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How To Teach a Healthy Dose of Skepticism?
c0d3h4x0r writes "It's no accident that 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' is one of the most common tags applied by this community to stories about proposed ideas or laws. The ability to spot and predict faults is a big part of what makes a great engineer. It starts with having a healthy skepticism about the world, which leads to actual critical thinking. Many books and courses teach critical thinking skills, but what is the best way to encourage and teach someone to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism? Is it even a teachable skill, or is it just an innate part of the geek personality?"
The best way is personal experience. Have a strongly held belief effectively challenged and have an epic fail. Then don't do what most of humanity does and use cognitive dissonance defenses to justify why you are still incredibly smart despite the fact you were in this regard a complete tool.
Generalize from your own experience and realize we are all flaming idiots but by using tools such as logic and the scientific method we can start to approach a modicum of cleverness. Then from that point on trust only 10% of what you hear and 50% of what you see, break a bunch of stuff while learning how not to break stuff as badly, and apply your skills to future problems.
Oh, and I would recommend reading 'Why People Believe Weird Things' by Michael Shermer. He describes this in great detail and even describes one of his own epic failures (he was abducted by aliens - kinda hard to own up to for a skeptic.)
Skepticism is just an offshoot of experience and the wisdom that (hopefully) comes with experience. After witnessing and experiencing a few spectacular failures in this life, the natural and healthy outcome is to develop a skeptical streak.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I didn't let my kid watch television until he was old enough to talk to.
Then I sat down with him, told him the rules for watching it, and emphasized one point:
"This is fun to watch, but remember - people lie."
At every level of life, when he was exposed to school, encountered any institution, or group, I would ask him, "How do you know this is true?"
I introduced him to the concepts of logic while playing games, and we made our own puzzles based on these concepts.
He is grown now, and has one awesome built-in BS detector.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
But you have to find someone who wants to live in a rational, logical world first. That's a lot harder than you might think, and probably explains why computer-saavy people tend to be more skeptical because logic is such a dominating facet of computing. "Normal" people, on the other hand, like their fairy tales and myths and "magic remedies" and so forth and tend to not appreciate it when you point out that what they're doing either doesn't work or has some other, more mundane, explanation...especially if that mundane explanation means they can't charge money for tours or Jesus-shaped bread.
Back to the question though, I find a healthy dose of skepticism from reading the various newsletters out there to be quite useful.
The James Randi Education Foundation (JREF) at http://www.randi.org/ has a weekly column they put out that is usually a good read discussing various "woo-woo" ideas and why, rationally, they fail as well as links to other such things. It's a decent enough starting point I suppose.
Interesting book by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistics professor. It has a lot of ancidotes about environmental policies and looking at the real impact of them. I don't agree with everything the author has to say, but it I thought it did a good job teaching critical thinking and encouraging people not to accept statistics at face value.
In the UK we have this newspaper called the Daily Mail. Some people call it the Daily Hate Mail, because that's basically how it sells - it makes the reader angry. Every story is blatantly biased, designed to make your blood boil. There is always someone doing something stupid, someone to blame for every problem in the world. It's really obvious that it's actually a load of rubbish, but people seem to just have a natural tendency to like that sort of thing.
Herman Gering admitted that the Nazi party used basically the same trick. The argument that you are being attacked, that other people are the cause of all your problems seems to be very compelling, perhaps because evolution makes the world competitive by nature and because if it's someone else's fault, it's not yours.
A lot of men in particular seem to have a hard time admitting they are wrong too. Even if you point out how stupid their beliefs are, people have a hard time accepting it. So, when ideas come along that are even quite blatantly stupid people tend to latch on to them if they support their existing point of view.
I think the only way to counter it is to teach philosophy and rational thinking from an early age. People seem to literally not know how to think, how to form a logical argument or dissect one in a rational manner.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
When I was in high school, we had two upper level physics class, AP Physics, and Electro-physics. I took the electro-physics class because we got to build things instead of study for a stupid test all year.
I learned quite a bit about electronics, but I think the most important thing I learned was failure mode analysis. The class had so many projects that required you to build things (physical things, not just circuits) that I, and everyone else in the class became very good at it. The projects started very simple and progressed in difficulty throughout the year.
