Slashdot Mirror
The Sweet Mystery of Science
Hugh Pickens writes "Biologist David P. Barash writes in the LA Times that as a scientist he has been participating in a deception for more than four decades — a benevolent and well intentioned deception — but a deception nonetheless. 'When scientists speak to the public or to students, we talk about what we know, what science has discovered,' writes Barash. 'After all, we work hard deciphering nature's secrets and we're proud whenever we succeed. But it gives the false impression that we know pretty much everything, whereas the reality is that there's a whole lot more that we don't know.' Teaching and writing only about what is known risks turning science into a mere catalog of established facts, suggesting that 'knowing' science is a matter of memorizing says Barash. 'It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.' Barash isn't talking about the obvious unknowns, such as 'Is there life on other planets?' Looking just at his field, evolutionary biology, the unknowns are immense: How widespread are nonadaptive traits? To what extent does evolution proceed by very small, gradual steps versus larger, quantum jumps? What is the purpose of all that 'junk DNA"? Did human beings evolve from a single lineage, or many times, independently? Why does homosexuality persist? According to Barash scientists need to keep celebrating and transmitting what they know but also need to keep their eyes on what science doesn't know if the scientific enterprise is to continue attracting new adherents who will keep pushing the envelope of our knowledge rather than resting satisfied within its cozy boundaries."
And that sort of makes sense to me because what are you going to publish about if your field is dead? What is going to drive you to keep studying your field if it's a dead field. I will say I don't remember many exciting things coming out of my advanced math courses. I know that field isn't dead but my instructors were abysmal in that field. Even the statistics professor had more fire. And I think the reason behind that is that math is a very deep field with so many before us that have pushed that field so far. In order to make original progress in that field, it appears to me that you almost have to become a hermit. You've got to become some sort of phantasmal waif like the great Grigori Perelman.
And I think that's the essence of where this article becomes misaligned. The author is complaining about learning by rote but there's few other ways to accelerate young minds quickly up to the point of modern positions of each field. I feel polymaths become much more rare as each field deepens in knowledge and that's because they are all rapidly becoming very deep rabbit holes (like mathematics). For me, grade school and high school contained the teachers that this guy is complaining about and that's because they had no choice. I wasn't ready for the real questions that remain when I was learning about derivatives and integrals in high school. I probably would not have comprehended P=NP very well at that time let alone the proof to the Poincaré conjecture.
It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.
I think there's a healthy balance, if you're teaching about what you don't know about then what could the students possibly be learning? Instead, I think teaching by rote and example of what we do know while using what we don't know as a carrot is the best methodology. If you can make your students excited about the unknown possibilities while at the same time conveying the boring and known but pragmatic information then you hit that sweet spot of teaching at a college level.
As to the particular field discussed in the article: Yeah, evolutionary biology is a relatively young field with a lot to be learned yet. I realized only a fraction of what I don't know when I read and reviewed The Logic of Chance.
My work here is dung.
Someone's going to write another book that fundamentalists will take as proof that science is wrong. o_O
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Teaching and writing only about what is known risks turning science into a mere catalog of established facts,
Science is about explaining things, not cataloging facts. If the guy thinks that the facts are the important bit, he's lost his way somewhere. Facts are the questions, theories are their answer and "science" is really the process of creating theories and disproving them. Hopefully replacing old theories with better or more refined ones. It's not about being able to recite the properties of a given thing, person or animal (those can be looked up).
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I think the unknown is far more fascinating than the known.
This was largely my experience up through high school. Science was taught as a body of facts, and less so taught as a process. When process was mentioned, it was taught as THE scientific method...which is not exactly how research is done! The whole body-of-facts approach makes it boring to most people.
Beginning in undergraduate courses, it was somewhat better. Mainly the beginning undergraduate courses were all about getting one up to date on a few centuries of research, and there just wasn't time to discuss the frontiers of the field. Really good teachers made time for it, and stressed that there is much more to be learned. I don't think any graduate school science course, at least among the physics ones I've taken, have treated the field that way. The underlying assumption was that there is much more to be learned. But that's why there is graduate school.
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
Regarding the article, science would be more honest about research if we emphasized what we don't know and what we're doing to learn new things in the field. Also, I might emphasize how science has changed, so students can see that the taxonomy charts they are filling out had less useful predecessors (kind of like making your C++ class learn how to type "Hello World" in Assembly or Fortran halfway through the year).
about what you don't know?
It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.
Woo-hoo! When can I start? It'd be a job for life, because you could fill a library with the things I don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.
Personally I love Andrew Wiles' description of the process of scientific research in the first minute or 2 of this science show.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
I believe (although I'm not an etymologist) that the source of your frustration is the irksome fact that Scott Bakula is better known in American households than Max Planck.
Regarding the article, science would be more honest about research if we emphasized what we don't know and what we're doing to learn new things in the field. Also, I might emphasize how science has changed, so students can see that the taxonomy charts they are filling out had less useful predecessors (kind of like making your C++ class learn how to type "Hello World" in Assembly or Fortran halfway through the year).
I think the key problem is that there's only so much time. Why did you pick Assembly or Fortran? Why not force computer science students to start out on punch cards or a PDP-6? In physics better models have been developed and while I learned of the less correct models (like combining the Rutherford and Bohr models) we never truly delved into their original states or why their failings drove them to something better. I think that's great stuff to preserve but ultimately when you're teaching high school physics there's just not enough time and students only retain so much. So I think sometimes we're forced to teach it by rote rather than as a process or journey that the student embarks upon.
My work here is dung.
The author is complaining about learning by rote but there's few other ways to accelerate young minds quickly up to the point of modern positions of each field.
But that's just it: you've done nothing for them if all they have done is learn by rote. They won't understand a thing, and everything you taught them will be easily forgettable. You do a disservice to people by making everything boring and assuming that they can't truly understand it.
The "unanswered questions" are critical for stimulating interest, but from the standpoint of accurate portrayal of science (the author's main point), what is more important is portraying the evolution of knowledge discovered thus far.
