6 ms·

Lie-to-children

52 points by thinkingemote 3y ago

drewcoo 3y ago
> Educators who employ lies-to-children do not intend to deceive Then they're not lies. Nor are jokes, fiction, or any other perceived-to-be-untruths not intended to deceive.
- leetrout 3y ago
  > the authors acknowledge that some people might dispute the applicability of the term lie, while defending it on the grounds that "it is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie".
  - badcppdev 3y ago
    I sense a paradox there. They are insisting on calling it a lie but really it isn't
    - rvnx 3y ago
      The models that they call "lie" are, in fact, mostly correct, they are good approximations, with limited scope, and sometimes don't handle edge cases, the same with Newton's gravity and many topics. The same way that Pi is not 3.14159, nor it is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286, and it's not a lie, just an approximation. The reality is that we don't know the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything Even general relativity is a lie if you want to go that route. This Wikipedia article is just scientific trolling promoted by satiric authors like Pratchett, that some people here are taking too seriously.
      - genman 3y ago
        And these authors are hurting science because they equate actual lies like made up stories created to deceive masses with scientific simplifications.
- d1sxeyes 3y ago
  I don't think that this statement is correct (the quote on Wikipedia, not your conclusion). Educators do indeed employ lies-to-children with the intention of deception in many cases. It's not the primary intention, but it is still intentional deception. In some cases, there is no intention to deceive (e.g. when a teacher immediately explains that 'what I'm teaching you is an intentional oversimplification, and is not completely correct'), but in many cases, educators leave this to the teacher who needs to teach the newer, more correct model later. This is especially true at a young age.
- leoedin 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree the name is terrible. The logic that simplifications of complex topics are "lies" essentially makes every part of human knowledge a lie - which makes it a meaningless term. Ultimately every single thing you think you understand ends at an approximation or a simplification. That's just the nature of the world. It's not a lie - it's just a simpler abstraction of the underlying truth. The entire field of engineering is based on creating simple models of things and using them to build complex things. Every engineering class is pre-empted with "these equations are simplified approximations of how things work in the real world, but they're good enough for designing things". Those aren't lies - just useful tools.
speeder 3y ago
When I was a child myself I hated this and as adult I am still unconvinced it is necessary. Also this sort of stuff made me lose lots of trust for educators in general, even university level ones are willing to teach junk.
- scandox 3y ago
  Well forgive me if I'm misunderstanding but it seems that all human knowledge being approximate it all comes under this heading. They are simply saying is that it may not be best to start with the most complex approximation.
  - hoseja 3y ago
    It would be better to think how to appropriately simplify the state-of-the-art knowledge instead of going through consecutive confusingly wrong historical theories as often happens now.
- bogdan 3y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I always wondered whether the thing they are teaching next is really the way things are supposed to be or if it's once again simplified mumbo-jumbo..
  - Sander_Marechal 3y ago
    The article says it's all simplified mumbo-jumbo. It's just a question of how simplified it is.
- tsm 3y ago
  It's absolutely useful to tell 4th-graders that x(t) = vt + x₀ (assuming no acceleration) since they're probably not on top of exponents yet. It's also absolutely useful to tell 8th-graders that x(t) = at² + v₀t + x₀ since now they can handle exponents. And it's useful to tell 12th-graders how to do the calculus to get x(t) for variable acceleration. But that's also inaccurate for very large values of v (or a) due to relativistic effects. However, it's a very convenient simplification ("lie") for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of cases. It's probably possible to explain the relativity math to most 4th-graders, but for most of them it's a terrible use of teaching time and the old "rate times time equals distance" that was drilled into my head at a young age is much more practical.
noufalibrahim 3y ago
The problem here seems to be that "lie" is a loaded term. Understanding is a point somewhere between an absolute falsehood and the an absolute detailed truth. These two can be hard to define for some subjects but nevertheless. People who don't have the mental capacity or knowledge to understand the complete truth can still benefit from a partial understanding of what's going on and that's what this is talking about. I think it's similar to how programmers use libraries to hide abstractions. We don't need to know the details of what's going on at the lower levels of our stack to be useful even though we're operating with some "false" notions of what's happening under the hood.
- gwd 3y ago
  "All models are wrong; some models are useful."
  - tareqak 3y ago
    I was taught that computer science is the study of abstractions. In my opinion, an abstraction is a kind of story, and storytelling is the most powerful tool that human beings have had at their disposal.
    - noufalibrahim 3y ago
      Yes. So, imagining education as progressively peeling off layers of abstraction is closer to the truth than "lie to children".
lencastre 3y ago
The lies upbringing a new soul in civilized society… parents, educators, gurus. It’s hard.
smokel 3y ago
This does not make sense. These are not lies, but simplifications. The only lie seems to be the title itself. I would have expected Santa Claus, storks delivering babies, and perhaps even God, to show up under this heading. Count me disappointed.
- fifteen1506 3y ago
