
The Case for Teaching Ignorance - trevordixon
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/opinion/the-case-for-teaching-ignorance.html
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Animats
There's a lot to be said for this, especially in biology, where there's so
much we don't know, and textbooks don't make this clear. Brain science is even
worse. We still don't know how memories are stored, either the mechanism or
the format.

Economics remains badly understood. The predictive power of economic models is
low. Psychology and sociology are even worse.

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hyperion2010
I think the point here is not that the limits of knowledge are not know, but
that the focus of course work often stops at what is know. If you are training
future experts you should spend the vast majority of the time focusing on the
interesting questions that don't have answers right now. The realm of the
'textbook' known is so small for many scientific domains that in an ideal
world it would be relegated to summer reading (yes, I'm implying one should
read most if not all of that 800 page textbook, or many curated sections from
it).

~~~
TTPrograms
"The realm of the 'textbook' known is so small for many scientific domains
that in an ideal world it would be relegated to summer reading"

It seems like you're implying that the 4-8 years graduate students spend,
starting in undergrad, learning what's already known about their field could
be relegated to a single summer? That's fairly outrageous, given how many
thousands of scientists have been building increasingly complex theories and
categorizations of knowledge over the past few hundred years.

~~~
hyperion2010
I'm exaggerating a bit but mostly because my experience is that the kinds of
questions that are asked on tests a lower levels of science education are
things that you simply know at higher levels and not because you were tested
on them but because you have to use them and apply them every day. Better to
have courses that expect you to have read all of Molecular Biology of the Cell
in advance and present material with that expectation. That way students can
see the real applications of the knowledge that we build on and not just see
it as some stupid thing to be memorized for the next certificate. I get no
prize for knowing IUPAC nomenclature, but I couldn't even start to do my work
without it. The expectation should be as such, you get a prize for thinking
creatively about how one could answer questions or for coming up with
answerable questions that haven't been asked before.

I actually think that formal courses are an excellent way to learn 'textbook'
material, but they are far more useful when you know you are going to use that
knowledge in the future. The question for me is whether, at the highest
levels, we should be focusing our courses, and rewarding people for the
equivalent of learning how to walk when we need them to fly.

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sandworm101
This sort of course isn't for medical school. Maybe undergrad, but to-be
doctors have enough on their plate without focusing on the blank areas of
scientific knowledge. Once you at a professional school the time for fostering
curiosity is long gone. If you;ve dedicated much of your life to a subject
then you are already curious.

I hesitate to say such a course could be useful at the highschool level. It
would certainly encourage independent leaning and humble many subjects. But it
would also become political. It's a fine line between teaching the limits of
biological knowledge and preaching intelligent design.

~~~
kaitai
It is quite important for medical school. Doctors give poor care when they
say, "You don't have a problem," rather than, "Science does not know how to
deal with this problem." Examples of this include "complementary" medicine
that is supported by science
([http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/upshot/labels-like-
alterna...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/upshot/labels-like-alternative-
medicine-dont-matter-the-science-does.html)) but which doctors are not
necessarily educated about, and even worse, the false certainty around
prostate cancer screening which has led to urination problems and erectile
dysfunction and even death for many men who would not have died from prostate
cancer
([http://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/research/overtreatment](http://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/research/overtreatment)).

Doctors _must_ know the limits of their scientific knowledge or they endanger
the lifespan and the quality of life of their patients.

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euske
I'd love to see a similar approach to CS-related topics. We don't know how to
solve many security problems (key delivery, etc). We don't know what exactly
makes a good user interface (many psychological/natural/social factors that we
aren't aware). And we're yet to know how to write a correct program, let alone
what "correctness" is. We don't even know what's a good way approach the
problem, or even discuss it.

~~~
dingaling
It took me nearly two decades working in IT before I was in a position where I
was respected, secure and comfortable enough to be able to say "I don't know"
in front of the business client.

If I had said that even after five years on the job I would have been hauled
into a meeting room by my manager and dressed-down for giving a 'poor image of
the Technology department'.

Unfortunately that's also one of the reasons we have so much buggy code;
people are afraid to express their lack of knowledge of a particular subject,
so they kludge on through with some code pasted from a Google search.

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stephengillie
I'm not sure about the philosophy of it all, but I think the concept to be
conveyed is an understanding of how large a domain of knowledge is, and an
understating of how little of that domain you have removed the "fog of war"
from. Of course, this is a Bayesian interpretation, believing everything
exists, we have but to go discover and interpret it.

Do others perceive a domain of knowledge to grow and change as one interacts
with it and asks questions?

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animefan
I don't buy it. Any academic presentation of a subject includes the limits of
current knowledge. Maybe this is not emphasized enough, but it's a matter of
extent, not a qualitative refusal to acknowledge ignorance.

A great example is that mainstream academic economists are _very_ open about
not being able to explain why monetary stimulus works. At one point (maybe
this goes back to Keynes or even further) people attributed it to sticky
prices. But current research cannot come up with a reasonable mechanism based
on sticky prices that would explain the magnitude of the effect of monetary
policy. Currently people accept that what we observe on the macro level cannot
be explained on the micro level.

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rgarrett88
Medical science has limits? I thought we proved we're just finite state
machines that are occasionally jostled into unfavorable states that can only
balanced by external chemicals.

~~~
civilian
Can't tell whether you're being sarcastic or didn't read the article.

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kaa2102
"We are blind to our blindness." Daniel Khaneman

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jessaustin
"But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know."
SecDef Donald Rumsfeld

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rimantas
I don't get why he is laughed at because of that quote. I personally find it
quite elegant.

~~~
kaa2102
The quote wasn't spoken eloquently but it was profound. He was speaking truth
but it was also amazingly ironic. Why risk and assume so much about success in
Iraq with the quagmire of obvious unknowns?

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aaron695
It blows my mind that we don't know if Japanese intestines are longer than
Westerners even though it's a popular meme in Japan.

~~~
kazinator
It blows my mind that there is some myth about the Japanese still floating
around in Japan may have been started by some pasty white German in the late
1800's.

~~~
aaron695
But how come we can't/haven't disproved it, this to me is more the question,
unless the article is incorrect and it has been disproved.

Why don't we have average sizes for body parts on record? Surly this would
have been step one in Anatomy.

[https://medium.com/unpublishable-elsewhere/are-japanese-
inte...](https://medium.com/unpublishable-elsewhere/are-japanese-intestines-
longer-8a41ca3e7d89)

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Toast_
Seems more like she's trying to teach a class on relativism, a subject I
wholeheartedly hope stays away from science. Additionally, epistemology
already exists, and is a well established field of study.

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cplease
Did you even read the article before typing out your smug post? The professor
is not advocating ignorance. She is advocating an honest recognition of the
bounds of knowledge and ignorance versus false certainty.

~~~
Toast_
When did I make that claim? I said that I think what she's promoting is based
more off of relativism, and that epistemology is already an established field;
hell, it's quite literally the study of knowledge. So _smug_!

