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You want to teach the scientific method and skepticism? Fine. But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumul

by kiba 5y ago

You want to teach the scientific method and skepticism? Fine. But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumulated knowledge exceed anybody's ability to learn it within their lifetime. I don't think it's a flaw per se to focus on the facts, knowledge, and concept at the expense of scientific thinking, but we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith.

IncRnd 5y ago
No, it isn't laborious when the teacher understands the why and wherefore of the scientific method. I know the Earth is round, because I have observed that when a ship sails away from me, the top portion of the ship is the last to fade over the horizon. When flying, the shadow of the plane has a surrounding glory.
- kiba 5y ago
  You confuse your actual collection of knowledge, facts, and conceptual understanding from actual thinking. Actual thinking is hard, confusing, slow, and infinitely more painful. Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle. The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    > Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle. The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it. That's simply made up. There are two examples in my comment. They are not from long dead ancient squabbling scientists of natural philosophy but from my own experience of setting experiments to prove empirically whether the Earth is round or flat.
- Retric 5y ago
  Teaching a single scientific fact based on supporting evidence is easy, teaching every single fact plus it’s associated evidence simply takes longer. Nobody questions that sugar contains C6H12O6, so it’s simply taught as a fact without showing the evidence used to derive it. This can even run into problems when people get taught a bunch on regurgitated nonsense around stuff like how wings work. In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. Why most people object to just those specific things has absolutely nothing to do with evidence, it’s completely part of a wider social phenomenon.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. The Mohs scale is pretty easy to validate, and the exercises typically done when it is taught tend to serve to do that.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Just imaging if people showed similar levels of skepticism around the Mohs scale as the did global warming etc. The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials. It’s intuitive that if A scratches B and B scratches C then A should scratch C, but testing a few samples is nowhere near enough to demonstrate across every natural mineral. It’s even more difficult to show this is a stable property that doesn’t very significantly over time. So, sure a teacher might hand out a few samples and show what the idea is, but that’s little more than hand waving.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials Well, sure combinatorial explosion and the difficulty of gathering every possible natural material makes it impractical to show that: (1) the scale measures a real trait that exhibits the same consistent transitive behavior across all possible combinations of natural materials, and (2) every natural material with a rating on the scale is correctly rated. It's relatively easy to establish that the set of standard examplars for the integer ratings consistently show the relative properties the scale is supposed to measure. Of course, it trivial to then verify the same is true relative to the examplars for any other material with an established rating, or to establish (within the bounds of the ceiling/floor integers) the rating of any material for which one doesn't have a measure and confirm consistency against examplars and any manageable sample of other rated materials.
rPlayer6554 5y ago
But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary. Absolutely some things you may need to take on faith; but you shouldn't base your world view on only taking people in authority's views on faith. The more you use the scientific method, the more you know when you need to use it or not.
- kiba 5y ago
  But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary. It's not a matter of mindset but the sheer impracticality. As individual, we can only question small parts of humanity's knowledge base.
  - rPlayer6554 5y ago
    All the article is suggesting is that we do more than just have people focus on memorizing facts. It isn't asking _everyone_ to understand and prove _everything_. Just that there is more focus on having people understand the why, not just the what.
version_five 5y ago
> we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith Maybe for many people, but this is not a given. I obviously don't have deep knowledge of every discipline, but with an engineering undergraduate degree (20 years ago) I feel like I have strong tools to understand the world around me down to first principles, question what I'm told and situate it within the axioms I firmly believe, and in general apply the scientific method. There is almost nothing they feels like "magic" to me, even if I'm not a specialist. I think it's a question of critical thinking, understanding a bit about the philosophy of science (not the current religious version) and thinking about cause and effect. I'm prepared to accept we're all living within a simulation, or in some reality constructed by a diety, or some other currently un-testable unknowable thing, but in the world as we perceive it, there is a lot of order that can be understood in general, without having to be a specialist and without requiring faith
JohnBooty 5y ago
You want to teach the scientific method and skepticism? Fine. But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumulated knowledge I think there's a miscommunication/misunderstanding here; perhaps a language/culture barrier? I'm quite sure that when people refer to "the scientific method" they're talking about this -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method It's a method with six steps. It's usually something primary education science teachers spend like, twenty minutes on at the beginning of a school year. It's not laborious. (For maximum effect, the concept of the scientific method is then of course reinforced throughout the rest of the class, whenever experiments are performed. Assuming classes will be doing these experience anyway, this is not what I would remotely call "laborious") skepticism I suppose one could spend a lot of time teaching the history of skepticism, but from a scientific perspective, literally the only relevant bits are the notion that "repeatable, properly-designed experiments" are truly the cornerstone of science. I mean, it's certainly a notion that should suffuse the entire curriculum, but "laborious?"
- adolph 5y ago
  Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity places the cornerstone at conjecture and criticism leading to Good Explanations: “An explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for” that are treated as fallible (“Fallibilism The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.”). Falliblism to Deutsch is in contrast to: * Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard. * Instrumentalism The misconception that science cannot describe reality, only predict outcomes of observations. * Justificationism The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.

