The lies upbringing a new soul in civilized society… parents, educators, gurus. It’s hard.
Lie-to-children
11–20 of 68 posts
Re: Lie-to-children
#12This 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.
Re: Lie-to-children
#13When 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.
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.
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.
Re: Lie-to-children
#14The 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.…
"All models are wrong; some models are useful."
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.
Re: Lie-to-children
#15> 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.
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.
Re: Lie-to-children
#16> 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.
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.
Re: Lie-to-children
#17When 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.
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..
The article says it's all simplified mumbo-jumbo. It's just a question of how simplified it is.
Re: Lie-to-children
#18When 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.
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.
Re: Lie-to-children
#19so Newton's gravitational theory is a lie?
Re: Lie-to-children
#20so Newton's gravitational theory is a lie?
An incomplete description of a more complex reality, perhaps.