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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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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.
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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".
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.