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Lie-to-children

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Re: Lie-to-children

#41

Post by quartesixte »

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.

Re: Lie-to-children

#42

Post by tolleydbg »

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.

Re: Lie-to-children

#43

Post by michaelt »

bilvar wrote: post #33
tsm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's absolutely useful to tell 4th-graders that x(t) = vt + x₀ Why is this useful? Where and when are they going to use this equation until they learn the correct one?

Anything moving horizontally, I guess?

(admittedly that's not what tsm's post implied, but still...)

Re: Lie-to-children

#44

Post by lloeki »

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

but the whole chapter is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&t=894

Re: Lie-to-children

#45

Post by cancerhacker »

bilvar wrote: post #33
tsm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's absolutely useful to tell 4th-graders that x(t) = vt + x₀ Why is this useful? Where and when are they going to use this equation until they learn the correct one?

In 4th grade I was writing very simple animations in basic on an Atari 400 and I absolutely would’ve used and understood this. I think this is a perfect example of perfect being the enemy of good. (And I think I’m mangling that phrase)

Re: Lie-to-children

#46

Post by mprovost »

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.

Re: Lie-to-children

#47

Post by verisimi »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #32
verisimi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 tha…

Look - I did this too, I breached trust.

But think about it - you set him up for a fall. You lied, then he spotted it and you told him the truth. This is a loss of trust - the child now knows that his parents lie to him. (Great that you admit it, after, of course.)

Perhaps the lying is to some extent useful - such is the nature of this world and all that - but that whole charade could have been avoided without any deceit in the first place.

But I really don't see how you can argue that its ok to lie 'in the right way' to naive, trusting children, for the sake of some cultural convention.

And I'm not even broaching the pros (?) and cons of the cultural convention.... I'm sure no one wants to hear my thoughts on the 'most wonderful time of the year', lol.

Re: Lie-to-children

#48

Post by TeMPOraL »

fifteen1506 wrote: post #21
smokel wrote: post #12

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.

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.

I'm against lies and wouldn't mind skipping the Santa, except it's ubiquitous around Christmas, it's present in schools and kindergartens. Instead, we settled on explaining that Santas are a kind of delivery service, similar to the delivery people that drop packages off at our apartment regularly. Parents and grandparents buy presents, a Santa delivers, and it's all a kind of fun game. Seems like a good compromise - technically true, and doesn't take away the play, just makes it explicitly make-believe.

Re: Lie-to-children

#49

Post by TeMPOraL »

verisimi wrote: post #39
scoutt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 1 one year old boy and I often think about how should I behave. While the Santa issue is trivial to me, I decided I will lie, or hide the truth for that matter, about some topics to protect his innocence until he's mature enough to understand. > your kids will know that there are things you will lie to them about And that's part of growing up. I now know that the dog I barely remember (when I was almost 3 year…

Yes - but I agree with your dog story - kids can't really understand about a death. Its not a lie - its an attempt to explain at the level you were at when you were 3. Its a different thing to go along with the social convention of tricking the younger generation, and allowing these external conventions to cleave the trust between a parent and child.

FWIW, we tried to explain my grandfather's passing to our then 3.5 year old without lying, and she herself crafted a story that "he's with the ants", and now, after listening to a truckload of astronomy songs, she says he's "in space" and "fell into black hole". We can see she pattern-matches the event to any other concept of "lost and not coming back" she comes across.

Re: Lie-to-children

#50

Post by bilvar »

cancerhacker wrote: post #45
bilvar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's absolutely useful to tell 4th-graders that x(t) = vt + x₀ Why is this useful? Where and when are they going to use this equation until they learn the correct one?

In 4th grade I was writing very simple animations in basic on an Atari 400 and I absolutely would’ve used and understood this. I think this is a perfect example of perfect being the enemy of good. (And I think I’m mangling that phrase)

Fair enough.
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