The most glaring example is the periodic table. Bam! There it is. It is knowledge in its most reductionist form. How were the elements separated and identified? Heck, how would you even go about separting elements today? (This would lead into the beginnings of material science, a subject important for everyday and political life but which much less than 1% of college students touch on, let alone grade school and high school students.)
I was really confused in all my science classes, because I was a Math/CS major. I would have been a lot less confused if someone had explained the philosophy of science -- not just the "scientific method" (and I don't think I even got that explicitly -- labs seemed to be more about showing how bad we were at taking measurements than about the process of discovery), but that the "laws" of physics were merely the best known model of observed phenomena, and that furthermore the models tended to break down at the extremes. I.e., it was never explained to me that science works backwards of math and computer science.
That's one reason I favor classical education for schools. Classical education cover the "great books" from the beginning of recorded human history to the modern era, in chronological order. Mortimer Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World, called it the "Great Conversation".
A conversation that reveals the evolution of human knowledge is comprehensible, interesting in the way drama is, cross-disciplinary, and leads to holistic and lasting knowledge.
I definitely agree with the article, it's not so much what we know about the universe, but what we don't know that is really interesting.
My biggest wonder is consciousness. What is it? How does it work? If I am conscious, does this mean the universe is conscious? Am I conscious? Is consciousness only available in higher order complex physical structures (like higher order mammals), or is it possible in lower order structure too, like rocks? I have to say that this there is not a big effort to solve this question. For me it's the most important question to answer, and most interesting. Where do you start to answer such a question? Of course many great thinkers have tried to answer the question, but at the moment it's little more than just philosophy.
Another interesting question is: How the heck does the universe exist?
Yes, but many of them are the worst of both worlds. Speculative and unproven whilst being presented as dogmatic fact. This increases the public perception that science is both certain/absolute and changes its mind frequently/frivolously, and makes it even harder to explain how it really works.
I guess I must have gone to a fundamentally different kind of college. Nearly every single professor I encountered wasn't excited about what was already known in their respective field but got disturbingly excited about untestable theories, suspected areas of interest and tantalizingly unknowable facts. My computer science professors would treat P=NP in an almost religious fashion -- treating that solution like the face of god. Sometimes it was just a numbers game like natural language parsing and parts of speech tagging. Here's the best-to-date accuracy, can you beat it? Ask my physics professors about entropy in space or, worse, string theory and they'd shortly be speaking in tongues. My philosophy instructors, even, loved to ask questions that had no clear answer: would you murder one person to save thousands? Why did Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner of 3,000 lives in Paris, survive the revolution and what moral implications entailed him executing his former boss the king?
The tasks of most professors I met were reduced to management stuff. They only appear as authors on papers because of things they did while being a postdoc, or because they want to be added to a student's paper (in order to get their references up). They had more up-to-date knowledge about the issues of the faculty's politics and the mechanical problems of the coffee machine than their (former) field.
Well, that's the reason scientists don't emphasize certain aspects of science: the fear that certain people will take the wrong conclusions from that. (Note: I said they don't emphasize, not that they don't talk about it at all.)
For example, if scientists (such as Fred Hoyle) state that it is improbable that life was created by chance molecular interactions, some people will take that as evidence of divinity.
If scientists pose a specific genetic origin of homosexuality, that could lead to a gaydar-based homosexual genocide (feticide?).
If scientists admit differential IQ or other traits in various subspecies of humanity, that could lead to a basis for legalizing racial discrimination.
This would become even more powerful if it were discovered that humans had independently evolved in different areas (not the currently accepted theory).
Finally, sociobiology may lead to legalized sexism.
What we do not know is unquantifiable, however what we do know is quantifiable, so I would rather learn something we do know.
What we do not know is what we do not know, how can we teach anyone that which we have no knowledge, after all we do not know it.
It seems like the examples given of things we don't know are somewhat misleading. There is a great deal we don't know, but we have well researched theories on a lot of what is mentioned by the editor.
Looking just at his field, evolutionary biology, the unknowns are immense: How widespread are nonadaptive traits?
Obviously this is different by species, but we can quantify it within a range for many species.
What is the purpose of all that 'junk DNA"?
This is the implicit question fallacy. Why would junk DNA need a purpose? We understand where much of it originates and how it is inserted.
Did human beings evolve from a single lineage, or many times, independently?
Originally, all the research points to one line for life on earth. As for where we draw the distinction of the homo sapiens species, there seems to have been multiple lines of progenitors evolving in parallel sometimes isolated sometimes interbreeding. There have been quite a few articles on this in recent years.
Why does homosexuality persist?
Kin selection. What did you learn biology in the 20's or something?
The author is complaining about learning by rote but there's few other ways to accelerate young minds quickly up to the point of modern positions of each field.
But that's just it: you've done nothing for them if all they have done is learn by rote. They won't understand a thing, and everything you taught them will be easily forgettable. You do a disservice to people by making everything boring and assuming that they can't truly understand it.
Okay well somebody modded you up so let's take the example from the article:
In my first college-level biology course, I was required to memorize all of the digestive enzymes and what they do. Even today, I can't stomach those darned chemicals, and I fear the situation is scarcely much better at most universities today.
I'm not a biologist but here's how I'd teach this: 1) here's the methodology and a brief history of how they found these enzymes 2) here are the list of the all the known enzymes and their functions 3) this is why we suspect there might be more we don't know about or why we suspect we have discovered all of them. (keep in mind I have no idea which of those is reality)
So you teach that to the class and you tell them that they will be expected to know the full list of enzymes from number two. Okay so how do you propose we teach them that? Give them a cow's stomach and tell them to get to work? I mean, at the end of the day you only have so much time and you cannot give the students the opportunity to discover in a class period what took some well funded researchers many man months. You're best off to give them these enzymes "by rote" and, should they want more information, be able to approach you about this outside of class.
