Being Wrong

[azurelunatic]

From one of my infrequent Facebook comments.

I have long thought that there should be a 3rd-grade-ish class on Being Wrong.

My vague lesson plan for it involves giving students outdated literature, having them read it, and having them summarize it to the class. After all of them have done this, the new material on the same subject is introduced, with a "What you just looked at was the pinnacle of scientific knowledge from $DATE. Since then, the following has been discovered: ___" - with the idea that if you are given incorrect or incomplete information, this is Not Your Fault, but one of the first steps after trying to understand something is seeing if there's any more recent information that changes things. And that it takes a while for new information to get spread around. Perhaps with a game involving human-to-human transmission of information, with information represented by marbles or something.

The aim of the lesson would be to help the students lessen their ego-involvement with being found wrong, encourage them with pride in productive effort, and reward them for searching for updated information.

Comments

[automaticdoor]

Michelle Obama and I approve of this message.

[azurelunatic]

It is the sensible way to proceed!

[ilyena_sylph]

I ♥ your brain.

Lots.

[azurelunatic]

It follows from Asimov's principles of science education, to teach the history of science to put everything in its historical perspective and to get the student used to the idea that science is a process rather than fixed facts, and with further knowledge the commonly held conceptions are challenged and replaced.

Teaching this early would entirely possibly change human society.

[ilyena_sylph]

Oh yeah. It very well might.

What would you start with, though, to avoid winding up with hysterical parents of third-graders ranting to your superior about "that $atheist teaching my child that $HolyBook is wrong!!!", though?

-- Serious question, btw, since a lot of western science came out of natural philosophy came out of monastic study.

[azurelunatic]

I might go with something like chameleons living on air, ostriches with their heads in the sand -- hilarious biological fantasy that can be disproved with just plain careful ethology.

[ilyena_sylph]

Oooh! *grins*

That makes sense! And ought to avoid the thorny mess I was staring at longingly.

[jd]

Although with examples like those (or perhaps any, now that I think of it. rather depends on both the parents and the kid) you'll fairly often run into the one precocious child who's already heard the real explanation and inadvertently ruins the exercise.

[cadenzamuse]

Hmm, you know what? I got the history of science from the time I was a wee lass, and particularly in all my biology classes from middle school on, and I don't think just teaching the history of science is enough. The most common reaction (this was mine as well) is "Why are we learning this stuff if we know it's not true any more?"

So I honestly don't imagine teaching it earlier would change anything.

Teaching it differently, however... Which is why I think your class is a good idea, as the living process of research and the changing understanding of concepts in science is really fun. I *got* it once I started working in a research lab at the age of 19. But not before then.

[silverflight8]

Aye, but for the truly cocksure (sometimes I am one) the response is omg, how could they be so stupid?!?! I am better. I would have found it. HMPH.

Humility is hard to learn :P Personally I think life eventually does it.

One of the things I really like aobut science, though, is the (mostly) acceptable practice of overturning formerly thought to be true ideas. See: Pluto.

[azurelunatic]

I think, if caught young enough, the cocksure response might be able to be transferred to When new information comes along, I will beat everyone else to examining it and seeing if it's closer to the truth. Maybe.

[pne]

As long as they also learn how to evaluate new information and determine whether it's closer to the truth or not.

"They laughed at Galileo!" is a favourite phrase of crackpots. Just because it goes against accepted knowledge, or just because it's new information, doesn't mean it's more reliable.

It's often hard to distinguish whether "What they don't want you to know!" is a sign of psychoceramics or conspiracy theory on the one hand or of truth that's uncomfortable for The Powers That Be on the other, and youth will need to learn the tools to make the distinction.

[azurelunatic]

In the shower, I started thinking of another lesson, to help with evaluating information presented by others and emphasizing the importance of peer review. All groups of students carry out the "same" experiment, and all but one control group are instructed privately/bollixed such that either their experiments or their reporting will not come out the same. They then present, with instructions that on first presentation, they do not reveal the special instructions.

After the chaos has calmed down some, they then reveal their special instructions, and a lesson on bias and peer review follows.

[cadenzamuse]

We did an exercise in our "leadership learning class" in college that involved negotiating for oranges.

You're from MegaSciCorp, and you need 400 oranges to make a drug that will save people from the plague. Fewer than 400 oranges will Really Not Do. This is VERY IMPORTANT. Also, BigCompScience is a HUGE rival with whom We Do Not Do Business.

Your opponent is from BigCompScience, and they need 400 oranges to save people from a completely different deadly disease that's running rampant. Fewer than 400 oranges will not do. This is VERY IMPORTANT. And, of course, MegaSciCorp is a HUGE rival to BigCompScience.

There is currently an orange shortage, and there are only 400 oranges available. AT ALL. IN THE WORLD.

You give each group their version of that backstory. And then you set them at each other.

Sometimes, one group talks the other group into believing that one cause is more important.

Sometimes, they split the difference and each take 200 oranges.

And sometimes, they are able to set aside the hating each other and the tendency to guard information *just* enough to discover that MegaSciCorp's drug uses orange rinds, and BigCompScience's drug uses orange meat.

That's an important lesson on communication, bias, and assumptions.

[jeshyr]

Wow the three lessons described here (one in the post, Azz's in the comments, and yours in the comments) are all so totally cool!!

I'd love to see a put-together archive of these amazing lessons actually - I seem to recall others mentioning similarly cool things from time to time but always in isolation.

I think I would have been fairly resistant because most of my childhood being smarter and righter than everybody around me was basically my whole self-identity, but hopefully it would've sunk in.

[cadenzamuse]

+1 :)

[silveradept]

That's a good thought. I'm not sure whether me-at-that-age would have picked up the lesson, because at that time, a large part of my psyche was invested in Being Smart and Being Right, even if it was Not My Fault.

However, what would hopefully get through with enough time and application is the intended lesson - that all scientific knowledge is always "what we think we know" and subject to change with new information.

I might think a good way of making that work would be to use the "here, try this root, no here, try this potion" that went around the Internet a few years ago, except this time with the actual scientific information that people thought at the time.

[aella_irene]

One of my lecturers recently told the story of how, in his First Evar Lecture, he talked about Henri Pirenne. He explained Pirenne's thesis, and people took pages of notes, drinking in how Pirenne revolutionised the study of trade around the Mediterranean in the seventh-eighth centuries.

Eventually, he got to the end, and said "And that's all wrong."

And someone in the front row burst into tears.

[azurelunatic]

Oh dear!~ That's definitely a possible failure method.