach for a dictionary more often than you did.

I'm guessing the "figure them out on their own" precluded using a dictionary? Otherwise you're right, a dictionary should solve the problem.

>> It would be disastrous in a foreign language class if you were told the word for "mother" was "banana".

How so? 20 min with a bilingual dictionary(which is more than likely in the back of the textbook) would be enough to verify definitions. Though I don't think it would have the desired effect since it doesn't really promote learning just rote fact checking.

> How so?

Learning a foreign language is all about internalization. It takes time and is hard to correct. The last thing you want is to inadvertently internalize the wrong thing. Root vocabulary would be relatively easy to fix, but pronunciation and grammar would be very hard.

Yeah, pronunciation would suck if the only person who knew how to say it correctly was just fing with you.

As soon as I read that comment I thought the exact same thing; however, I thought about it for math. Not above calculus level math (because the students in those classes should be smart enough to call something fishy out immediately), but high school or elementary school math. A simple lie could destroy a students math career. Especially one a day!

When I was In a numerical approximations course, one other student in the class and I managed to correct the professor about once a week. He wasn't deliberately lying; actually, it was because he had a very poor textbook to work with and was trusting it too much. We were just in the process of doing this again when he demonstrated that you can legitimately say O(n) when you mean O(n^2).

Come to find out, he was a math prof, and very much not an algorithms guy. There are two versions of big-oh notation: one for algorithmic complexity, and one for accuracy of approximations. They are exact opposites of each other: higher numbers are "better" for approximation accuracy, at least in the sense they were used in the course. He was unaware of the former, but both of us were unaware of the latter.

Not such a great teacher, no. Still, the last mistake was an entirely reasonable one. It's a great example of how even math students need to be on their toes.

One thing I'd like to mention is that math and science profs rarely mind being corrected when they're wrong (assuming it's done respectfully). I've seen profs in other disciplines become positively incensed when a student tried to challenge what the professor was saying, but I've never seen a math or science prof do so. Your mileage may vary (and I admit this is really nothing more than anecdotal evidence of anything), but I think it says something about the culture of science vs other disciplines.

I can verify this for my math profs. I guess it has something to do with coming closer to `one single truth' in math than every where else.

Oh yes I agree. I personally am a math guy. My algebra two teacher was...well...Let's say that I sat in the back of the class the entire year and just corrected him several times a day. Almost all of the people who left that class struggled to understand concepts of their next math course because they:

1) Didn't have a solid understanding of algebra. and 2) Didn't even learn all of the algebraic concepts.

I was fine (because I could recognize the concepts even though he made a TON of mistakes) and skipped (precalc/) trig (which I learned during..) and went right on to AP calc . But the point is that the fact that the teacher made so many mistakes led to the students not being able to comprehend slightly higher level math. (and him being fired)

It's one the big-O notation and the other the small-o notation, or so? There's also the \omikron or \Omega notation (or so) that has to be asymptotically correct (up to a factor) in both directions.

reminds me of a Monty Python skit

No it doesn't.

I'm reminded of the reference book "Writing CGI Applications with Perl." In the introduction the author warned that there will be several purposeful mistakes in every chapter as an exercise to the reader to find and correct. Using this technique in a reference manual was bad enough but it made things even more difficult given that there was no key.

I got rid of the book. Tough to learn from a book that lies.

How absurd. The best part of this learning technique is the discussion and the collaboration between students to solve the puzzle - you even learn by pointing out false positives, with someone correcting you and reinforcing that bit of information. A textbook / reference book is entirely different from a classroom - what was that author thinking?

I think that author was thinking "hmm, how can I skip a long editorial fact-checking process without looking completely unprofessional."

In fact, this is happening to me right now around the third time in the row, and it still is interesting.

However, in our case, this is happening, because this is the third time in a row we organized and talked a professor to give us a lecture around 6 people (which, at the moment, is 1/3 of all students in this term and study course). The conclusion is that the professor is not that prepared, and because the entire course is pretty math-heavy, errors in proofs and lemmas just slip in. Pretty often, they are just little typos, but it still is fun to hunt and spot them.

Why is the sibling to this (my) comment dead? I don't see anything horribly wrong with it!

I've seen this happen to users before. Looking at tomjen2's history, all comments from the last 11 days have been killed with 1 point. I take this to mean that they were killed quickly and automatically before anyone voted on them.