  As I'm kinda against lies but don't to deprive my kids of Santa, in my world all Santas you see are franchises/agents of the main Santa. I also add I have never seen the real Santa because he is insanely fast to go to all locations of the world.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    You will inevitably trigger a loss of trust - your kids will know that there are things you will lie to them about, as you are indeed lying to them to support a cultural norm. I suggest it is better not to lie - why bring deceit into that relationship? - but keep the idea of Santa, if you like.
    - ifdefdebug 3y ago
      No, you won't trigger a loss of trust if you do it the right way. This year, my 7-yr-old, for the first time in his life, asked me clear questions about Santa and all this stuff (we had more of that going on). Having been asked a clear question, I of course gave him a clear answer. First he was sad - he liked the world of Santa, little gnomes hiding sweets for him in the woods when we were out hiking, things like that. But my clear answers just confirmed the suspicions he already brought home from school. Then we talked about how this was a nice game adults and older kids play for the younger ones - and he got that immediately, kids inherently understand (and like) role playing games. So now he's in the role of those who know and play the game for the younger kids in our broader family - and he's proud of it :) Before that happened, I actually was afraid and unsure about how to get out of this storyline without breaching trust. But it all played out smoothly.
lucioperca 3y ago
so Newton's gravitational theory is a lie?
- pja 3y ago
  An incomplete description of a more complex reality, perhaps.
negativelambda 3y ago
> Anthony Judge has noted that the concept itself is a lie-to-children for more complex concepts in the philosophy of science.
moomin 3y ago
It's fascinating how much of this there is about. It gets worse when people don't realize there's other ways of looking at things. You'll note there's a whole social movement based around what its proponents refer to as "primary school biology". The idea that primary schools might be teaching a simplified version just doesn't come up. I once had the honour of talking to Chris Zeeman down a pub. He asked me what I was studying, and I said Newtonian dynamics. This began a solid rant about how he thought it was taught all wrong and by the time we were at university we should be taught about the principle of least action as that would stand us in much better stead as we moved onto more sophisticated versions of physics.
- rjsw 3y ago
  His Royal Institution Christmas lectures inspired me to study maths, I was quite proud of getting red ink all through one school homework answer where I used his main area of work instead of whatever method the teacher was expecting to see.
  - moomin 3y ago
    Seriously, I met the dude once 25 years ago for a single evening and I still remember it vividly. Charisma seems an inadequate word for what he had. And he had the chops to back it up. Meanwhile my University group invited Benoit Mandelbrot along in the same year and were making fun of him for years later. So self-important, so little to say. Zeeman, for his part, didn't actually mention his own work once. He wanted to talk maths and the history of maths and there was no subject we touched that he hadn't already thought deeply about.
- jgwil2 3y ago
  > The idea that primary schools might be teaching a simplified version just doesn't come up. This reminds me of an Atlantic article from a few years ago entitled, "The Curse of Econ 101."[0] In that case, IIRC, the subject was how debates about economic policies like minimum wage laws suffered when people with some knowledge of microeconomic principles tried to extrapolate that to much more complex questions. [0]https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/economism-and-the-minimum-wage/513155/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/economi...
koliber 3y ago
I hated chemistry in high school. It did not make sense. It was hand-wavy and incomplete and lacked foundations. It got to the point where I consciously stopped doing work and learning, and began failing tests. Thankfully, my teacher noticed. She had a conversation with me, and I shared my frustration. She was direct and said something to the effect: "This won't make sense right now. There are a bunch of other things you'll need to learn before you have the tools for this to make sense. But you still should learn it, as it is one of the things that you will need to everything to make sense." It was the relief I needed. The way she explained the approach, acknowledged that it won't just yet make sense, but also outlined the way forward, gave me what I needed to resume learning chemistry. I did alright in the end. Just now I realized she was talking about "lie to children." As an aside, this is what good teachers are made of. Thank you Dr. Roberts.
- mellutussa 3y ago
  Lucky you. I just got iterate answers like "it's just the way it is" and "oh it's too advanced and you wouldn't understand it". Pardon my language, but seriously fuck those teachers. If it's too advanced then at least let me come to the conclusion myself and have something to look forward too.
javawizard 3y ago
Leave it to HN to spend checks 57% of the toplevel comments debating whether the word "lie" in the term "lie to children" is in fact literally correct. My bleeding linguistic descriptivist heart dies a little every time I walk into a debate like this. Does it really matter what we call it, as long as we can all agree on what it is we're talking about? At which point we can have insightful debate about whether the concept to which the term refers is a helpful, or unhelpful, one to engage in. --- Personally I think it is; as another commenter already mentioned, "all models are wrong; some are useful". Any oversimplification of a real-world concept is bound to fall down at some point, and lots of oversimplifications are useful right up to that point. Many times as a kid I asked for an explanation of a real-world phenomenon from a grown-up and received something that had way too much detail or nuance to hold my attention span, or for me to comprehend at the time. Usually I dropped pursuit of whatever had led me to ask the question in the first place, and as a result it would take years for me to accomplish something I could have accomplished much earlier. Other times I asked for an explanation and received one that was oversimplified but perfect for what I needed, and was able to stay focused on, at that point in my life. Those were golden moments; more often than not they resulted in leaps in my education, and I was later able to "correct" the explanation I'd received once I ran up against its limitations. And it's not just children; many adults who aren't subject matter experts get overwhelmed if you try to present things in a way that's as technically correct as possible. I honestly believe the ability to simplify to exactly the level one's conversant needs for their situation is one of the most underrated skills on the planet. --- (There's an undeniable irony to how long this comment is. Ah well; to paraphrase Mark Twain, if I'd had time I would have written a shorter comment.)