I'm more comfortable speaking about computer science so a comparison of this might be telling students about the evolution of memory management systems in operating systems "by rote" instead of forcing them to code each iteration of what Unix, Minix, Solaris, Linux, Windows 1, etc did to manage memory or schedule threads. There's only so much time and while this information is valuable in some context, it's not as valuable as being able to move forward to get to more pragmatic fronts of the field in question.
I'm totally open to hear how you think biology is supposed to teach enzymes. A lot of memorizing and teaching by rote in biology has to do with just coming to agreement on what you're going to call the bones of the body or tissues in the body or fragments of the skull or whatever you want to agree on with your area of focus. How do you make naming the bones of the human body fun and then expect them to read a paper on metatarsals and expect the students to have come up with a better name from metatarsals and know that that's what the paper is talking about?
My work here is dung.
I'm a HS science teacher [bio and chem] and he seems out of touch. Sure, he's right about there is a tonne of shit we don't know. Great. We also know there is a tonne of stuff we DO know. I constantly attempt to draw attention to BOTH. My students are regularly attempting to verify the 'what we know' and investigate the 'what we don't'. The latter is always a challenge at the HS level. A constant difficulty is that science 'stands on the shoulders of giants' and therefore to move forward we need to appreciate the past. Again, there is nothing new here. Lastly, I attempt to focus on concepts I HOPE my students move towards mastering. The fact is, many concepts require years of scaffolding, spiraling and application to truly understand. You really think you knew Newton's laws in grade 8 or 9? Memorizing the statements is fine but applying the concepts to authentic scenarios is challenging. I don't only teach facts, I ATTEMPT to teach a way of thinking and problem solving and wondering and all the other more interesting stuff.
rather than resting satisfied within its cozy boundaries.
Right, because according to the author, there is no scientific progress at all since everyone is "satisfied". The scientific method works as is. It's up to any decent scientist to review the work of others when postulating a new hypothesis to see if the question has already been answered by someone. That's part of the steps of the scientific method. Automatically you find out that way what is known about a subject. However teaching "what we don't know" is ridiculous because there are plenty of things that we don't even know exist. In short - we don't even know what we don't know.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
As to why the universe exists has nothing to do with consiencness. Clearly it existed before humans came into existance to observe anything.
They had more up-to-date knowledge about the issues of the faculty's politics and the mechanical problems of the coffee machine than their (former) field.
Oh I don't know if its that bad. To the best of my knowledge I'm the only person I've ever met who always asked any post-secondary educator about their PHd dissertation. Two observations:
1) On topic, virtually all of them spent the last 10% of their discussion talking about very recent work in that field. Apparently my favorite calc teacher tells people he takes credit for inventing how pretty much every kid learned algebraic equation multiplication in the 80s based on an enormous number of teaching experiments and lots of early computer based statistical analysis, but that was superseded by a more recent fad / trend / research around 1990 blah blah blah. I never fact checked these people, but even in something irrelevant to them now, they pretty much all keep up with old times.
2) Off topic, at least a small percentage of phd's are achieved on a non-dissertation track. Maybe 5% of my phd level instructors talked about submitting a large quantity of research papers with their name on it. Maybe luck, donno, but this seemed more prevalent outside the hard sciences. My pre-civil war history prof got his PHD based on lots and lots of published research papers some fairly interesting sounding historical economic analysis of England or something very similar to this story, but he claimed to never write "a" dissertation just turned in stacks of research papers and did his written and oral exams.
TLDR if you think your prof is clueless about modern research, motivate your prof by asking about their PHD dissertation and you'll probably get a pretty interesting speech about modern developments in the field both during and since the prof's dissertation.
I don't think this is all that surprising... J random luser walks up to me and asks whats new in the modern world of computing and I probably tell them to F off I'm busy, but if they have a good conversation starter about something from my past, maybe we'll have an interesting discussion instead.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's even mentioned in the original article, but left out by submitter and editors (are there any true editors here?).
I guess that's why so many people say their experience has been different - they learn under different teaching systems.
My experience is also opposite. Teachers were inciting to find new solutions and think in scientific way how to make progress rather than "catalogue facts" and remember them as, say, historicians do.
It's a critically important point he is making, and that just makes it all the more frustrating that his examples are mostly really poor ones. It's been a few years since my biology classes but "Why does sexuality occur at all, since it is fully one-half as efficient in projecting genes into the future compared with its asexual alternative?" seems adequately explained - assortment of genes has significant benefits despite its inferior efficiency in a very narrow sense. And of course it's not like once sexual reproduction evolves asexual reproduction ends. The peculiarities of human females he mentions have at the very least quite plausible explanations that were old when I was in school. Monogenesis of modern humans is strongly supported by the evidence and the only significant dissent seems to come from states that specifically encourage multi-regional genesis theories for nationalist reasons.
But the worst of it is probably "What is the purpose of all that "junk DNA"?" That is not a scientific question. It's a teleological question. The fact that a man can actually lecture on 'science' for 40 years in this country without knowing the difference is really all that needs to be said.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Finding this out is part of any reasonable scientific education. It is something people have to find out themselves, otherwise they would not believe it. But it is hardly the only scientific fact in that class (although most are more specific to individual disciplines) and calling it a "deception" is grandstanding on the part of this person. There is no deception, at least not by scientists. Just people that are incapable of understanding, usually because they want a simple, clear (and wrong) picture of the world.
Relevant citation:
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty
are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled
with doubt and indecision. -- Bertrand Russell
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.
I think there's a healthy balance, if you're teaching about what you don't know about then what could the students possibly be learning? Instead, I think teaching by rote and example of what we do know while using what we don't know as a carrot is the best methodology.
I think problem solving and deductive reasoning should be the primary things taught in school. In Japan many lessons start with a question to answer or problem to solve, that the student is not yet knowledgeable of. Then the students are put to the task of coming up with a solution or finding an answer in whatever way they think best. Then the teacher presents the established known answer or solution, and discusses how the students own attempts compare and contrast with the known method. Doing so reveals things such as mathematic principals as obvious, not mysterious, and gives young minds the tools to go forth and explore.
