3 ms·

I'm torn on this one, because there's no way I can accept "lies-to-children are for their own good", but on the other hand I'd hate to be overburdened with info

I'm torn on this one, because there's no way I can accept "lies-to-children are for their own good", but on the other hand I'd hate to be overburdened with information about Peanut maximums or the Ophthalmic supergroup when all I wanted to know was how to do division or what kind of thing a mushroom is.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
It's not hard. "It's sort of like that, but the details are complicated and you'll learn them later if you want" is a perfectly fine answer. A big difference between a lie and a simplification is whether the other party knows it's a simplification. Communicating that is independent of specific simplification you use, and it's sometimes as easy as saying "is mostly like" / "sorta" instead of "is".
- mlhpdx 2y ago
  I was learned enough in school to know when teachers were “teaching” something oversimplified. They uniformly acknowledged that when asked, until one didn’t. That one didn’t care about the nuance and insisted I give the “expected” answer when asked and ruined my attitude in school for years (not the only event, but it didn’t help). Obviously I’ve never forgotten her. One thing I adore about this community is the broad acceptance of “I don’t know” and “it depends” as the starting point for answers.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    To bring that back into the tech/business world: My personal rule for being an expert/consultant is to be very willing to say "I don't know, but I can find that out for you", and define that as my real expertise: know how to find out things. Technology stacks, programming languages, all of those things come and go. The skill to pick up whatever is needed is long-term better.
alexey-salmin 2y ago
Once you accept that a model of reality is always somewhat incorrect you kind of stop seeing this as "lies". Reality is infinitely complex, a model however is finite and therefore understandable. We value models for their simplicity, for their ability to disregard secondary and tertiary details to allow comprehension and prediction of primary effects. Then the only question is: which level of the simplicity/correctness trade-off is appropriate in given circumstances? When teaching kids or even a non-professional adults, the appropriate level is often very heavy on the "simplicity" side. Adding more complexity results in less overall understanding, so a net-negative effect in the end.
- Tostino 2y ago
  I think the problem comes in when you have adults teaching kids a simplified model who don't actually understand that is what they are doing. It is not always conveyed well that they are learning a simplified model, or using an analogy. That's when kids feel lied to.
- MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
  There are very many pithy sayings to this effect, most famously "All models are wrong, but some are useful" (perhaps by George Box, but I can't find this exact phrase attributed to him) Even Von Neumann said "truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations."

TeMPOraL 2y ago

It's not hard. "It's sort of like that, but the details are complicated and you'll learn them later if you want" is a perfectly fine answer. A big difference between a lie and a simplification is whether the other party knows it's a simplification. Communicating that is independent of specific simplification you use, and it's sometimes as easy as saying "is mostly like" / "sorta" instead of "is".

mlhpdx 2y ago
I was learned enough in school to know when teachers were “teaching” something oversimplified. They uniformly acknowledged that when asked, until one didn’t. That one didn’t care about the nuance and insisted I give the “expected” answer when asked and ruined my attitude in school for years (not the only event, but it didn’t help). Obviously I’ve never forgotten her. One thing I adore about this community is the broad acceptance of “I don’t know” and “it depends” as the starting point for answers.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  To bring that back into the tech/business world: My personal rule for being an expert/consultant is to be very willing to say "I don't know, but I can find that out for you", and define that as my real expertise: know how to find out things. Technology stacks, programming languages, all of those things come and go. The skill to pick up whatever is needed is long-term better.

alexey-salmin 2y ago

Once you accept that a model of reality is always somewhat incorrect you kind of stop seeing this as "lies". Reality is infinitely complex, a model however is finite and therefore understandable. We value models for their simplicity, for their ability to disregard secondary and tertiary details to allow comprehension and prediction of primary effects. Then the only question is: which level of the simplicity/correctness trade-off is appropriate in given circumstances? When teaching kids or even a non-professional adults, the appropriate level is often very heavy on the "simplicity" side. Adding more complexity results in less overall understanding, so a net-negative effect in the end.

Tostino 2y ago
I think the problem comes in when you have adults teaching kids a simplified model who don't actually understand that is what they are doing. It is not always conveyed well that they are learning a simplified model, or using an analogy. That's when kids feel lied to.
MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
There are very many pithy sayings to this effect, most famously "All models are wrong, but some are useful" (perhaps by George Box, but I can't find this exact phrase attributed to him) Even Von Neumann said "truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations."