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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.
Finally a subject I can get a PhD in!
Finally a topic where I don't need to read the summary!
I've been prepared my whole life for this!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.
Oh wait, its a HughPickens post. Nevermind, I understand now, carry on.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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!"
The original title was This Professor Suggests Teaching Ignorance : What Happens Next... I Can't Even.
Dark Reflection
We don't teach how to fail in any segment of our schooling, which is somewhat necessary in addressing ignorance. Failure is taught to be avoided at all costs. Failure is mocked, ridiculed as a personal flaw instead of something that everyone experiences. We don't teach that failure is something that happens even when we've put our best effort into the work. That failure happens when you've done everything right and according to the rules. And in neither of those cases is failure something bad. It's just something that happens in life.
Being ignorant is not the same as being wrong.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
When I was in elementary and high school, I learned the incompleteness of science well enough; it was not omitted, at least not for those who were actually interested enough to PAY ATTENTION. No, it wasn't described explicitly in big neon flashing letters, but honestly should it be? As I said, someone paying attention would have extrapolated this message. Don't we want scientists who are actually interested enough in the subject to pay attention to the messages not presented in neon?
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.
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.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Well, I think it's more complicated than that. People are not just ignorant of the limitations of knowledge, they're ignorant of the limitations of ignorance.
In fact, I'd say faulty appeals to ignorance are much more common here than faulty appeals to knowledge. People will say "How can we know X when we don't know Y?" when in fact it's quite possible to know X without Y, and in any case we actually know a lot more about Y than the poster thinks.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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?
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I think the idea is to actually teach students where we have gaps in our ability to explain things.
There are many things that are taken to be scientific facts which are anything but proven, and you'd know that if you asked certain experts in the fields.
The problem is that many of us assume that we collectively know more than we actually do, and it gives students the incorrect idea that there is nothing more to be learned, or that they will be doing relatively trivial research. In that sense, we need to explain where the frontiers are, and some of them are hiding in places we didn't expect them to be.
It's not really a course on being ignorant, it is a course to help students to learn where to start looking to find unsolved mysteries.
Such a course would be hugely important because it allows us to discover more questions to answer as well as giving some motivation to those who might otherwise be bored or disheartened by the lack of a frontier.
The data should always be king--not the math--inconsistencies should point the finger at the math and theories, not the other way around.
Except when the data are "bad". The most recent example of this was the Opera experiment's claim to have observed faster that light neutrinos. That's what their data said...at least until someone found that their GPS cable was loose.
Experimental science is never that cut and dried. The data may always be right given the experiment performed but, as the Opera case shows, that may not be the experiment which you think you had performed. The result is that there is always a tension when theory and data contradict: is it because the theory is wrong or is it because of an invalid assumption when interpreting the data?
No, new theories do not have to look mathematically connected to the math of old theories--this is the root problem--assuming that the old theories are *proven* and *correct*.
Here you have taken a position which contradicts your earlier one. We believe old theories *because* they are consistent with the data we have so far. Hence, by logical extension, any new theory must also be consistent with that same data otherwise we would point to that data and say "see it disagrees with data and so it must be wrong!". Within the precision of existing data any new theory *must* have identical predictions, i.e. an identical mathematical form, to the previous theory under the conditions where the old theory has already been tested and confirmed. It can only vary under situations where the old theory has not yet been tested.