- genman 3y ago
  > Leave it to HN to spend checks 57% of the toplevel comments debating whether the word "lie" in the term "lie to children" is in fact literally correct. And it is not and it is hurting the debate and is causing secondary problems like it will hurt the scientific world view in general because they equate actual lies like made up stories created to deceive masses with scientific simplifications.
  - 3y ago
tolleydbg 3y ago
This reminds me of something I read nearly ten years ago and have tried finding since - I'm hoping somewhere here can help. It was an article or paper about analogies being dangerous in the sciences and leading to misconceptions, even among the learned. As best as I can remember, there was an example of graduate students in physics, at either Cambridge or Oxford, who overwhelmingly had an inaccurate view of concepts in physics based on toy explanations and Nova specials etc.
quartesixte 3y ago
I grapple with this because on the one hand, at some level you must abstract away the most fundamental concepts. It's overwhelming otherwise. But on the other, these "lies to children" sometimes never gets corrected and you end up with an education system that produces adults with very incorrect models of the world. We can "Lie to Children" but I think it's very important to emphasize that they are explicitly being lied to because the Truth (or the model that is closer/closest to the truth without overwhelming most anyone) requires knowledge of concepts they haven't learned yet. And at every step change in knowledge, they are updated about how "true" their "lie" is.
lloeki 3y ago
In more general terms - not just applying to children but to anyone - I call these "Feynman lies": the kind of lies you have to tell so as not to drown the receiver into very deep technical details. In essence this means presenting a model of the world that is sort of fundamentally incorrect, but one that is useful in allowing one's to wrap their head around the ideas. "All models are wrong, but some are useful", yadda yadda. "meet where they are" is a really nice way to put it, although it can be tricky to not paint ourselves in a "like rubber bands" corner! > I can't explain [magnetic] attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we’d said the magnets attract like as if they were connected by rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands, I shouldn’t be in trouble, you’d soon ask me about the nature of the bands… and secondly if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain, so I have cheated very badly, you see. > [...] > But I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you're more familiar with, because I don’t understand them in terms of anything else that you are more familiar with. direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&t=1263s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&t=1263s but the whole chapter is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&t=894 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&t=894
mprovost 3y ago
This puts a name to the approach that I've been using to write my Rust book. Leaping directly to a final, idiomatic solution without explaining all of the fundamentals first doesn't actually teach anything (except memorisation). It's often more effective to show a more straightforward, but possibly less idiomatic or performant, solution first. Then later introduce more complexity. But I realise that if you stop reading after a few chapters you might go off into the world and write suboptimal code. In my mind this highlights the difference between a reference and a textbook designed to teach. If you just want the final answer, check the reference. (Or have an AI autocomplete for you.) But to teach you have to bring people on a journey and show some "mistakes" along the way. My premise is that people learn better that way and retain the knowledge because you are giving them the chance to "discover" it themselves.
netcan 3y ago
Some lovely ideas. "Lies" is nice and provocative, but I think it's potentially limiting as you develop these ideas out. A recursive lie to children, perhaps. I feel that it's quite relevant for anyone who wants to learn philosophy these days. Western philosophy has, for hundreds of years now, mostly taken the form of dialectic or polemic. A philosophical position is polemical response to a previous philosophical mode, one that the new school defines and characterizes. Often one that they even names. Marx defines and characterizes capitalism. Academic feminism eventually characterizes patriarchy. Postmodernism responds to.modernism. The enlightenment counters medievalism. As the era progresses, we know about the earlier modes of thought primarily from the polemical retorts. It's much easier to gain a rudimentary understanding of "what non-trinitarian gnostics believed" from inquisitors and heresiologists than it is from reading gnostic sources. Even when the Pendulum swings, the inquisitor's definition tends to persist. Ayn Rand and other late modern, libertarians/objectivists adopt Marx's use of capitalism, and what capitalists believe. Revivalist religious movements rely on heresiologists for their theology. These "lies" are necessary scaffolding for modern ideas.
hnben 3y ago
I believe, that the "lies to children"-approach is one of the driving forces behind the general science-skepticism, and maybe even behind some consipiracy theories and some climate-science-denial. It basically goes like this: 1. Teachers are authorities and present facts to children 2. people later learn that some of these facts are in-fact not factual 3. people learn that: a) authorities can not be trusted b) it is ok to make up facts, as long as they sound good 4. people apply a) and b) to other situations
Richardcynthia 3y ago
[dead]

