Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

Great advice. Interrogative questioning was my biggest takeaway from my high school journalism class. We would often have to write interrogative-style fake interviews at the beginning of class and it took a while to develop an intuition for it.

The idea that science education is profoundly and pervasively dysfunctional.

It was a slowly accumulating realization. There was Feynman's critique of rote memorization in Brazil[1], but ok, Brasil isn't CaTech. And Mexico high-school graduates having TIMSS scores similar to US high-school dropouts, but oh well, that's Mexico. And news media have a trope, like "Harvard MBA students don't know what causes Earth seasons", but that's merely misunderstanding the nature of expertise -- if someone last studied a topic in middle school, then a middle-school-like understanding shouldn't come as a surprise. Similarly for grad and undergrad, professors and grad school. MIT and Harvard graduates being unable to light a bulb with a battery and wire[2], that seemed more bizarre. But by the time I saw Eric Mazur's (Harvard, intro physics) "it became clear that in spite of high evaluations, and in spite of good performance, my students were not really learning very much"[3], it didn't come as a surprise. Though it could still felt odd, for a time. Talking with first-tier medical school graduate students, with no clue how big blood cells are, beyond "really really small". Asking first-tier astronomy graduate students, "a five-year old asks you 'I'm told the Sun is a big hot ball [...] what color is the ball?'"... and of the very few who didn't get it wrong, half-ish learned it as "common misconceptions in astronomy education", rather from their own, atypically extensive and successful education. A follow-up of "what color is sunlight?" repeatedly produces these cute, not "aha!", but "uh oh" moments... the "that doesn't make sense, does it..." of two conflicting bits of unintegrated knowledge colliding for the first time. I no longer find it even slightly odd when a physical sciences gradate student tells me the Sun doesn't have a color, or is rainbow color. A person's understanding very rapidly becomes ramshackle as they move beyond their active research focus. And education content is pervasively authored beyond that. Far far beyond. Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent". To be fair, rote education in Brasil and elsewhere achieves... something, some societal value. And ours does too, and more of it. But now when I occasionally encounter someone who thinks of science education as working... it's become an exercise of empathy and imagination to picture how that might be a plausible description of the world.

[1] From "Surely You're Joking[...]" "In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience." https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education [2] "Minds of Our Own" clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng5qzH39nyg full 1997 https://www.learner.org/series/minds-of-our-own/1-can-we-bel... [3] Eric Mazur's "Confessions[...]" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=920

"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even attempted."

Blub paradox applied to taste is even harder to deal with because people without it want to believe it doesn't exist. Programmers can eventually move along the spectrum.

Article date: March 10, 2018

He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016.

...

Mr. Hagerman begins every day with a 30-minute drive to Athens, the closest city of note, to get a cup of coffee — a triple-shot latte with whole milk. He goes early, before most customers have settled into the oversize chairs to scroll through their phones.

Life finds a way I guess.