Of course, if you aren't +showdead, you would never know.

My guess would be http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936379 had something to do with it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=796014

shhhh!

I see.

I think the "do not notify" policy is evil in most cases.

Humans should not be treated like spam bots. Look how much time/effort he wasted writing perfectly legit comments afterwards.

For those, like me, wondering why this sounds eerily familiar:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124386

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/my-favorite-lia.html

It's great to see it posted again - though I do prefer that original overcoming bias version. I can only speculate as to why it received only 30 points two years ago. The key differences seem to be a) the linkbait title, b) the bolding of random sections within the post itself (which I found made it uglier to read) and c) the picture at the top of the post. Of course there's also d) we had fewer people.

I don't know what it is, and maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems posts like this tend to attract a lot of low-signal comments. Perhaps this can be used to our advantage: every few weeks, pg could let a few really linkbaity and low-grade posts past the filters. Pictures of cats, or something equally fun but inane. Something from the top of Digg. Everyone who upvoted such a post would have their voting rights suspended. Would this help or harm the quality of posts here?

Presentation is an important component in blogging as in other forms of presentation.

The arrangement of whitespace in the original post made it harder to read. The intro line in the second version is far better than the nondescript blurb in the overcomingbias version. The picture is more appealing, and underlines the tagline. All of these things conspire to ensure that instead of 1 out of 10 people actually reading the post, perhaps 1 in 3 read it.

The lesson: if you're going to publish great blog posts, make sure they're published in a great format that also drags the reader in.

The defining characteristic of this story is not the lying part, but professors who deviate from strict curriculum and think about how best to make their students think. My particular canonical example - Literature and Criticism Seminar (An English course) - after 14 weeks of reading passages of poetry and prose and discussing them in class, our final exam was a wine-tasting exam. An opportunity to take the skills we had learned and apply them to a different domain, and have some fun.

The class was very small (8 people) so it was easy for the professor to do this and not have to worry about evaluation issues.

Sounds like a great teacher. I had a prof who was a bit more sadistic/incompetent about this. He would incorporate a falsehood into his lectures, not always and not always just one. When challenged he would admit it but if no one caught the mistake he would let us live on in ignorance. This was a fluid dynamics course so you could frequently find the "lie" by carefully going over the algebra in his derivations. I'm pretty sure this was just a clever ploy to conceal the fact that once in a while he did, in fact, make mistakes.

I don't even try to conceal the fact that I make mistakes. I tell my students that I'll sometimes lie and often screw up, and that they shouldn't trust me.

Sadly, they rarely listen. I'm told that 95% of what I say is right, and it's not worth the effort to figure out what falls into the remaining 5%.

I find that most engineering teachers do this, at least in the upper level classes and especially to see if the class is paying attention. However the classes where it is done to see if people are paying attention are more often than not the classes that have a bad teacher who frequently makes mistakes, such as my dynamics teacher (thank god for hibbeler).

I'm going to steal this for the ethics class I teach. Heh heh heh.

Of course, I'm still trying to develop a grading curve based on game theory and economics. Given there are only enough points available for 10% of you to get A's, most of you will get B's, and some of you will get C's. OR all of you can work together to get B+'s.

This probably wouldn't work. BUT I think it has possibilities ... Any ideas?

There is a professor at my university who is known for doing something like this. He says for every exam that if /no one/ writes anything on the exam, everyone in the class will get an A on the exam. But, if one person writes anything on the exam, then he will grade all the exams normally.

Apparently he's never had an entire class leave all their exams blank.

Hehehe. Prisoner's Dilemma, writ large.

That's evil.

Simple things like this seem to be the most effective. This is particularly interesting, because it forces students to check what they (as a class) find most difficult, in order to find what they missed.

From my experience, there seem to be two classes of professors, those that interact with the class, and those that don't. It is relatively easy for a professor to interact with and engage the class when the class is small, in the 20-30 student range. Personally, I don't care much for these classes because when the professor interacts with the class, all of the interaction becomes dominated by one or two students. Then there are the really good professors who teach a lecture-sized class, but still engage the students in the learning process. They have 50-100 students (or more), but still manage to get the students involved with learning. I have only had one professor do this particularly well, and I enjoyed his class far more than any of my others at the time. The interaction dynamic is very different in a class this sized. One or two students can't dominate the professor's attention, it just isn't possible.