52 points by thinkingemote 3y ago

> Educators who employ lies-to-children do not intend to deceive Then they're not lies. Nor are jokes, fiction, or any other perceived-to-be-untruths not intended to deceive.

leetrout 3y ago
> the authors acknowledge that some people might dispute the applicability of the term lie, while defending it on the grounds that "it is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie".
- badcppdev 3y ago
  I sense a paradox there. They are insisting on calling it a lie but really it isn't
  - rvnx 3y ago
    The models that they call "lie" are, in fact, mostly correct, they are good approximations, with limited scope, and sometimes don't handle edge cases, the same with Newton's gravity and many topics. The same way that Pi is not 3.14159, nor it is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286, and it's not a lie, just an approximation. The reality is that we don't know the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything Even general relativity is a lie if you want to go that route. This Wikipedia article is just scientific trolling promoted by satiric authors like Pratchett, that some people here are taking too seriously.
    - genman 3y ago
      And these authors are hurting science because they equate actual lies like made up stories created to deceive masses with scientific simplifications.
d1sxeyes 3y ago
I don't think that this statement is correct (the quote on Wikipedia, not your conclusion). Educators do indeed employ lies-to-children with the intention of deception in many cases. It's not the primary intention, but it is still intentional deception. In some cases, there is no intention to deceive (e.g. when a teacher immediately explains that 'what I'm teaching you is an intentional oversimplification, and is not completely correct'), but in many cases, educators leave this to the teacher who needs to teach the newer, more correct model later. This is especially true at a young age.
leoedin 3y ago
Yeah, I agree the name is terrible. The logic that simplifications of complex topics are "lies" essentially makes every part of human knowledge a lie - which makes it a meaningless term. Ultimately every single thing you think you understand ends at an approximation or a simplification. That's just the nature of the world. It's not a lie - it's just a simpler abstraction of the underlying truth. The entire field of engineering is based on creating simple models of things and using them to build complex things. Every engineering class is pre-empted with "these equations are simplified approximations of how things work in the real world, but they're good enough for designing things". Those aren't lies - just useful tools.