At the end of the year, the Electro-physics class challenged the AP physics class to a sort of competitive science project, building a catapult. That's where our experience in construction paid off. Our project was heavily researched, carefully designed, and we even left a day to debug it (which proved extremely helpful). In the end, we won the competition.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
True skeptics aren't taught, they are usually forged through their own mistakes and misjudgments. In education it would behoove us to encourage mistake making as a learning tool instead of the current academic paradigm of grades and rankings.
Of course I am a graduate of The Evergreen State College which has no grade system so apply salt liberally.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
I don't think geeks are much more skeptical than other groups of people. Everyone thinks groupthink and bias don't apply to them, but the reality is a lot more subtle. A good book I've found for learning about innate human biases is How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilovich. It's filled with examples of how pattern detection and reasoning are skewed by the same heuristics that make our brains so effective in the first place.
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I've often thought about running a science class in schools with deliberately miscalibrated rulers. Or maybe an undergrad lab, where a selection of the instruments are 'off'. See how long it takes the kids to figure it out. (My colleague just lost a weeks work because he didn't bother to test his fancy fibre-optic temperature probes by sticking them in a glass of water with a thermometer. He'll remember that lesson!)
I am no perfect teacher, nor am I claiming to be an expert. I do teach middle schoolers (ages 10-13 at my school) and I try to show and teach them on a daily basis to question the world around them. Why do things happen? What really is cause and effect? What are the other options? What happens if we do this? (A great question not just for science) As a social studies teacher I get the "Why are we in Iraq?" question all the time. It gets difficult at times not to jump on a soapbox, so instead, in my best Socratic questioning, I ask the kids to look at the situation. Is this good? Is this bad? How do we stop terrorism? If it's broke, how can we fix it? If we're wrong (hard to say with a straight face!)what can we learn so as not to do this again? How should we solve problems?
:)
While I will admit I try to encourage skepticism about things like warrantless wiretaps, Gitmo, PATRIOT ACT (from a Constitutional viewpoint, as yesterday shows us, these programs are open to more than one interpretation) I hope that getting the kids to look at our (US) government policies leads them to ask themselves if they agree, if they "work", if they disagree, what else we could do, etc. Devil's advocate is a useful tool for me and I hope by presenting different views and getting them to think it over for themselves they can form their own opinions. I realize at age 10 this is near impossible as abstract thinking skills just aren't there yet, but the 7th graders can handle quite a bit of these topics and I only hope they are walking away with the ability to question their world in a meaningful way.
So to teach skepticism I actively look back at U.S. history (and world history) and get them to question why we did what we did. What were the outcomes? What were the motivations? Why did this happen? Could things have been different? If I wanted them to parrot God Bless America and engage in hero worship of their leaders, I guess I could teach things much differently, and in effect REMOVE all skepticism... but that's not teaching, that's conditioning. While I admit all teaching really is conditioning, I hope they condition themselves more than spit back my opinions, which I try to mask with varying degrees of success. Does it work? Guess we'll have to wait and see
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It's not hard. One classic approach for use in schools is to take some political issue which was a big deal in its day but is forgotten now. Obtain material written about the subject from many points of view, some sensible, some totally bogus, and with various degrees of stridency. Have students read through all the material and then write a brief evaluation of the various positions, listing the arguments, which ones they think are good, which ones seem bogus, and explain how they made that decision.
The Free Silver issue is a good example. Once upon a time, the "free and unlimited coinage of silver" was a big issue. This was an early attempt at an "economic stimulus package" in a hard-money system. There's a famous speech by William Jennings Bryan ("I will not allow this nation to be crucified upon a cross of gold"), there were political cartoons, and there's plenty of material available. This is for high school level students.
In earlier grades, teach skepticism of advertising. Teach how to read an ad. What are they trying to sell you? What are they telling you? What aren't they telling you? Use old TV commercials from the Internet Archive as teaching tools. Teacher handbook: "Ogilvy on Advertising".
It's a work-Life balance thing that we often need to spend more effort on than people in other disciplines.
I was a little amazed by the premise that there's not enough skepticism because I have learned to try to tune out the doubters and skeptics. Far too many people think they are clever if they can find a hypothetical problem with an idea. It's as if they think that being critical is the same as being discerning.
I think it's the whole bikeshed thing; they won't approve until they change the color.
