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I imagine a child would say the pen would drop A child that has seen a movie or documentary about astronauts floating around in a spacecraft, may very well gue
by Confusion 17y ago
I imagine a child would say the pen would drop
A child that has seen a movie or documentary about astronauts floating around in a spacecraft, may very well guess that the pen would float. "Space" seems to be the common denominator, not "on a large rock". From most perspectives, the earth looks nothing like the moon.
This seems to me that years of physics/science teaching has ruined the ability of these students to actually think.
The more you know, the more options you have to consider before coming to a conclusion. Considering all the, mutually influential, effects that could play a role, you may simply get overloaded. The problem isn't the capacity to think, it's the ability to easily and swiftly dismiss all irrelevant factors. I believe I could have made this mistake in my first year as a physics student.
- mechanical_fish 17y agoThe more you know, the more options you have to consider before coming to a conclusion. This was a big problem when I played rapid-fire, Jeopardy-style trivia games in school. One learned to dread questions that were in a field you actually knew. The knowledge slows you down! Trivia questions are generally written by knowledgeable non-experts. But a question which is clearly phrased from the perspective of a knowledgeable non-expert can be imprecise enough to cause an expert to pause, and pauses are deadly in rapid-fire trivia. It's hard to construct a perfect example, but suppose you got a question that boils down to "who first demonstrated radio"? A lot of people will blurt out "Marconi" -- he did, after all, apparently score the first patent for a radio set, and he was a good self-promoter. But the physicist or historian, who might know about Tesla and Oliver Lodge, will object, or at least hesitate for a fatal moment.