speeder 3y ago

When I was a child myself I hated this and as adult I am still unconvinced it is necessary. Also this sort of stuff made me lose lots of trust for educators in general, even university level ones are willing to teach junk.

scandox 3y ago
Well forgive me if I'm misunderstanding but it seems that all human knowledge being approximate it all comes under this heading. They are simply saying is that it may not be best to start with the most complex approximation.
- hoseja 3y ago
  It would be better to think how to appropriately simplify the state-of-the-art knowledge instead of going through consecutive confusingly wrong historical theories as often happens now.
bogdan 3y ago
I'm in the same boat. I always wondered whether the thing they are teaching next is really the way things are supposed to be or if it's once again simplified mumbo-jumbo..
- Sander_Marechal 3y ago
  The article says it's all simplified mumbo-jumbo. It's just a question of how simplified it is.
tsm 3y ago
It's absolutely useful to tell 4th-graders that x(t) = vt + x₀ (assuming no acceleration) since they're probably not on top of exponents yet. It's also absolutely useful to tell 8th-graders that x(t) = at² + v₀t + x₀ since now they can handle exponents. And it's useful to tell 12th-graders how to do the calculus to get x(t) for variable acceleration. But that's also inaccurate for very large values of v (or a) due to relativistic effects. However, it's a very convenient simplification ("lie") for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of cases. It's probably possible to explain the relativity math to most 4th-graders, but for most of them it's a terrible use of teaching time and the old "rate times time equals distance" that was drilled into my head at a young age is much more practical.

noufalibrahim 3y ago

The problem here seems to be that "lie" is a loaded term. Understanding is a point somewhere between an absolute falsehood and the an absolute detailed truth. These two can be hard to define for some subjects but nevertheless. People who don't have the mental capacity or knowledge to understand the complete truth can still benefit from a partial understanding of what's going on and that's what this is talking about. I think it's similar to how programmers use libraries to hide abstractions. We don't need to know the details of what's going on at the lower levels of our stack to be useful even though we're operating with some "false" notions of what's happening under the hood.

gwd 3y ago
"All models are wrong; some models are useful."
- tareqak 3y ago
  I was taught that computer science is the study of abstractions. In my opinion, an abstraction is a kind of story, and storytelling is the most powerful tool that human beings have had at their disposal.
  - noufalibrahim 3y ago
    Yes. So, imagining education as progressively peeling off layers of abstraction is closer to the truth than "lie to children".

lencastre 3y ago

The lies upbringing a new soul in civilized society… parents, educators, gurus. It’s hard.

smokel 3y ago

This does not make sense. These are not lies, but simplifications. The only lie seems to be the title itself. I would have expected Santa Claus, storks delivering babies, and perhaps even God, to show up under this heading. Count me disappointed.

fifteen1506 3y ago
As I'm kinda against lies but don't to deprive my kids of Santa, in my world all Santas you see are franchises/agents of the main Santa. I also add I have never seen the real Santa because he is insanely fast to go to all locations of the world.
- verisimi 3y ago
  You will inevitably trigger a loss of trust - your kids will know that there are things you will lie to them about, as you are indeed lying to them to support a cultural norm. I suggest it is better not to lie - why bring deceit into that relationship? - but keep the idea of Santa, if you like.
  - ifdefdebug 3y ago
    No, you won't trigger a loss of trust if you do it the right way. This year, my 7-yr-old, for the first time in his life, asked me clear questions about Santa and all this stuff (we had more of that going on). Having been asked a clear question, I of course gave him a clear answer. First he was sad - he liked the world of Santa, little gnomes hiding sweets for him in the woods when we were out hiking, things like that. But my clear answers just confirmed the suspicions he already brought home from school. Then we talked about how this was a nice game adults and older kids play for the younger ones - and he got that immediately, kids inherently understand (and like) role playing games. So now he's in the role of those who know and play the game for the younger kids in our broader family - and he's proud of it :) Before that happened, I actually was afraid and unsure about how to get out of this storyline without breaching trust. But it all played out smoothly.

lucioperca 3y ago

so Newton's gravitational theory is a lie?

pja 3y ago
An incomplete description of a more complex reality, perhaps.

negativelambda 3y ago

> Anthony Judge has noted that the concept itself is a lie-to-children for more complex concepts in the philosophy of science.