I wish my schooling was like that in the USA. When I was 10 I was creating a 2D vector graphics space game in BASIC (moveto, lineto, rotate). I only understood linear equations, but I needed to find the angle from one ship to the other ship for the CPU player to turn towards the player's ship. I understood slopes, and made a drawing of line slopes and their corresponding angles. For the rest of the summer I spent inventing Trigonometry. There was a sin() and cos() function, but their documentation didn't explain what they were used for -- I ended up making my own slopeAngle() program.
The next school year was more long division, and ratios... When I presented my 3D distance equations and what I would soon learn were proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem to my mathematics teacher, she was unimpressed. "You'll learn about Trigonometry in high school", she said. That was the key word I needed to continue my education, I soon discovered calculus at my local library. When we did start learning Trig, I was just as unimpressed with the "Geniuses" of old as my math teacher had been of me. I found it odd that these old dead bastards were so highly praised for what would be obvious to any 10 year old.
I dropped out of Highschool as soon as was legally possible and started a career in software development. "School" was utterly useless to me, and college remains even moreso: It would cost so much for me just to be able to prove that I know what I know, and would waste so much time in the proving... I would be forever in debt. My customers like results, they could care less of my mental upbringing, only my experience and accomplishments. We should do away with "final exams" and instead place "entrance exams" at job entry points, thus freeing our minds to learn however we think best without punishing us for doing so.
YOU may not have been ready for P != NP or the Poincaré conjecture, but why should your slower development be a limiting factor to others?! I've been using Unit-Sphere Quaternions and Integration for NEAR Polynomial time Inverse Kinematics since Junior High School -- I'm not bragging, I don't feel superior at all. I'm just trying to drill it in that everyone develops at different rates, and the current establishment completely ignores this to the detriment of our race.
People like to believe we have a good handle on everything. It makes them feel safe.
There's a simpler non-psychological / non-political / non-philosophical explanation, that your average J6P knows we really do pretty much have an excellent handle on most anything we can mass produce, which for J6P is pretty much everything, or everything J6P knows, anyway. Therefore we must have a good handle on everything.
On the other hand, there's a heck of a lot of things we can imagine that we can't mass produce, and history shows we're pretty good at inventing and later mass producing some unimaginable stuff, so we'll probably keep on doing just that in the future. And thats that complicated science-y stuff.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
One of the best current contenders for the reason homosexuality persists is kin selection.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
You can't participate in the discussion unless you do the reading.
The Socratic Method actually requires a good bit of that "lowly rote learning" that people like to be so dismissive of around here. It's a necessary prerequisite so that you know what everyone is talking about.
It's not glamorous but you can't skip lifting your head, rolling over, learning how to crawl and then how to walk.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
about what you don't know?
It's all "what we don't know" which is why it's so neat. I remember the following quote, I just don't remember the source:
"The difference between an old scientific theory and a new one is that the old theory is wrong in more subtle ways."
Science is the process by which we work together to collectively improve our explanations and predictions about the world over time. It's how we develop, test, and explain/record our best guesses. Our current best guesses are likely to be improved in the future (i.e. they are "wrong"), we just don't yet know how.
Teaching science in this spirit means teaching humility as part of the lesson. I suspect the author (and many others involved in learning science, and too many on the teaching side) miss this entirely. They experience "Science" as a body of techniques, terminology, and content-specific knowledge that they struggled to master, when science is more correctly described as the process that got us there.
Compared to other systems of "truth", Science does indeed change it's mind frequently and frivolously. That's not a bad thing. It's nothing to fear. It's also not something to gloss over just because half of the population is going to get a panic attack over it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There is some justice to this criticism. It was certainly my experience in high school, but by the time I got to college there was plenty of discussion of what we don't know. One problem is that in many fields, it requires considerable knowledge of what we do know to make sense of what we don't know and why it matters. Of course, there are some areas where what we don't know is sufficiently straightforward that it could be easily discussed at the high school level--the origin of life, for example, or the nature of dark matter--and it is important to get into at least some of these areas to make students understand that the scientific frontier still exists.
I think a more serious omission is the lack of discussion of the evidence base for what we think we do know. Particularly at the high school level, it is easy for students to get the impression that there is a clear distinction between scientific facts and theories, whereas in reality it's all theories, with various levels of evidence to support them. One encounters this misconception constantly, in people who dismiss evolution or global warming because they think "it's only a theory." More discussion of the evidence base for accepted theory would help to dispel this misunderstanding.
As my geology prof exclaimed when the class complained about the amount of memorization required: "welcome to college."
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Or this Barash geezer went to a fundamentalist one.
He does seem to have a thing about evolution and homosexuality,.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Actually some people do skip learning to crawl. I found out recently that I did. But point taken! I think even those who skip rote learning from lists, would eventually pick up all the terminology that the roters use anyway.
Actually I don't really think there is any point forcing kids to memorise stuff that they'd be able to look up in a textbook in the real world. Focus on teaching them how to analyse problems and then look up the information they need, rather than trying to know everything.
which is totally what she said
Sure, you can discuss for infinity about all that you don't know and their endless possibilities, but why not simply teach what we know, and what is probably. I don't know for sure if Aliens do exist, but based on what we know, and the vastness of the universe, it seems quite probable that other intelligent beings exist. It doesn't make much sense to me why we should contemplate on things that are unlikely to be true .
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Looking just at his field, evolutionary biology, the unknowns are immense:
The parts that a nonscientist actually cares about are generally solved. To take just one example, evolution's "small" and "large" jumps are all large on a human scale. As far as everyone else is concerned, evolution takes a long time and scientists are just arguing exactly how long.
.
I think he has a point where the public is concerned - except for a few gifted science popularizers like Sagan and deGrasse Tyson, public exposure to science seems to be too heavily tilted to the "look what we found" side, and it's ruined public perception. Even on Slashdot science stories inevitably have several "wake me up when I can buy it at the corner store" comments.
Teaching can be done without pouring facts into kids' heads too. The best teachers I had would teach well known concepts by first posing a problem. You'd get a sense of the mystery, then work through to the (known, but not to you) solution.