But the point is well taken that people drink the Kool-Aid far too often without even considering what they're swallowing. Often, it's a reflection of their personal bias. They are willing to believe what their church/political party/government says because it conforms to their previously internalized beliefs. And belief usually translates to identity; people become what they believe. So when their leader tells them, for example, that global warming is not real, they believe what they're told despite evidence to the contrary. To not believe is a threat.
But this goes well beyond the obvious examples of politics and religion. Scientists are the worst examples of group-think. They are taught something and repeat it and hold it to be fact even when confronted with good alternative explanations.
As child, I could see that the continents of North and South America could plausibly fit up to Africa, yet my science teacher dismissed the idea that they were once joined. As we all now know, they were, in fact, once joined.
Personally, I think that shaming and embarrassing mistaken beliefs should come back into fashion. When people feel embarrassed about silly beliefs, they will start to question what they're told.
Best regards.
Yeah, the whole time I've been reading this, I've been thinking: "I think they mean critical thinking." Thinking critically is key to getting to the facts. They stopped teaching that in grade school many years back.
"Little is much when little you need."
Yeah, but even after he reveals the trick to the class, a significant percentage of them continue to believe the horoscope is 'real' and is aimed at them personally.
"... the Gods themselves..."
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... gave us all a nice healthy dose in skepticism by laying down a series of facts (with one wrong one), then setting us on the task of running an experiment to show those facts. Except he also led a lot of us astray by suggesting a certain way to do the experiment.
Then he graded us on our ability to 1) spot the false fact either by experimentation or by checking reference works, and 2) correctly set up the experiment in light of the wrong fact and wrong suggestions. Except we didn't know these grading criteria going into the project - we learned them afterwards.
I didn't spot that wrong fact, but did spot the problem with the suggested experiment setup. Lab partners and I got a 'C' for that project, and everyone else (who spotted neither problem) got 'D's. It actually led to some parents complaining, but I still thank Mr. Jackson (not his real name) for having done this. It was when I first consciously learned the value of skepticism in the real world. I owe my parents for having started a mild skepticism habit with a few carefully calculated lies now & then, but that was just the air I breathed; I hadn't really thought about it until Mr. Jackson basically failed almost the whole class for not being skeptical enough.
I go to an Episcopal church, which is one of the essentially non-doctrinaire Christian denominations. There are no creeds required to attend or be a member in good standing, though we do recite the Nicene Creed on Sundays. But some of my friends at church are "heretics" (heresy just being another word for a different idea about God; one that isn't mainstream), who don't e.g. believe that Jesus was divine in any way.
What should my church say about the physical world? My priest isn't a scientist, he's a priest.
I believe God created the heavens and the earth. I don't know how, though the observations indicate he knows a lot about chaos theory and there was some kind of big bang at the beginning. Where that initial matter came from that exploded (or I guess really just expanded), I don't know (but neither, yet, do physicists).
I believe that God wants me to do certain things (love others, charity, compassion, forgiveness), and not do other things (hatred, spitefulness). I think these are rather universal to the organized religion (mine and other Christian denominations).
But as for whether I should vote Democrat, Republican, independent, Libertarian, Green Party or should eschew politics, the religion is silent. If my priest told me who I should vote for (as seemed to happen at some churches in 2000 and 2004), or denied me communion because of my political affiliation or voting record (as happens at some Catholic churches) I would leave it, and hope that I could find some place to be in community with folk who share some of the same ideas about God that I have.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
I've worked in and socialized within a number of scientific fields, and religious beliefs aren't that uncommon, although they rarely intrude much into the research. But I've been surprised at how common a belief in a soul and god(s) in neuroscience is. There is a place where the science and belief can be in direct conflict, as neuroscience is actively explaining away any useful role once played by the soul.
I found this rather curious, but these were often competent, respected professors. I guess I'm just not smart enough to simultaneously believe two comflicting ideas which eat each other.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
I didn't say "spirituality". I said "god".
When you say you believe in something, you should be able to explain what it is you believe in, whether it be atoms, Pamela Anderson, komodo dragons, gravity, or dark matter; when people say they believe in "god", nobody really knows what "god" is supposed to be. Maybe throw in meaningless terms like "omniscient" and "omnipotent", without justification (of course), or some such, but that doesn't take us very far.
The most charitable I can be is "mysterious cosmic intelligence" and of course to believe in such a thing stretches way past any benchmark for reasonable, justified belief.
