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How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
- vardhanw 4y agoEarlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152542
- mncharity 4y ago> emotion Years ago I saw a nice talk by a leading engineer doing MEMS chips. He compellingly spoke of brownian motion... with visceral hate - "Brownian motion is the devil. The Devil." I wondered if teaching science might someday use such clips - for every phenomena, find someone who deeply cares about it, positive or negatively. > What practices would lead to tools for thought as transformative as Hindu-Arabic numerals? [...] To be successful, you need an insight-through-making loop to be operating at full throttle, combining the best of deep research culture with the best of Silicon Valley product culture. Wouldn't that be nice. It regrettably seems something we are culturally and institutionally incapable of. > [memory as educational bottleneck] Consider an educator from a system with an emphasis on memorize-and-regurgitate call-and-response "learning", even greater than our own, who suggests memory is a bottleneck to transformative outcomes. One might push back by saying "students memorizing this dreck isn't the problem". Now consider our own system, with chemistry education research characterizing chem ed content using adjectives like "incoherent", physics education so narrowly focused and yet still struggling with outcomes, and biology education struggling even less successfully. One might suggest memorization isn't where this system is bottlenecked.