Come on, there are lots of Slashdotters who participate in the discussion without doing the reading OR knowing what everyone is talking about.
Or did you mean participating in a productive discussion?
It is obvious that in the daily news feed no one is ever going to say "Hey by the way did you know that today no one discovered a solution to - Frankl's union-closed sets conjecture." What we never hear is the foundation on which new discovers stand. Today there are many fundamentalist or just uninformed people who don't "believe" in evolution and geology. If the press included in the discovery of say a new medicine for cancer the fact that evolutionary theory underlies our understanding of the what and why of genetics that led to the discovery, maybe people would see that biology today is the study of the evolutionary process.
People have strange notions of what the quantum uncertainty principal means. I have heard people say that "anything can happen" and "scientists can't say for certain that gravity will work". The truth that should be told when we smash particles to find the Higgs Boson or like is that quantum physics for all of it's uncertainty makes better predictions than any mathematical scientific framework ever previously invented. It may rely on probability but, it is still very exact.
I guess I mean that if we are talking about informing the uninformed about science I think telling them how much we know and how we got there is more important than saying what exactly we still don't know.
Yeah I know. I didn't RTFA.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
Or did you mean participating in a productive discussion?
On Slashdot? What are you smoking?
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
Ah good. Whenever people start saying "we know everything" tends to be when someone or something comes along and shows us how little we really know. And I'm kind of a novelty junkie.
Focus on teaching them how to analyse problems and then look up the information they need, rather than trying to know everything.
I can see a problem with this method. If you don't have some basic understanding of the information related to the area you are analyzing, you won't be able to think in broad enough terms to come to any type of solution or analysis. You could very easily get caught up in all of the details of the information you have to keep looking up. If you can't memorize the information you looked up, you won't have it all in your head an once for the analysis anyway. I would personally rather understand how a formula works or how it was created than just memorize it. Then, years later, I have a good chance of being able to re-create it when I need it. But without plenty of understandings of the areas around that formula, I would not be able to do that, so there is some sort of memory needed to have a good understanding of an area of study.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
I didn't say that memory isn't useful, just that there's no need to fill it up with rote learning of digestive enzymes when your desired field of study is Computer Science for example. When I don't know something, I look it up. I remember things that interest me more easily than if I have to force myself to read through a textbook.
I'm not trying to say that people should try not to remember things either. I think it will be easier to absorb relevant information if you're not also trying to cram with irrelevant information though. Perhaps that's incorrect though, and that forcing yourself to memorise things when you're younger helps with passively absorbing information later in life? I haven't seen any studies either way.
which is totally what she said
"Is consciousness only available in higher order complex physical structures (like higher order mammals), or is it possible in lower order structure too, like rocks?"
I am a rock, you insensitive clod!
Consciousness is an illusion, along with free will. It doesn't actually exist, but your brain perceives the world and the actions you are taking in the context of consciousness.
Hmmm, do you have the scientific papers to back this up? I believe you are just making an assumption, like people used to assume the Earth was flat. I agree that this is currently the easiest explanation, but no-one has actually come up with a reasonable theory for it. It's the "I feeling" that I refer to as consciousness, to my knowledge there is no physical explanation of its mechanism. How does the universe allow for this awareness, the "I feeling"?
This comment made me happy and even more so to see it with positive score.
Actually, I think my initial score was 3, now it's 2, ... I'm just waiting till it's -1.
No. It isn't. It's used to denote a small discontinuous transition. The smallest possible in a system. It is a term that pops up when discussing the low energy behaviors of a system.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Why would you expect your students to know a list of of arbitrary names ascribed to chemicals used in digestion? How could memorizing such a list possibly be important or useful to students? Requiring that makes no sense at all. People can look up trivial details like that on their own, should they need them. The vast majority (dare I say all if it!) is immediately forgotten by students after the test. If people use a particular set of information in their field of study/work a lot they will naturally memorize it on their own in order to save time! Theres no need to torture students by requiring them to memorize lists of trivial details that are meaningless to them aren't likely to be useful later on.
Those of us who do things that might benefit actual humans need to come up with more answers than questions.
I'll be sure to mention at my next lab meeting that the work we're doing on sequence conservation in embryonic development can't possibly "benefit actual humans," then.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In the sciences, the dissertation is typically published. Each chapter is usually a separate paper. In fact it's common to take all your published (or at least submitted) research papers and staple them together (or combine into a single LaTeX file), and call that the dissertation.
You seem to be confused. If you think you are horny about something, then you are horny about something. If you think you like something, then you like something. These conditions exist so far as you think they exist, and need no other objective consideration.
What THE FUCK could possible be the point of the Poincaré conjecture anyway? From a pathfinding point of view it seems obvious that any ring can be compacted into a point in any sphere like object. Could you explain it in terms a software engineer could understand?
But... the future refused to change.
The Socratic method also requires that we learn numerous fields of study. This is something else often complained about by many. In my ever so humble (hah!) opinion, the real meaning of that requirement is lost today. For example few in college study Philosophy, Logic, Symbolic Logic, Rhetoric, and Ethics. Most people take "Humanities" as their Liberal Arts objective, which teaches no real skills but is glorified "Social Studies". People whine about taking Communications and Algebra if it's not related to their degree, ignoring the far reaching implications of the learned skills.
In my opinion, the more you learn the better off you are. It's interesting to me how much knowledge begins to correlate to other knowledge as you learn more and more. Having basics like Rhetoric and Logic mean you can convey thoughts and usually make sound decisions. Math is required for just about everything, Physics helps you make sense of the world.
Even back when I was in College most of those things were not required, now even less are required. I took lots of extra classes because I enjoyed learning, and still do, not because I had to. Since I could afford it, it made it easier to do. Someone on a tight budget in College would not have the same luxury, and would still get a degree.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Before you get that far, one must look to Descartes work (also Aquinas) to know that they exist without question. If you do not know you exist, the question of being conscious is not relevant. If you know you exist, being conscious is just an extrapolation of that same principle.
