> and year in, year out, a large number of students ignore my calm, well-argued and perfectly rational advice
I would point out that they probably remember your advice, it's just not "connected" to the part of their brains that does the driving under stress of deadline.
I find you can make a lot of true predictions by extending the "system 1/system 2 thinking" model into a complete disjunction: that everyone is, internally, one person who listens and talks and learns social mores; and then another person who acts and reacts and learns by doing; and that—other than sharing a body—these two internal people have nothing in common and you should assume that any lesson that's been imparted "through" one of them has absolutely not been imparted to the other.
I.e., if you tell someone something, they'll be able to tell you what you said, and it will affect what side of a debate they engage in in the future, but it won't affect their behavior in the slightest, except insofar as they verbally precommit to doing something in a way that then forces doing-them to do it.
And, if you get someone to, say, play a video-game simulation of some complex system that imparts a particular lesson about that system into them, then they'll still verbally argue on the "wrong" side regarding how that system works, until someone essentially forces them to sit down and have their "social mind" go over the experience their "doing mind" just had, explaining it to themselves to convince themselves. (Some people probably do this "narrating themselves observing their doing mind" by default to some degree; these people are probably measurably better at some meta-skill like learning or teaching.)
I would point out that they probably remember your advice, it's just not "connected" to the part of their brains that does the driving under stress of deadline.
I find you can make a lot of true predictions by extending the "system 1/system 2 thinking" model into a complete disjunction: that everyone is, internally, one person who listens and talks and learns social mores; and then another person who acts and reacts and learns by doing; and that—other than sharing a body—these two internal people have nothing in common and you should assume that any lesson that's been imparted "through" one of them has absolutely not been imparted to the other.
I.e., if you tell someone something, they'll be able to tell you what you said, and it will affect what side of a debate they engage in in the future, but it won't affect their behavior in the slightest, except insofar as they verbally precommit to doing something in a way that then forces doing-them to do it.
And, if you get someone to, say, play a video-game simulation of some complex system that imparts a particular lesson about that system into them, then they'll still verbally argue on the "wrong" side regarding how that system works, until someone essentially forces them to sit down and have their "social mind" go over the experience their "doing mind" just had, explaining it to themselves to convince themselves. (Some people probably do this "narrating themselves observing their doing mind" by default to some degree; these people are probably measurably better at some meta-skill like learning or teaching.)