
Fake Explanations - unwantedLetters
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/
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kakuri
It took several years, but eventually someone posted a sensible comment below
the article - "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer."

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."

~~~
techiferous
"The lecturer, a person in a position of trust, starts with a query coming
from a place of deception."

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.

~~~
megablast
Dangerous, you really don't want your students thinking you are lying to them
every lesson.

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.

~~~
techiferous
"Dangerous"

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.

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techiferous
Context had a lot to do with this. Science students expect to be presented
with a counterintuitive occurrence coupled with an enlightened explanation
from the teacher.

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.

~~~
jey
Right, but the point is that that kind of blind deference to authority is
dangerous.

~~~
megablast
It is not blind deference, it is natural for students to enter a classroom
during class time to learn something.

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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
The point is that they're not learning science, they're just learning new
forms of pseudoscientific jargon. Which could be considered to be more
dangerous than remaining untaught, because now they have a false sense of
understanding the world when in actuality they merely have different names for
the same unscientific superstitious mumbo jumbo.

~~~
smcl
See I read the article as saying that the students are at fault for being all
to ready to throw answers at the teacher which they didn't understand. Whereas
I'd say that the students are simply a product of their environment, one
(created by the teacher or a previous teacher, or a physics dept as a whole)
where emphasis has shifted from understanding a subject into hitting enough
keywords in your answer to get a passing grade - even if it turns out that the
actual question might be a bit silly.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Agreed. But consider the possibility that the lesson today was exactly that; a
smart student will figure it out, just like we did.

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cema
The story and some of the comments here reminded me of an old joke.

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!_

~~~
Natsu
You sure it wasn't red?

~~~
cema
My dad told me so, I swear!

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smcl
I dislike the tone of both this and "Where Does A Tree Get It's Mass"
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480118>). They both have a rather smug,
superior air about them that I find really irritating.

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.

~~~
sesqu
This tone is what makes it difficult to me to read lesswrong, and bayesian
stuff in general. I'm sure it's unintended, but when I wanted to look into
bayesianism the only thing I found was an air of superiority – and I'm
supposed to be the target audience (I feel strongly about assumptions). In the
end I concluded it's mostly an inner-platform effect, where you include a
configuration system and then claim your software is better because it can
meet the client's needs perfectly; all they have to do is tell it exactly how
they want it to behave.

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".