This is the foundation for critical thought, which in my opinion everyone should be trained in.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I think if people truly had a choice over their sexual orientation most homosexuals would opt to not be part of a category vilified and marginalized by ignorant halfwits such as yourself. Considering they have to put up with dumb asses such as yourself I am more inclined to believe its a biological imperative rather then simply a choice about continuing to do something they just got horny about as a teen.
You don't understand homosexuality, that is obvious, most likely you are fearful and obsessed by it, but don't come off sounding like the rest of the world is simply not as enlightened with your reason for its existence and then hide behind anonymity.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Well, of course. He's a biologist. A full understanding of biology, to the level of understanding that physics provides to mechanical and electrical engineering, is a ways off.
On the genomic side, full genome sequencing for complex organisms is only about ten years old. That just provides the raw bits. Now the meaning and the expressive mechanisms have to be figured out. We're nowhere a tool like SPICE where you put in a DNA sequence and an organism simulation runs. People are still trying to figure out protein folding.
Biology isn't mysterious any more. Just big. Many of the basic small-scale biochemical mechanisms are well understood. That wasn't true fifty years ago. Work today often involves moving up the scale of complexity, trying to understand how the parts interact. There's a long way to go, but progress is rapid. Especially now that there's enough compute power to deal easily with the data sets involved. This is not an area that is stuck with some huge unsolved problem that impedes forward progress. (Compare fusion, rocketry, and the resolution of quantum mechanics with general relativity.)
While this may sound interesting and logical to someone uneducated, this is simply a nice fallacy with no scientific backing that could not be countered by other scientific data. Simply put, you are full of shit.
While numerous studies show that often we make decisions by calculations, there is also a tremendous amount of proof to things like instinct, precognition, and premonition. We don't understand it, it's extremely complex to measure, but it is most definitely real.
You have a very blatant lie hidden in your statements as well. " What you perceive as blue doesn't actually exist, what actually exists is just a wavelength range". We define the color blue by the specific wave length (or filtered wave length if you prefer) so know exactly what "Blue" is. So a person can perceive "blue", "red", "violet" or any other color defined in the spectrum. You are a liar, the end.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Because what I did in college was write software which among other things was used to model digestive processes. As I recall, the medium sized model was a fairly non-sparse system of more than 200 differential equations, mostly linear but with a few key highly nonlinear terms. And in case it isn't obvious, 200+ equations translates into a hell of a lot more chemicals involved than you could reasonably memorize.
Difficulties of solving the thing aside (the system turns out to stiffer than you'd expect), the fun part for the chemists was getting all the coupling coefficients right, because they come from lots of different sources and are expressed in lots of different units. I built dimensional analysis into the software, but they decided not to use it because it would take to long. That was a bad call, because after publication a mistake turned up (an add that should have been a multiply) that dimensional analysis would have caught. The good news is they reran the model and the mistake didn't change the results significantly, so they were able to issue a simple correction.
I couldn't name even one enzyme involved then or now, but back then I knew quite a bit about how digestion actually worked.
Perhaps, you Sir, should learn what a liar is?
If I know the truth and tell you something different with the intention to let you be unaware about the truth, that is a lie.
Someone who is drawing false conclusions, or following a logical chain incorrectly or recalling something wrong from his memory is not a liar.
In a different thread today was the question why europeans often make fun about americans ...
Well ... obviously you are one. How do I kow that? In europe calling someone a liar is likely the second biggest insult you can do. The first biggest insult depends on the country of the adressed person.
Anyway, it makes me sad that people in a discussion need to call one a liar when he only made a honest mistake. Your argument does not become more convincing if you attack your opponent ad hominem
So you started your post with an insult and ended it with one ... for some reason I did not catch the middle part. Likely you where equally wrong like your parent? I will never know ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Compared to other systems of "truth", Science does indeed change it's mind frequently and frivolously.
Well... I don't know about "frivolously". Usually, you have to have solid evidence and sound reasoning before Science changes its mind.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I think you're answering some of your own questions here. As interesting a topic as it is, it's doubtful that anyone knows a concrete place to start in understanding consciousness. How can you put in big effort to solve something when you don't quite know what that something is? At that point you're kind of stuck at the philosophy stage by necessity.
Also, if you have the capability to wonder whether or not you are conscious then, yes, by definition you are.
Happy people make bad consumers.
I never called you a "liar", I stated that you had typed a blatant lie. My statement is factual, go read the definitions for "blatant" and "lie". If you are personally offended or assume name calling, this is your short coming.
This has nothing to do with being US or from Europe. If you don't tell the truth, it's a lie. If you use poor logic to come to a false conclusion, it's a fallacy. You did both, and I pointed out both. If I spoke something factually untrue in Germany, I would receive the exact same treatment as you did. I would be told that I spoke a lie. Why? Because it is factually correct. Of course the German word is "liegen".
And hey, guess what? I was in Germany for years and have relatives from Germany. There is no magic cultural divide as you propose that changes how someone is corrected when telling something that is not true.
If you are called out for speaking something not true, and chose not to read the logic.. that is another severe short coming on your part. Perhaps if you read the middle you would learn "why?" instead of simply opening up to repeat the same mistakes over time.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Alright. Assume a N-dimensional image, for instance, some medical data where which is part, say, of a 3D dataset over time (3D+t), and say that you want to compute the matrix of all the second order derivative at each point, in order to measure the local curvature. This could allow you to distinguish grey matter (which is quite flat) and blood vessels (which are quite curvy). Now we have a non-trivial, high dimensional dataset.
Now say you want to find out whether the arterial blood supply has any loop in it. Normally one would expect it to be like a tree (with no loop). The discrete version of the Poincaré conjecture (or the Perelmans theorem now) tells you that if your arterial network is like a tree, then it is topologically equivalent to a hypersphere, and you can at each point filter your dataset locally in order to reduce it down to a point in finite time. If you find that you cannot (i.e. you end up with something with a loop or even many loops) then your network was abnormal to start with.
