On Friday 19 October 2007 10:36:04 pm, Mike Tintner wrote: > The best way to get people to learn is to make them figure things out for > themselves .
Yeah, right. That's why all Americans understand the theory of evolution so well, and why Britons have such an informed acceptance of genetically-modified foods. It's why Galileo had such an easy time convincing the Church that the earth goes around the sun. It's why the Romans widely adopted the steam engine following its invention by Heron of Alexandria. It's why the Inquisition quickly realized that witchcraft is a superstition, rather than burning innocent women at the stake. The truth is exactly the opposite: Humans are built to propagate culture memetically, by copying each other; the amount we know individually by this process is orders of magnitude greater than what we could have figured out for ourselves. Reigning orthodoxy of thought is *very hard* to dislodge, even in the face of plentiful evidence to the contrary. Isaac Asimov famously said that the most exciting moment in science is when someone says, "That's funny..." But the reason to point it out is that it *doesn't* happen all the time, even in science (it's not "normal science" in Kuhn's phrase), and even less so outside of it. In the real world, when people get confused and work out a way around it, what they're learning is not an inventive synthesis of the substance at issue, but an attention filter. And that, for the average person, is usually just picking an authority figure. "Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die." Humans are *stupid*, Mike. You're still committing the superhuman human fallacy. Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=55686241-899d6e