moomin 3y ago

It's fascinating how much of this there is about. It gets worse when people don't realize there's other ways of looking at things. You'll note there's a whole social movement based around what its proponents refer to as "primary school biology". The idea that primary schools might be teaching a simplified version just doesn't come up. I once had the honour of talking to Chris Zeeman down a pub. He asked me what I was studying, and I said Newtonian dynamics. This began a solid rant about how he thought it was taught all wrong and by the time we were at university we should be taught about the principle of least action as that would stand us in much better stead as we moved onto more sophisticated versions of physics.

rjsw 3y ago
His Royal Institution Christmas lectures inspired me to study maths, I was quite proud of getting red ink all through one school homework answer where I used his main area of work instead of whatever method the teacher was expecting to see.
- moomin 3y ago
  Seriously, I met the dude once 25 years ago for a single evening and I still remember it vividly. Charisma seems an inadequate word for what he had. And he had the chops to back it up. Meanwhile my University group invited Benoit Mandelbrot along in the same year and were making fun of him for years later. So self-important, so little to say. Zeeman, for his part, didn't actually mention his own work once. He wanted to talk maths and the history of maths and there was no subject we touched that he hadn't already thought deeply about.
jgwil2 3y ago
> The idea that primary schools might be teaching a simplified version just doesn't come up. This reminds me of an Atlantic article from a few years ago entitled, "The Curse of Econ 101."[0] In that case, IIRC, the subject was how debates about economic policies like minimum wage laws suffered when people with some knowledge of microeconomic principles tried to extrapolate that to much more complex questions. [0]https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/economism-and-the-minimum-wage/513155/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/economi...

koliber 3y ago

I hated chemistry in high school. It did not make sense. It was hand-wavy and incomplete and lacked foundations. It got to the point where I consciously stopped doing work and learning, and began failing tests. Thankfully, my teacher noticed. She had a conversation with me, and I shared my frustration. She was direct and said something to the effect: "This won't make sense right now. There are a bunch of other things you'll need to learn before you have the tools for this to make sense. But you still should learn it, as it is one of the things that you will need to everything to make sense." It was the relief I needed. The way she explained the approach, acknowledged that it won't just yet make sense, but also outlined the way forward, gave me what I needed to resume learning chemistry. I did alright in the end. Just now I realized she was talking about "lie to children." As an aside, this is what good teachers are made of. Thank you Dr. Roberts.

mellutussa 3y ago
Lucky you. I just got iterate answers like "it's just the way it is" and "oh it's too advanced and you wouldn't understand it". Pardon my language, but seriously fuck those teachers. If it's too advanced then at least let me come to the conclusion myself and have something to look forward too.

javawizard 3y ago

Leave it to HN to spend checks 57% of the toplevel comments debating whether the word "lie" in the term "lie to children" is in fact literally correct. My bleeding linguistic descriptivist heart dies a little every time I walk into a debate like this. Does it really matter what we call it, as long as we can all agree on what it is we're talking about? At which point we can have insightful debate about whether the concept to which the term refers is a helpful, or unhelpful, one to engage in. --- Personally I think it is; as another commenter already mentioned, "all models are wrong; some are useful". Any oversimplification of a real-world concept is bound to fall down at some point, and lots of oversimplifications are useful right up to that point. Many times as a kid I asked for an explanation of a real-world phenomenon from a grown-up and received something that had way too much detail or nuance to hold my attention span, or for me to comprehend at the time. Usually I dropped pursuit of whatever had led me to ask the question in the first place, and as a result it would take years for me to accomplish something I could have accomplished much earlier. Other times I asked for an explanation and received one that was oversimplified but perfect for what I needed, and was able to stay focused on, at that point in my life. Those were golden moments; more often than not they resulted in leaps in my education, and I was later able to "correct" the explanation I'd received once I ran up against its limitations. And it's not just children; many adults who aren't subject matter experts get overwhelmed if you try to present things in a way that's as technically correct as possible. I honestly believe the ability to simplify to exactly the level one's conversant needs for their situation is one of the most underrated skills on the planet. --- (There's an undeniable irony to how long this comment is. Ah well; to paraphrase Mark Twain, if I'd had time I would have written a shorter comment.)