This is actually used in medical imaging.
Feynman reveled in the multitude of phenomena that we do not yet understand, and he had a way of sharing that fascination and excitement with the student/listener/reader. Many of his lectures, to me at least, seem to primarily be attempts to describe the landscape of science, which things are known and where there is unexplored territory, or at least unanswered questions. And the picture he paints indicates that what we understand is a small percentage of the world/universe around us. There are so many basic things that we can observe, describe, and even predict, but we don't actually understand how they work. Like gravity.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
You are a tiny fraction of 1% of the population that the education system doesn't have to worry about. No need to be bitter about it. Afterall you're (apprently) earning a decent salary without having invested in years of your own education. Most of us have not been able to do that.
As my geology prof exclaimed when the class complained about the amount of memorization required: "welcome to college."
Memorization is probably 50% of the work. The other 50% is knowing how to learn. I never learned to do homework until my third year in college. I learned it because of Dr. Tripp's analytical mechanics class: "Lambert, problem 4, up on the board".
One of the worst things about most educational formalism is the unwritten rules that let smart people get away without having to learn how to learn, or at least work to a schedule. The one thing that was the same for all my classes up to that point was that you turned in your homework at the end of class, which meant I did my homework in class and had it done by the time it was due. It got me through 5 AP classes (the school record, at the time) with college credit in all of them, and straight A's in everything but one P.E..class. To this day, I occasionally pause to thank Dr. Tripp.
If you are a teacher reading this, I'd really advise assigning homework at the end of class, and requiring it be turned in at the beginning of class. And to keep people honest, take a day a week to get random people up to the chalkboard/whiteboard to do a problem from the homework assignment.
Lol! Imagine a crybaby German giving someone a lecture like this!
It's an insult on the internet -- get over it -- no one cares.
Required reading for internet skeptics
It's a good guess, since they seemed to be perfectly offended and interject statements I never said. Of course I could be wrong, but this is pretty normal psychology for the most part.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I would challenge the writer, David P. Barash, to give one example of an established scientist who maintains that "we know pretty much everything". And of course, I mean a first-hand quotation, not a reference to another article that makes the same specious claim. The whole point of science is to explore what we don't know.
Oh, and I do stand corrected. I did reread my post and I did call the person a liar. If it's factually correct then it is not an Ad Hominem, it's a logical fact.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
They'll just be using a calculator (or the pictures on the McD's register) to find out the answer anyway. So there's no need to memorise, right?
It depends on what you mean by "memorize." They could always use their brains. Chances are, if they do that, they'll actually understand what's going on rather than be mindlessly memorizing the results of random mathematical operations.
And history. Who needs to know what the names of the USA presidents were off by heart? Right?
I believe you're right.
We could cut down school to about three weeks with a bit of effort...
I'd say it needs to be cut down, but I don't think it could be cut down by that much.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Nobody's suggesting that being able to rattle off a list of 50 enzymes means you're qualified to begin manipulating the human genome
Well, I don't believe anyone is suggesting that all forms of memorization are bad, either.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
What is currently known is a very small faction of that which could be scientifically known.
Science is a restrictive methodology i.e. the scientific method.
Human beings have ways of knowing things that are not scientific. So the class of things that could be known, is even larger, than the class of things that could be scientifically known.
And then there are the questions human could pose, for which there is no conceivable way for humans to confirm an answer.
This is the unknowable. "Our line is too short to fathom such immense abysses."
Then there are those truths for which humans can not even formulate the question.
If you know you exist, being conscious is just an extrapolation of that same principle.
Extrapolation, but in what direction? How can you give numbers and structure to such vaguely defined concepts as "knowing" and "existence"?
A Lisp circular list of A= (1 . A) could be said to contain an information-theoretic representation of both "existence" and "knowing" - it certainly is self-referential, as long as you have an interpreter defined for traversing it, and it's a piece of data which is distinguishable from zero or null. But conscious, it ain't.
So consciousness is obviously something quite different from mere existence plus self-reference. And knowing that I know that I know that... I both exist and am smart enough to stop traversing that chain of infinite self-references.... doesn't really help me define what my intuitive sense of "knowing" or "existence" actually mean in hard mechanical or mathematical terms.
It's quite an interesting problem actually. Here's a fact we all see to know and agree on, but we can't give it much of a structure. Why?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
It's simple chauvinism. We're the winners of a "wonderfulness" contest for which we are the judges. We engage in the "Four F's" like all the other animals: fleeing, feeding, fighting and reproductive behavior. Pterosaurs lasted 140 million years. we've been around for maybe a million. A few thousand years ago we were worshipping trees and howling at the moon. Then we congregated, made the water go bad and had to drink booze to kill the bacteria until about 500 years ago. We got tea and coffee from some more sophisticated folks and sobered up. Newton got all jacked up on caffeine and we started thinking, Now we have extracted some gene from a jellyfish and made rabbits that glow in the dark. We're the real "The Crown of Creation". Death scares the bejeezus out of us. We need to distance ourselves from the animal kingdom as much as possible. There'll be a global extinction eventually and everything will start over again. Ending everything right after Stalin, Hitler and Mao would have been poetic justice. But as Elliot says, we'll go out with a whimper not a bang.
People should treat "the internet" liek any other conversation. Where is the difference to a post in a forum, an email a paper mail or a talk over the phone or a talk in person? ...
Imho there should be none
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Your definitien of a lie and what a liar is is certainly not in synch with common dictionaries :D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The English definition is as follows:
liar [la]
n
a person who has lied or lies repeatedly
Since the person posted anonymously, I have no idea who the person is. Since the post appears to be propaganda, I assume the worst. My use and the English definition match very well considering that there are at least 3 lies in that post. Two could technically be classified as poor logic, however, as just mentioned when people post what appears to be propaganda I assume it's not poor logic. I assume that it is intentionally misleading information.