One or two students can't dominate the professor's attention, it just isn't possible.

You've clearly never seen me in a classroom setting. :-P

What a great strategy to help students focus -- and wow for the most difficult part.

He claims to have learned that

> "Experts" can be wrong

While I agree with this, and enjoyed the story, the story does not make this particular point well. In the story, the lecturer is basically perfect.

The expert lecturer remained fully in control of the situation at all times, had the students doing what he wanted, and was never wrong by accident.

In general, imperfect experts can be wrong by accident, can lose control of situations, etc... It's common, but the linked story isn't an example of an expert going wrong.

Except his point isn't what you say it is. You quote only:

> "Experts" can be wrong

His point in its entirety is:

> “Experts” can be wrong, and say things that sound right – so build a habit of evaluating new information and check it against things you already accept as fact.

Emphasis mine.

Again, while that's a good lesson, the story doesn't teach it. The story only gives an example of evaluating new information when you're told it will contain a lie.

You're nitpicking. Humans (and all animals) operate by constructing mental approximations and generalizations. This does in fact teach students not to trust authority.

I think what would teach not to trust authority is an explanation of why it's bad to trust authority. The story does not contain such an explanation.

Secondarily, I think an example where people trusted authority and got burned would work. The story doesn't contain such an example.

Thirdly, one could have an example where people refused to trust authority and got good results. The story doesn't have that either.

What it does contain is students who did what their teacher wanted and got good results by going along with the authority's lessons.

I agree that the story does not explain WHY it is bad to trust authority. But it tells the story of HOW the author have learn to mistrust authority.

It's one thing to know that you shouldn't trust authority, it's another thing to have practiced it. And this is exactly what the professor teaches: giving the students the tools and practice of constant skepticism toward even qualified authority.

You claim that the story doesn't teach that. Yet that lesson, in those words, is at the end of the article in the list of things that student learned from that professor.

That someone said "I learned X from Y" is not evidence he's correct.

True. But conversely that you don't see how that someone learned X from Y is not evidence that he's wrong.

The experience of seeing how easy it is for an almost correct statement to sound authoritative, or to be arrived at from almost correct reasoning, does cement the lesson of how easy it is for experts to be wrong. The practice of listening to an expert sounding authoritative and listening for the mistake gives practice in that skill. Applying that practice with other experts would give ample verification of the value of listening to "experts" with that care.

I am not at all surprised that this would teach the lesson and it would stick.

The professor wasn't perfect. As has been pointed out above, the last lecture did indeed contain a lie.

"On the days when nobody caught the lie, we all sat in silence, looking at each other as Dr. K, looking quite pleased with himself, said with a sly grin: “Ah ha! Each of you has one falsehood in your lecture notes. Discuss amongst yourselves what it might be, and I will tell you next Monday. That is all.”"

If, as the article said, he repeated this message as usual at the end of the lecture, it was a lie. (Unless, of course, the students all wrote down his oft-repeated message in their lecture notes - which I find unlikely.)

If they did write that down in their lecture notes, that would actually be an instance of the Liar's Paradox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox

This comment is spot on. To add, this story is from the perspective of the student, so he gives his professor (his self-admitted favorite) a bit of a shine.

Nothing wrong with that at all, but a salient point to remember.

That aside, I wish I had more professors that engaged the students and not just the content of the lectures. Sounds like this professor loved to teach, which, IMO, is more valuable to the students than expert knowledge, at least at the undergraduate level.

"...an arousing melange of exasperated groans..."

I'm pretty sure the author meant "rousing," but I think I prefer this more titillating version.

This will be off topic, but ... what if he makes two lies in a class? :D

I'm surprised that nobody has pointed out yet(that I could find) The lie in that last lecture was: "Each of you has one falsehood in your lecture notes. "

It seems it would also be a great way to keep students from mindlessly repeating whatever they read or are taught.

Do we really need to repost this story every few months?

First I've seen it and I've been here almost 2 years, the value of a community like HN is the commentary on the links as much as the links themselves.

I think President Bush used this technique as well.

(Sorry, couldn't help myself.)

He uses the more interesting "One thing in every one of my speeches will be true" technique. Makes for entertaining press conferences.

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