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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.
Too many people will simply be turned off by the name. I fully agree that we are ignorant, but most people refuse to admit their own. We don't teach people to check facts or even show them how. We teach them to "Google" which returns the popular answer and that may not be correct (and probably is not).
I could spend hours discussing "Classical" versus Industrial education. I could spend days explaining why teaching a rounded education is necessary and teaching only specialties runs counter to education. Liberal Arts (PHI) is essential, but most kids get a couple semesters of history instead.. and we wonder why people can't think critically, defend their own position, and perceive that disagreements with their opinions are personal attacks.
Yeah, I got a college age kid so I see what's been happening.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
There are two major types of ignorance, which we can call "passive" and "active".
Passive ignorance is the same as simply not-knowing something. Like, we are ignorant of whether or not there are any living organisms on Mars.
Active ignorance is the deliberate ignoring of facts. See the Flat Earth Society for an example of active ignorance, although there are plenty other offenders, like Creationists who claim the Earth is only a few thousand years old (so explain this), abortion opponents who claim the Earth isn't overpopulated (so explain this), etc.
That boggles the mind. Even something as fundamental to our daily experience as gravity, and we don't know what it is. We describe its effects, and we have a few theories about its cause, but when an apple falls out of a tree, we don't know why it falls to the ground.
The fact of this ignorance should be taught in the first lesson.
Active ignorance is the deliberate ignoring of facts. See the Flat Earth Society for an example of active ignorance, although there are plenty other offenders,
See most modern physicists:
"My data doesn't match up with my mathematical model used for prediction? My options are":
a) Create new, even more esoteric maths to heap on top of it and hide it, and add more fudge factors to "coalesce" the difference (even where it's orders of magnitudes off), then ask for more funding to build another, bigger machine to gather more data whose significance I will also ignore.
b) Throw out the failed model and seek an entirely new explanation--oh but no funding from this choice, and it includes ridicule.
Which acknowledges ignorance?
And which option is most commonly taken?
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Teaching ignorance directly would require an honest assessment of things like religion, central banking, chiropractors, mathematical ability and pharmaceuticals. This would require strong tenure protection for an individual teacher, or it would likely devolve into trivialities and historical anecdotes that would lead students to assume that important questions are generally irrelevant or settled in modern times. One idea is that education exists to convey the certainty by which things are known, and to prepare students for critical thinking that will improve their estimates of factual certainty with time. Another idea is that education should firstly prepare students to be productive citizens. While these ideas are not always in conflict, knowledge and critical thinking will not be tolerated when money, ideology or power can be gained or preserved through ignorance.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
We spend a lot of time on the trial of Galileo and how we know the Earth goes around the Sun. It's far harder to show than most people think.
I sometimes cite a similar example of Ptolemy. People too often thing the Ptolemaic model is stupid, but really it's very good at predicting the phenomena that people at the time would experience. Ptolemy wasn't stupid. IIRC, he seems to notice that the epicycles line up so that the centers seem to coincide. He even cites the example of being on a boat, watching the shore recede away when really the ship is moving, the way that motion seems relative to the observer, and relates this to the possibility that the earth is moving. He just doesn't have a firm reason to think that the earth is moving.
It's easy now, in hindsight, to see that Newton's model is much better. It especially makes sense once you've had the opportunity to get up onto the moon and some other planets, and you know for a fact that they're made of the same material that Earth is made of. But then, even Newton's model isn't quite right, and a lot of physics these days ultimately come down to, "We don't really understand why things work the way that they do, and some of our rules don't seem to apply the same way at all times and at all levels, but we know enough to do most of the things we're trying to do." On a deep level, we still don't understand how time and space work.
When the instructor effectively places the material they are presenting in a larger framework including unknowns, it is often quite inspiring. Textbooks in mathematics and physics are the worst in this regard. They try to paint their presentation as the complete story on the subject and that leaves students bored. Even just a little bit of explaining the complex problems that are being sidestepped by the way the course material was chosen can greatly enliven a course. Even better, the students come out with an understanding of where the methods they learned will work and where they will not.
Ditto for chemistry and physics.
Compared to biology, there's less taxonomy in chemistry and far less in physics.
I'd say that as a highschooler, taxonomy made biology seem like a completed field, and the supposed explanatory power of Newton's laws (at a medium scale) and relativity made physics seem approximately completed. In both cases, I was left with a distinct lack of sense of wonder, because it seemed like ongoing research was just spending huge amounts of effort tidying up arcane little corners of the knowledge base.
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.
Unless, of course, it doesn't do that.
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.
Obviously, you can cool the system down enough, say near absolute zero, where it will be boring. But hot can be boring too. A diffuse plasma doesn't really have a lot of stuff going on in it either. Merely, having more energy doesn't make something harder to predict. It'll depend on the model and what you are trying to predict.