genman 3y ago
> Leave it to HN to spend checks 57% of the toplevel comments debating whether the word "lie" in the term "lie to children" is in fact literally correct. And it is not and it is hurting the debate and is causing secondary problems like it will hurt the scientific world view in general because they equate actual lies like made up stories created to deceive masses with scientific simplifications.
- 3y ago

tolleydbg 3y ago

This reminds me of something I read nearly ten years ago and have tried finding since - I'm hoping somewhere here can help. It was an article or paper about analogies being dangerous in the sciences and leading to misconceptions, even among the learned. As best as I can remember, there was an example of graduate students in physics, at either Cambridge or Oxford, who overwhelmingly had an inaccurate view of concepts in physics based on toy explanations and Nova specials etc.

quartesixte 3y ago

I grapple with this because on the one hand, at some level you must abstract away the most fundamental concepts. It's overwhelming otherwise. But on the other, these "lies to children" sometimes never gets corrected and you end up with an education system that produces adults with very incorrect models of the world. We can "Lie to Children" but I think it's very important to emphasize that they are explicitly being lied to because the Truth (or the model that is closer/closest to the truth without overwhelming most anyone) requires knowledge of concepts they haven't learned yet. And at every step change in knowledge, they are updated about how "true" their "lie" is.

lloeki 3y ago

In more general terms - not just applying to children but to anyone - I call these "Feynman lies": the kind of lies you have to tell so as not to drown the receiver into very deep technical details. In essence this means presenting a model of the world that is sort of fundamentally incorrect, but one that is useful in allowing one's to wrap their head around the ideas. "All models are wrong, but some are useful", yadda yadda. "meet where they are" is a really nice way to put it, although it can be tricky to not paint ourselves in a "like rubber bands" corner! > I can't explain [magnetic] attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we’d said the magnets attract like as if they were connected by rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands, I shouldn’t be in trouble, you’d soon ask me about the nature of the bands… and secondly if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain, so I have cheated very badly, you see. > [...] > But I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you're more familiar with, because I don’t understand them in terms of anything else that you are more familiar with. direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&t=1263s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&t=1263s but the whole chapter is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&t=894 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&t=894

mprovost 3y ago

This puts a name to the approach that I've been using to write my Rust book. Leaping directly to a final, idiomatic solution without explaining all of the fundamentals first doesn't actually teach anything (except memorisation). It's often more effective to show a more straightforward, but possibly less idiomatic or performant, solution first. Then later introduce more complexity. But I realise that if you stop reading after a few chapters you might go off into the world and write suboptimal code. In my mind this highlights the difference between a reference and a textbook designed to teach. If you just want the final answer, check the reference. (Or have an AI autocomplete for you.) But to teach you have to bring people on a journey and show some "mistakes" along the way. My premise is that people learn better that way and retain the knowledge because you are giving them the chance to "discover" it themselves.

netcan 3y ago

Some lovely ideas. "Lies" is nice and provocative, but I think it's potentially limiting as you develop these ideas out. A recursive lie to children, perhaps. I feel that it's quite relevant for anyone who wants to learn philosophy these days. Western philosophy has, for hundreds of years now, mostly taken the form of dialectic or polemic. A philosophical position is polemical response to a previous philosophical mode, one that the new school defines and characterizes. Often one that they even names. Marx defines and characterizes capitalism. Academic feminism eventually characterizes patriarchy. Postmodernism responds to.modernism. The enlightenment counters medievalism. As the era progresses, we know about the earlier modes of thought primarily from the polemical retorts. It's much easier to gain a rudimentary understanding of "what non-trinitarian gnostics believed" from inquisitors and heresiologists than it is from reading gnostic sources. Even when the Pendulum swings, the inquisitor's definition tends to persist. Ayn Rand and other late modern, libertarians/objectivists adopt Marx's use of capitalism, and what capitalists believe. Revivalist religious movements rely on heresiologists for their theology. These "lies" are necessary scaffolding for modern ideas.

hnben 3y ago

I believe, that the "lies to children"-approach is one of the driving forces behind the general science-skepticism, and maybe even behind some consipiracy theories and some climate-science-denial. It basically goes like this: 1. Teachers are authorities and present facts to children 2. people later learn that some of these facts are in-fact not factual 3. people learn that: a) authorities can not be trusted b) it is ok to make up facts, as long as they sound good 4. people apply a) and b) to other situations

Richardcynthia 3y ago

[dead]