> if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and 8 passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being trained to think, these children have been trained to do the opposite.
This is basic stimulus-response behaviour: school education is effectively a game that the children are playing to win points, and within that environment “thinking” is wasteful and disincentivized.
The same attitude persists long after graduation: if the task is to build a website/app/project, completing the project is what's measured and rewarded. Learning how to work with the tools provided isn't valued. At my previous shop, it was called a wasteful tendency for curiosity...until you urgently needed an answer that was only available because someone sought to answer a question that wasn't purely tied to a deliverable.
Thanks for your efforts! Actually, despite ArchiveTeam's statement of having captured 98.6% of public profiles, I wasn't able to find a single post (let alone a complete list of posts) of a single person I cared about on the Wayback Machine as a result of the last-minute scraping (there were a few that had been crawled earlier): neither any of my friends, nor people like Timothy Gowers, Terence Tao, John Baez, Linus Torvalds, etc. I just assumed it had somehow not been uploaded to the Wayback Machine yet, but if it's gone... oh well. Such is life. Thanks again anyway!
It's possible some content hasn't yet been ingested, though I'd thought it would be there by now. Just checked Archiveteam's pages, no clear info there.
I work for a government agency. You’d be surprised how often we play very complex versions of this game.
Or maybe you wouldn’t. In any case, in my experience, about once a week. Essentially, your sponsors lets you know they want an answer to an unanswerable question (“how can we best weaponize salmon?”). Then we play “guess the answer the sponsor wants”.
I had to look up what eight grade age was. It's apparently 13-14. FYI.
Kids brains are not developed well at that age, plus being given endless questions at school to which there are answers will accustom them to assuming an answer exists. Standing up to authority is something they aren't taught to do, in fact the opposite. I can understand what's going on. At that age I'd say what I think (and sometimes get into trouble for it) but most wouldn't - and as adults I still find a lot of people won't, which is beyond saddening.
Can anyone recall the study where adults were asked to estimate something (IIRC whether one line was shorter or longer than another) and when actors were there to give the wrong answer, some people were pressured into agreeing with something that was obviously wrong.
The question may also be thought of as a trick, per the old riddle: "A man stepped out of his tent with his rifle and walked 1 mile south, 1 mile east and 1 Mile north. Then he shot a bear in front of his tent. What color was the bear?".
How would you answer this question if you got it during a job interview? Oddly, it seems a bit like the infamous "spit ball an answer to how many dentists there are in Cleveland" type questions Google was famous (or infamous) for. The number of sheep might be a clue to age if shepherds accumulate sheep in a lifetime (naturally, no reason to think they do, sadly).
There's a lot of authority issues involved. Do you admit to an authority that you don't know how to solve X? Do you challenge an authority that they don't know either? Do you doubly challenge that authority by alleging they gave you a bullshit question for kicks?
And after authorities throw such a question at students, they're happy to draw conclusions about what feeble solution efforts the student made?
And this is after students have been inured to treating math as a bondage and discipline exercise in following instructions, after math has been drained of any large meaning.
The people did this experiment should be whipped with a wet noodle.
The “maths” section of the Swedish SAT actually only deals with exactly this type of question (or at least it did last time I took it).
You get one question “how old is the shepherd” and then two pieces of information A: there are 125 sheep B: there are 5 dogs.
The alternatives for answering the question is whether it can be answered using A alone, B alone, requires both A and B, can be solved with either A or B, or can’t be solved at all.
This is a failure if 13-14 year olds are so used to being given questions that can be answered, that they are uncomfortable telling an authority that “it’s not possible to answer this”. It’s probably universal and I’m sure the same result could be found in Sweden despite our SAT’s (done later) have a whole section on finding nonsense.
It isn't much different in the working world. Answers are expected regardless of how impossible they may be and frankly most management do not take a non answer well.
I wonder how much correlation there is between answers to this question in 8th grade and "life success". We can define life success in many ways, including lifetime income, number of offspring, and overall happiness.
My guess would be that the young pedants who refuse to answer the question, saying "not enough information", do worse on average for each of these metrics than their more compliant but completely wrong peers.
I missed the opportunity to answer this question, especially when I gathered the cues at the bottom of the post to recognize what the question was trying to do.
It's like watching a video about asking people where the matters in a tree comes from. You now know the answer instead of being made to think it out.
> if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and 8 passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being trained to think, these children have been trained to do the opposite.
Also here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/11/maths-...
This is basic stimulus-response behaviour: school education is effectively a game that the children are playing to win points, and within that environment “thinking” is wasteful and disincentivized.
(See also: Lockhart's Lament https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament...., the heart-breaking How Children Fail by John Holt, etc.)
Gowers also had a couple of posts on a very different way of teaching mathematics:
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathemati...
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/a-trip-to-watford-gr...