7 ms·

Fake Explanations

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
techiferous 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Right, but the point is that that kind of blind deference to authority is dangerous.
  - megablast 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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 16y ago
        Agreed. But consider the possibility that the lesson today was exactly that; a smart student will figure it out, just like we did.
      - nooneelse 16y ago
        Science is not just a body of knowledge, it is a methodology of description and the update process for models in the face of new evidence. Perhaps they are simply so open to shifts in their models and the terms in those models that the term "heat conduction" is open to, what seems to us, quite radical revision. Quine would be proud.
  - aplusbi 16y ago
    I don't think it's blind deference to authority, I think it's a result of over-active pattern matching. We see patterns all the time, but that doesn't always mean there is a pattern. For example, in a science class students are typically presented with a phenomenon, asked to speculate about it, and then presented with a scientific explanation. Do this often enough and a clear pattern emerges - phenomenon -> scientific explanation. In the case of the article, it was actually phenomenon -> human interference, but it shouldn't be surprising that the students assumed it would fit the usual pattern.
- aplusbi 16y ago
  This reminds me of the candle problem: You are given a candle, a book of matches and a box of tacks. You need to mount the candle on the wall in such a way that the candle won't drip on the table below it. When the problem is presented as above people struggle to come up with a solution. When you simple changes the description of what you are given to: "You are given a candle, a book of matches, a box and some tacks." people are able to quickly solve the problem.
- indrax 16y ago
  No amount of expecting a science-y explanation from the teacher makes any of their science-y explanations correct. It's not that they had an alternative model of how it could have happened, and tried to offer a explanation with a technical term. It's that they were just throwing out technical terms. If a teacher shows an egg being pushed into a bottle with a match in it, and one student guesses 'quantum tunneling', that answer is just as wrong as the answers in this essay, and driven by the same process of inserting magic words.
kakuri 16y ago
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 16y ago
  "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.
  - endtime 16y ago
    What were the results?
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - r3570r3 16y ago
    what was the outcome? Did they come back with arguments the next day?
    - techiferous 16y ago
      First, some more context. This was an 8th grade middle school physical science class. Here are some excerpts from a worksheet I gave them: "Many people believe things based only on what they hear other people say, not based on real evidence. This makes it easy for people to have misconceptions (wrong beliefs). One common misconception is that the Earth is a sphere. The majority of Americans believe this in spite of the evidence to the contrary. "The Earth is actually a disc (circle). The sky is a dome above the Earth. The sun, moon, and stars are all attached to this dome. The dome rotates, giving us day and night. Underneath the Earth there is water. Around the edges of the Earth is a vast, impenetrable ice sheet. The north pole is at the center of the Earth. ... "Point #7: The United Nations’ logo correctly shows the shape of the Earth. Since they are the supreme governing body of the Earth, they should know how it is shaped! ... "Point #9: This one you can try yourself! If the Earth is a sphere, then the ground must be slightly curved. This means that the floors of buildings must be slightly curved. Lay a ball or a pen on the floor. Does it roll? "Point #10: If the Earth is a spinning sphere, then all of the water in the oceans would be flung into space! ...So you get the point. If I had more time, I would have made the lesson more compelling. Most students exhibited some form of cognitive disequilibrium. About half ended up going along with the concept of a flat earth. About half were skeptical. A few, especially one student, got quite interested and came back at me the next day with lots of evidence and reasons to the contrary. So it had the intended result for at least a few students. And at the end of it all I think most got the point that we should rely on evidence, not simply what people say.
cema 16y ago
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 16y ago
  You sure it wasn't red?
  - cema 16y ago
    My dad told me so, I swear!
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  What is green, has four wheels, and is 4" tall? Grass! I lied about the wheels.
smcl 16y ago
I dislike the tone of both this and "Where Does A Tree Get It's Mass" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480118 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 16y ago
  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".

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

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 16y ago
Right, but the point is that that kind of blind deference to authority is dangerous.
- megablast 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        Agreed. But consider the possibility that the lesson today was exactly that; a smart student will figure it out, just like we did.
    - nooneelse 16y ago
      Science is not just a body of knowledge, it is a methodology of description and the update process for models in the face of new evidence. Perhaps they are simply so open to shifts in their models and the terms in those models that the term "heat conduction" is open to, what seems to us, quite radical revision. Quine would be proud.
- aplusbi 16y ago
  I don't think it's blind deference to authority, I think it's a result of over-active pattern matching. We see patterns all the time, but that doesn't always mean there is a pattern. For example, in a science class students are typically presented with a phenomenon, asked to speculate about it, and then presented with a scientific explanation. Do this often enough and a clear pattern emerges - phenomenon -> scientific explanation. In the case of the article, it was actually phenomenon -> human interference, but it shouldn't be surprising that the students assumed it would fit the usual pattern.
aplusbi 16y ago
This reminds me of the candle problem: You are given a candle, a book of matches and a box of tacks. You need to mount the candle on the wall in such a way that the candle won't drip on the table below it. When the problem is presented as above people struggle to come up with a solution. When you simple changes the description of what you are given to: "You are given a candle, a book of matches, a box and some tacks." people are able to quickly solve the problem.
indrax 16y ago
No amount of expecting a science-y explanation from the teacher makes any of their science-y explanations correct. It's not that they had an alternative model of how it could have happened, and tried to offer a explanation with a technical term. It's that they were just throwing out technical terms. If a teacher shows an egg being pushed into a bottle with a match in it, and one student guesses 'quantum tunneling', that answer is just as wrong as the answers in this essay, and driven by the same process of inserting magic words.

kakuri 16y ago

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 16y ago
"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.
- endtime 16y ago
  What were the results?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- r3570r3 16y ago
  what was the outcome? Did they come back with arguments the next day?
  - techiferous 16y ago
    First, some more context. This was an 8th grade middle school physical science class. Here are some excerpts from a worksheet I gave them: "Many people believe things based only on what they hear other people say, not based on real evidence. This makes it easy for people to have misconceptions (wrong beliefs). One common misconception is that the Earth is a sphere. The majority of Americans believe this in spite of the evidence to the contrary. "The Earth is actually a disc (circle). The sky is a dome above the Earth. The sun, moon, and stars are all attached to this dome. The dome rotates, giving us day and night. Underneath the Earth there is water. Around the edges of the Earth is a vast, impenetrable ice sheet. The north pole is at the center of the Earth. ... "Point #7: The United Nations’ logo correctly shows the shape of the Earth. Since they are the supreme governing body of the Earth, they should know how it is shaped! ... "Point #9: This one you can try yourself! If the Earth is a sphere, then the ground must be slightly curved. This means that the floors of buildings must be slightly curved. Lay a ball or a pen on the floor. Does it roll? "Point #10: If the Earth is a spinning sphere, then all of the water in the oceans would be flung into space! ...So you get the point. If I had more time, I would have made the lesson more compelling. Most students exhibited some form of cognitive disequilibrium. About half ended up going along with the concept of a flat earth. About half were skeptical. A few, especially one student, got quite interested and came back at me the next day with lots of evidence and reasons to the contrary. So it had the intended result for at least a few students. And at the end of it all I think most got the point that we should rely on evidence, not simply what people say.

cema 16y ago

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 16y ago
You sure it wasn't red?
- cema 16y ago
  My dad told me so, I swear!
JoeAltmaier 16y ago
What is green, has four wheels, and is 4" tall? Grass! I lied about the wheels.

smcl 16y ago

I dislike the tone of both this and "Where Does A Tree Get It's Mass" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480118 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 16y ago
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".