In the specific instance of my son, there was a predilection towards knowing the truth of things.
At 2 1/2 I was carrying him on my hip as we walked around the neighborhood on Halloween night. We saw our first group of people in scary costumes and he swivels around, looks me straight in the eye and, watching my face like a hawk, asks "Is this real or made up?" I answered that it was made up and after he scanned my face for another second, he swiveled back around and I could feel him relax.
A large part of his early training in skepticism was of course through play. Not long afterward we were at a toy store and there was a bowling game where each pin had a string on the bottom. Pulling a knob put all the pins back in place. After he had knocked the pins down I extended my hand magician style and "coaxed" them up again. His eyes got big, but immediately his eyes examined the "Magic hand", followed my arm down, across to my other arm and down that to my other hand. At which point he raced around and pried open the hand on the knob and triumphantly said "AHA!"
During our first stint with Harry Potter training took the form of a magic wand and my back against the light switch, turning the lights on and off. He *knew* what I was doing, but he also wanted terribly for magic to be "real", eventually his drive to catch me was just too strong to tolerate his desire the fantasy. Not long after he did find some solace in discovering the Real Magic of how radio works, it was cool to see awe supplant the longing for the unreality.
At one point I became worried that he was getting so confident about his command of practical physics that he would stop asking questions, so I got a book on coin tricks and took to finding all sorts of objects behind his ear and occasionally slamming a salt shaker magically through the table. Again, the drive to catch me at it was just too strong to tolerate any lukewarm or flawed explanations.
As his language skills became better there developed new ways to torment,um, I mean "teach" him. "that sandbox has five sides, and each side has two corners, so that should be ten corners, but I can only count five corners...Where are the other five?" I almost never left him hanging without the answer, that might work for some kids, but it wouldn't have worked at all for him.
We don't have broadcast/cable/satellite TV in our house (when I take business trips I check to see if I feel we are missing anything, mostly, I don't), but we watch DVD's and we see and hear advertising when we are out and about. After hearing that the messages were trying to influence his behavior he became very vigilant about the content of those ads and we always have fun picking out and playing with the hidden assumptions and premises.
After exposure to friends who were religious he made a leap of logic very much like that of "The Enlightenment": "If God exists then Hell must exist. Hell is too offensive a concept to accept, therefore God must not exist". I have to say that I played no part in this decision of his, I even pointed out the flaw in the reasoning, but he was unimpressed.
And then one day he came home from Third Grade a Militant Atheist. It seems that at lunch time some saintly little boy had told him that, as he didn't belong to some accidental religion or other, he was going to Hell. RAWR!
At about 9 years old we got into Syllogisms and spent a couple of nights searching the web for good examples to figure out. At this point we were home schooling (surprise!). Deciding he was ready, one day while driving I dropped the Final Exam for Fourth Grade Syllogistic Competency on him:
"All people who are not religious are going to Hell. You are not religious. You are going to Hell. True or False?"
He sat bolt upright in his seat, half grinning, half blazing with anger. He turned around and looked at me like he was about to chop my head off and said "False. 'I' might not be a person."
Okay so I had been skunked, fair enough, I wooted and gave him a h
Your argument is as cliche as it is not clever. Love is an emotion, art is a creative endeavor, and beauty is typically something that stirs a sort of emotional reaction.
Yes, it is hard to define many things especially since you cannot really describe one emotion or sensation in terms of another emotion or sensation. A lot of philosophy is trying to pin down a good definition--and a lot of philosophy is also carefully defining what you mean so it is understand what exactly you are arguing for. Saying you believe in "God" tells me almost nothing because I don't know what "God" is supposed to be. When someone says "love", "beauty", or "art", however, I do have an idea of what they are talking about.
Notice that "love", "beauty", and "art" are heavily subjective things, while "god" is not--god is supposed to be some sort of objective entity. Thus "god" needs to be defined so a discussion can be had on it. Maybe someone has an "internal" god of sorts but that's not what we're talking about and you'd be guilty of equivocation if you tried to bring such meanings into the discussion.
Having met several nobel prize winners and several others who I wouldn't be surprised if they received one soon (already holding other prestigious awards such as the national medal of science and having done groundbreaking research in their fields) I would say that most of them have a *better* than average family life.
Bottles.