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My vague lesson plan for it involves giving students outdated literature, having them read it, and having them summarize it to the class.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

[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 :)