by kiba 5y ago

IncRnd 5y ago

No, it isn't laborious when the teacher understands the why and wherefore of the scientific method. I know the Earth is round, because I have observed that when a ship sails away from me, the top portion of the ship is the last to fade over the horizon. When flying, the shadow of the plane has a surrounding glory.

kiba 5y ago
You confuse your actual collection of knowledge, facts, and conceptual understanding from actual thinking. Actual thinking is hard, confusing, slow, and infinitely more painful. Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle. The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  > Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle. The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it. That's simply made up. There are two examples in my comment. They are not from long dead ancient squabbling scientists of natural philosophy but from my own experience of setting experiments to prove empirically whether the Earth is round or flat.
Retric 5y ago
Teaching a single scientific fact based on supporting evidence is easy, teaching every single fact plus it’s associated evidence simply takes longer. Nobody questions that sugar contains C6H12O6, so it’s simply taught as a fact without showing the evidence used to derive it. This can even run into problems when people get taught a bunch on regurgitated nonsense around stuff like how wings work. In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. Why most people object to just those specific things has absolutely nothing to do with evidence, it’s completely part of a wider social phenomenon.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. The Mohs scale is pretty easy to validate, and the exercises typically done when it is taught tend to serve to do that.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Just imaging if people showed similar levels of skepticism around the Mohs scale as the did global warming etc. The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials. It’s intuitive that if A scratches B and B scratches C then A should scratch C, but testing a few samples is nowhere near enough to demonstrate across every natural mineral. It’s even more difficult to show this is a stable property that doesn’t very significantly over time. So, sure a teacher might hand out a few samples and show what the idea is, but that’s little more than hand waving.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials Well, sure combinatorial explosion and the difficulty of gathering every possible natural material makes it impractical to show that: (1) the scale measures a real trait that exhibits the same consistent transitive behavior across all possible combinations of natural materials, and (2) every natural material with a rating on the scale is correctly rated. It's relatively easy to establish that the set of standard examplars for the integer ratings consistently show the relative properties the scale is supposed to measure. Of course, it trivial to then verify the same is true relative to the examplars for any other material with an established rating, or to establish (within the bounds of the ceiling/floor integers) the rating of any material for which one doesn't have a measure and confirm consistency against examplars and any manageable sample of other rated materials.

rPlayer6554 5y ago

But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary. Absolutely some things you may need to take on faith; but you shouldn't base your world view on only taking people in authority's views on faith. The more you use the scientific method, the more you know when you need to use it or not.

kiba 5y ago
But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary. It's not a matter of mindset but the sheer impracticality. As individual, we can only question small parts of humanity's knowledge base.
- rPlayer6554 5y ago
  All the article is suggesting is that we do more than just have people focus on memorizing facts. It isn't asking _everyone_ to understand and prove _everything_. Just that there is more focus on having people understand the why, not just the what.

version_five 5y ago

> we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith Maybe for many people, but this is not a given. I obviously don't have deep knowledge of every discipline, but with an engineering undergraduate degree (20 years ago) I feel like I have strong tools to understand the world around me down to first principles, question what I'm told and situate it within the axioms I firmly believe, and in general apply the scientific method. There is almost nothing they feels like "magic" to me, even if I'm not a specialist. I think it's a question of critical thinking, understanding a bit about the philosophy of science (not the current religious version) and thinking about cause and effect. I'm prepared to accept we're all living within a simulation, or in some reality constructed by a diety, or some other currently un-testable unknowable thing, but in the world as we perceive it, there is a lot of order that can be understood in general, without having to be a specialist and without requiring faith

JohnBooty 5y ago

You want to teach the scientific method and skepticism? Fine. But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumulated knowledge I think there's a miscommunication/misunderstanding here; perhaps a language/culture barrier? I'm quite sure that when people refer to "the scientific method" they're talking about this -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method It's a method with six steps. It's usually something primary education science teachers spend like, twenty minutes on at the beginning of a school year. It's not laborious. (For maximum effect, the concept of the scientific method is then of course reinforced throughout the rest of the class, whenever experiments are performed. Assuming classes will be doing these experience anyway, this is not what I would remotely call "laborious") skepticism I suppose one could spend a lot of time teaching the history of skepticism, but from a scientific perspective, literally the only relevant bits are the notion that "repeatable, properly-designed experiments" are truly the cornerstone of science. I mean, it's certainly a notion that should suffuse the entire curriculum, but "laborious?"

adolph 5y ago
Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity places the cornerstone at conjecture and criticism leading to Good Explanations: “An explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for” that are treated as fallible (“Fallibilism The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.”). Falliblism to Deutsch is in contrast to: * Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard. * Instrumentalism The misconception that science cannot describe reality, only predict outcomes of observations. * Justificationism The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.