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Anytime school textbooks are mentioned I feel the urge to refer anyone who'll listen to the relevant chapter of "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" Feynman is po
by harry8 3y ago
Anytime school textbooks are mentioned I feel the urge to refer anyone who'll listen to the relevant chapter of "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" Feynman is popular around here and rightly so.
Blatant corruption from top to bottom is the norm, it would seem.
Feynman also loathed psychology and gave it as an example of "Cargo-cult science." Last I heard every single first year psych texbook contained the Stanford prison experiment as an example without mentioning how it was total rubbish. Is that /still/ true in 2023? Textbooks are weird.
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- hathchip 3y agoIronically "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" is a great example of what the article talks about: compelling and repeatable stories whose basis in fact is often extremely dubious.
- harry8 3y agoIronically your story is dubious, but less compelling than Feynman's anecdotes. My comment is as cheap as yours for illustration purposes. I don't believe Feynman fabricated his stories of textbook corruption. Do you?
- hathchip 3y agoRegardless of what I believe, those stories are clearly not compelling evidence on which to build any kind of political argument.
- harry8 3y agoSo you don't believe it's a fabrication either and we can agree it doesn't make a strong case that reform is unnecessary and school textbooks are incapable of being improved. Of course the best evidence either way on the latter is the contents of textbooks that are actually being used. How did they get that way? Heard anything that might give us ideas on where to look a bit more closely?
- WeylandYutani 3y agoPsychology is not an exact science because people are complicated. Generally anyone who is fucked in the ass by a creepy uncle ends up at a therapist office so I give psychology the benefit of the doubt.