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Lie-to-children

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Re: Lie-to-children

#61

Post by jgwil2 »

moomin wrote: post #25

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…

> 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/economi...

Re: Lie-to-children

#62

Post by noufalibrahim »

tareqak wrote: post #14
gwd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yes. So, imagining education as progressively peeling off layers of abstraction is closer to the truth than "lie to children".

Re: Lie-to-children

#63

Post by kthejoker2 »

javawizard wrote: post #31

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 con…

That was Pascal not Twain.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Lettres_Provinciales

> The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Re: Lie-to-children

#64

Post by Gigachad »

roel_v wrote: post #35
speeder wrote: post #5

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.

I have a working mental model for how electricity works that is useful enough to let me do (some) electrical work, figure out simple electronics circuits, have some sort of understanding of how electrical devices like light switches, light dimmers (of the mechanical and the electronic kinds), motors, batteries etc work, ... All of these are useful skills. Yet I know for sure I do not understand electricity, as I do n…

I remember learning that electrons actually move in the opposite direction that current is marked on diagrams because when they started drawing them they couldn’t tell which way it flowed and ended up being wrong, but it doesn’t actually matter as long as you are consistent about it so they kept it “wrong”.

Re: Lie-to-children

#65

Post by javawizard »

genman wrote: post #37
javawizard wrote: post #31

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 con…

> 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.

Does it though? I really don't know. On what observations or scientific evidence are you basing your statement?

Re: Lie-to-children

#66

Post by moomin »

rjsw wrote: post #58
moomin wrote: post #25

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…

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.

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.

Re: Lie-to-children

#68

Post by genman »

javawizard wrote: post #65
genman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does it though? I really don't know. On what observations or scientific evidence are you basing your statement?

I have personally observed this kind of reasoning that (out of ignorance) equates arguments with very different importance. Being able to say that "scientists lie to the children" could easily become a serious argument for them.
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