Where we differ, is that you assume innocence in these type of posts and I do not. Some one had pointed out long ago, with a serious of threads, how agents post propaganda. Who's "agents" is a valid question for which I have no answer. What is true is that there is a tremendous amount of propaganda on sites like Slashdot, and I have a very low tolerance for those that intentionally mislead people.
The way I read the post I replied to, it was not innocent. It's carefully crafted in a way to sway opinion using both fallacy and lies. As stated previously, it's posted anonymously so I have no way of seeing who actually made the post, what their history is, or try and guess their intent.
If the post I replied to was you, and you made errors, then admit that you made the post. I would apologize for the brash treatment, and we would move on. If it was not you that made the post, then we have a vast difference on how we perceive the intent of these types of posts. I don't find anything positive in trying to coddle propaganda, and you perceive there is no propaganda.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I believe that you actually went a bit further than you should have in the logic. There is no math required, and here is the extrapolation: Part of the proof that you exist (to yourself) should be investigating all of the possibilities you have to think. We learn that we have both a conscious and unconscious mind in that process. Dreams must be evaluated in the proof for existence correct? When we dream, we are not completely in control of our thoughts. However, we do have some control over both our bodies and minds while dreaming. The opposite is true when we are awake. We are perfectly conscious when awake, however there are some parts of the mind we don't have to actively control.
As a guess, I'm gathering that you and I are not looking at the same issue. It seems that you are hinting at both motive and consciousness, where the two should be separated. I may not understand your thoughts completely either, ahh the joys of text conversation..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Considering that this is in the context of an article saying "hurr durr memorization is stupid and pointless,"
Even if the article claimed that, that doesn't mean everyone posting in it is.
We memorize, because it builds our vocabulary.
Which I think is okay, except if it's needless. Some of the time it has nothing to do with vocabulary, though. I memorize exactly what helps me personally, and nothing more than that.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
This guy "admits" his lying has been "benevolent", because we're all too stupid to know the difference.
No real news here. What I want is for the "scientists" to stop being lying sacks of shit, the whole "benevolence" thing is bullshit. There's nothing "benevolent" about lying in order to secure funding paid for by the taxpayer. It's still lying, it's still reducing "science" to little more than whoredom..
Scientists used to be able to build their won test equipment. They used to have knowledge and interests outside their fields. Interaction across disciplines was encouraged, at least among legitimate disciplines. Most of what passes for "science" these days is little more than a cult of greed and hypocrisy. And most people are, indeed, too stupid to know the difference.
The solution isn't more lying to the public, the solution is to stop teaching kids how to pass tests and start teaching them how to think, how to create, how to question, and how to actually BE interested. A bored kid grows up to be a stupid, bored adult; one that spends all their time immersed in constant distraction presented as "entertainment". An adult that spends all their working hours just figuring out ways to fuck over everybody else. There's no thrill of learning there, there's no real comprehension of what science is there.
I would say that include "How widespread are nonadaptive traits? To what extent does evolution proceed by very small, gradual steps versus larger, quantum jumps? What is the purpose of all that 'junk DNA"? Did human beings evolve from a single lineage, or many times, independently? Why does homosexuality persist?"
The big unknowns are things like
what is the reality which underlies our perception of the universe, given the wave/particle duality?
if everything is complexly intertwingled, as quantum theory suggests, then were do we get the impression of individual consciousness?
why is time so asymmetrical in our perception?
are there other possibilities for naturally evolving life than carbon/water biochemistry and how would we recognize them?
what is consciousness?
how does information transfer between individuals?
etc. etc. etc.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
are you female? because i think most men would be baffled over the concept that they have the ability to turn their libido on and off. I'm heterosexual, and I really doubt I could manage to talk myself into lusting over male contact, which leads me to believe that those who do have those feelings have not just talked themselves into it.
heck for all I know, maybe women aren't any more in control than men are, they just pretend to be.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
... well, there is a thing for that -- it's called research papers and reviews, and there is just about a ton of them everywhere for any one to read ...
Thanks for the correction, my German is very rusty.
Just so you are aware, this is where I see danger in the post. "Consciousness is an illusion, along with free will." Given the current state of the world, claiming that people have no free will is a very alarming statement. That statement is exactly out of the Communist Manifesto, and was preached by Mao, Stalin, etc...
It could be that the person does not natively speak English, hence this translates poorly. However, since the fallacies and untrue statements are well thought out, it is more likely repeated propaganda.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Thanks for the perspective, and apologies for making an assumption. When I referred to the state of the world, I should have been more clear. There are 2 Philosophies in contention, which have quite honestly been in contention for a very long time (thousands of years at least). If you understand "The allegory of the Cave" then this should be rather obvious. It is my belief that we are nearing a historical collision between those Philosophies. This is not the first collision, they have collided through history very often. Sometimes small (See the initial Sophist movement) and sometimes rather large (see Stalin, WW II, hundreds of events during the cold war, etc.. etc..)
Personally, I see the Obama health care issue as a side show (for lack of better terms, not literally since it has implications on the whole scenario). The current push from the US is a bit more sinister. The "establishment" wishes to rid the world of those outside of the cave, and re-shackle those in the cave to ensure they don't move for a very long time. That is a Sophist agenda dating back thousands of years, and something that Socrates and Plato fought very hard against.
To get that perspective I have to zoom as far out as possible from the picture, ignore the small fights, and look for the real war. It's not easy to do mind you, and as a personal note I struggle with that constantly.
One thing through history that is very consistent is the stage being set for the larger battles. De-humanizing people is always a precursor, which is exactly what the statement "you have no free will" does. Over time, people begin to question their own free will and their own humanity. History teaches us this as well, and to see the success you only need to look at the Communist revolutions.
I could be wrong about the whole concept, and I admit that possibility. I challenge that belief rather constantly. It's much easier to watch the puppet shows we are given.
As mentioned previously, I have no idea whether the person was simply repeating propaganda or not. I view this type of propaganda as extremely detrimental to humanity. I recognize the harm it does long term to society. I try to challenge that type of propaganda when I see it, which is a lesson learned from reading, studying, and understanding Socrates.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.