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> nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that I'm not sure that this needs to be a requirement
by wool_gather 7y ago
> nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that
I'm not sure that this needs to be a requirement. Cultural axioms like this have value; there's a lot of knowledge to be had in the world, and not enough time or space in the mind to derive it all. I don't need to prove to myself from first principles every time I have a headache that aspirin will help.
There's danger, sure, if the wrong axioms take root, and we need to keep an open eye for new data that show we might be wrong. But it's unreasonable to expect that every individual person can cogently argue one side or the other of something with such overwhelming evidence that it has been accepted as a fact.
- biswaroop 7y agoI think this gets at the difference between knowledge and understanding. Simply knowing a fact (like the Earth is round) is different from understanding why we think that. Perhaps what's even more important than understanding is the ability to come up with experiments and arguments questioning our understanding. Questions of understanding lead to scientific research and analytical thinking, and that's exactly what a large fraction of the human population lacks. I'd say that's the only goal of education: to create people who can think for themselves.
- wool_gather 7y agoYou're right. In fact I think the ideal is even a step further up the abstract ladder: not every person in the street needs to be able to off-the-cuff explain the evidence for the earth being round. But they should know how to get the resources they would need to make that explanation.