Slashdot Mirror
The Case For Teaching Ignorance
HughPickens.com writes: In the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled "Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance." Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown. "Textbooks spend 8 to 10 pages on pancreatic cancer," said Witte, "without ever telling the student that we just don't know very much about it." Now Jamie Holmes writes in the NY Times that many scientific facts simply aren't solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations. According to Homes, presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.
In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist named Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. "This crucial element in science was being left out for the students," says Firestein."The undone part of science that gets us into the lab early and keeps us there late, the thing that "turns your crank," the very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown, all this is missing from our classrooms. In short, we are failing to teach the ignorance, the most critical part of the whole operation." The time has come to "view ignorance as 'regular' rather than deviant," argue sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey. Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.
In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist named Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. "This crucial element in science was being left out for the students," says Firestein."The undone part of science that gets us into the lab early and keeps us there late, the thing that "turns your crank," the very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown, all this is missing from our classrooms. In short, we are failing to teach the ignorance, the most critical part of the whole operation." The time has come to "view ignorance as 'regular' rather than deviant," argue sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey. Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.
It's a very large problem. We teach the students to memorize problem set recipes (aka exemplars), and the paradigm over time extends the exemplars to new observations regardless of how good the fit is. People then go online to criticize competing ideas, oftentimes without any awareness of the details of the debate. It's very rare to observe people running claims back-and-forth between the theorists and their critics -- and that's even though many theorists who disagree with the textbook theories make themselves available by email for rebuttals.
We should teach scientific controversies, and we should be teaching them very differently than the other domains which might not significantly change for another hundred years. Currently, academia simply pretends that many longstanding controversies simply do not exist, and these controversies can predictably act as an innovation bottleneck over time. If all we did was show students that there are competing arguments which oftentimes differ at the point of the initial hypothesis, students would become far better at asking good research questions. And this single change to the way that we teach science could secure our technological lead for another century.
Thank you for posting this article. It's honestly very rare to see here on Slashdot, and yet also very important.
When I was in high school, I found anatomy and biology boring, because it seemed like memorizing a finalized taxonomy of living creatures' details. If I'd had an appreciation for both how insanely awesome living creatures' designs are and that there are lots of mysteries still to be solved, I'd have been far more likely to get into the field. Ditto for chemistry and physics.
Science isn't blindingly obvious- if it was someone would have discovered it ages ago. It's piecing together tiny bits of evidence until something coherent starts to become visible, and even then most of the time someone else comes and kicks apart your jigsaw puzzle with new data
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
And unlike most PhD degrees, this one has numerous career paths!
Dear Jesus. I hope your teaching kids critical thinking before college. If not we'll, that's a damn shame and a failure. My 6 year old can explain why something is right or wrong or if we don't have enough information to make an informed decision. That's just because we taught him that it's ok to ask why and we'd explain everything to him even if it took forever.
My 6 year old can explain why something is right or wrong
That's not the same as critical thinking.
That's just because we taught him that it's ok to ask why and we'd explain everything to him even if it took forever.
Asking "why" and getting an answer isn't how you learn critical thinking.
Critical thinking is more like, "We have fact A, B, C, and D. Do these make sense together? Where did these facts come from? Should I trust them? How can I improve my confidence level in these facts?"
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Actually I also disagree with the title... not because it's wrong but because it will be coopted by the truly ignorant to "prove" that everything they disagree with has no scientific basis. This is the academic equivalent of clickbait, with the unfortunate consequence of being distributed outside the academic community.
I do think that the author has a point in that we are taught "best available" theory as fact. That's not wrong, however, it's only missing the concept that our school system has been ignoring for decades - actually teaching the basis of the scientific method, logic, critical thinking... not to mention applied statistics. All of these are necessary in the modern world to do the one important civic duty that most people exercise in a state of utter ignorance - voting.
I have pursued a rather rigorous scientific training career (MD, PhD) and getting the PhD training really altered my way of thinking about the world, and learning how to ask questions that are appropriate, can be answered, and how to design ways to answer them. I can understand where they author is coming from. I just think that to truly understand what he is saying one needs much more training than lay people get, and this headline just gets me into more trouble when I talk to patients and they refuse to believe me cause they read in the paper that everything science does is bollocks.
Given that climate is Chaos in action, it might well be.
The interesting thing is that we can know certain things, such as if the climate warms a few degrees, the energy fed into the system increases. Since it's a chaotic system, what it does is get even more chaotic and start coughing up crazier 'outlier' events, things we've not seen before. You get nutty stuff like snow in June and it's just because the total behavior of the system got more chaotic and more unpredictable.
Predictably unpredictable, if you follow me. :)
So we can predict with high confidence a sharply increasing quotient of WTFness in the already chaotic weather. To get it to behave more predictably, we'd have to cool the whole system down a couple degrees.
I agree, the words "ignorance" and "ignorant" are used far to often in a negative context. I can see how someone might think it insulting.
Colleges have become obsessed with how students feel about words. That's the first thing to fix. Life doesn't care how you feel, and you can't be an adult without accepting that.
In this specific case "ignorance" is the point. There's so much that humanity just doesn't know, and there always will be. The best thing my high school physics teacher taught me was "the bigger the island of knowledge, the bigger the shore of ignorance".
Every question you answer provokes more questions you can't answer, and that's what science is all about. Heck, sometimes new discoveries reveal quite surprising degrees of ignorance in humanity. "Wow, look at that, 80% of the matter in the universe is something we know nothing at all about. 80%! The best we can say is it's some sort of particle, probably. We can't even call the stuff we're made of 'normal matter', as we're the outlier."
Research only exists because of ignorance. That fact does need to be taught - we have too much unquestioning acceptance of science-as-religion these days (there's just no way to reconcile unquestioning acceptance of authority with critical thinking, regardless of the selected authority).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In mathematics & computer science, we tend to more charitably call these ``open problems''.
For example, German mathematician David Hilbert made a quite inspiring list of 23 of them in 1900, many of which are now famously only partially resolved (e.g., Hilbert's 2nd is only partially resolved due to Gödel's second incompleteness theorem) while others have only recently been resolved to great fanfare (e.g., Hilbert's 10th involves Gödel's first incompleteness theorem and relates to Fermat's Last Theorem), and a few others stubbornly defy proof or disproof still to this day (e.g., The Riemann Hypothesis is Hilbert's 8th).
Beyond Hilbert, the open problem to determine whether P = NP still intrigues, inspires and stymies many computer scientists to this day.
But perhaps a more fitting term for the field of medicine, though, might be ``remaining mysteries in medicine'' or some such, since they may view unresolved questions in treatment, diagnosis, and underlying mechanisms more as mysteries than as problems per se?
Error: NSE - No Signature Error