This is also infuriating when it comes to medical knowledge and dealing with doctors. I personally know someone who had a uncommon disease and he did extensive research looking at articles published in journals and science/medical books. However, almost every doctor he went to dismissed him and laughed at the idea that he could possibly know what he was talking about. Most of them don't deal with the uncommon diseases and refuse to believe it when it is in front of their eyes.
It wasn't until he got into touch with a scientist who did research into the same disease he had that they were finally able to convince doctors to take a closer look and start receiving treatment. Turns out he was right but had to suffer for a few years because of the arrogance of a few "professionals".
This happens with legit medical conditions, but also diagnoses that have been made up by the internet. For example, "Wireless Sensitivity," and "Moregellons Disease." It would be helpful to know which category we're talking about.
Speaking of which, the idea that they might "refuse to believe it when it is in front of their eyes" is, when judiciously applied, a strength of evidence-based medicine. Anecdotal experience should not be discarded, but needs to be put in the context of the existing mountain of scientific data.
Edit: Also, it is totally unacceptable that any of these doctors would laugh at your friend. No matter the situation, this should prompt a thorough discussion of the reasoning the doctor is using to decide to treat or not treat.
Damnit, here I was, having completely forgotten about the fictitious horrors of Moregellons Disease, and now you had to remind me. For a fake disease, that shit still creeps me the fuck out.
That's true but hopefully not too common.
In medical school, when it comes to diagnosing conditions, we are taught "When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras".
Fortunately there is a wealth of information available to patients online which can help them when working with their physicians in dealing with uncommon medical conditions. There needs to be a much better way to sort through it all however.
In my experience, almost every single doctor will not only talk down to patients who know something, they will also put them in the "crackpot hypochondriac" bucket. Further, most of those I've seen are not even scientists: sure, they have all the knowledge of a good medical training and can deal with common and emergency situations exceptionally well. But anything more than that and it's time for rampant lack of logic and stock recommendations that have already failed to work.
Further, most of those I've seen are not even scientists:
I've been disappointed by this realization a couple of times. Finally, it dawned on me. Doctors aren't scientists. They're not supposed to be. They are technicians. They look in a service manual, pick a likely problem, and do the hotfix. If its not in the manual (or the part they have memorized), they're done.
Medical research and medical practice are two entirely different animals.
Of course doctors aren't scientists, but comparing them to a "technician" is a horrible analogy. Doctors go through intense schooling and have a very deep understanding of all parts of the body. Your analogy fits more closely to a nurse, someone with very basic symptom/problem repertoire - not a dr. who knows what and WHY things are happening.
I've also never heard of a doctor being "done" - when have you encountered this? They may not be able to diagnose you immediately but they do research in other resources to help diagnose.
I agree with noonespecial about the technician statement, but sense that you regard that as an insult. Every good technician I know has an great understanding about the "item" they work on. I have a lot of respect for good technicians of all stripes. Doctors don't build new people, they repair, maintain, treat, and fix them.
As to a doctor being "done". Yeah, I have heard that in government provided (USA) health care settings. It happens, and it gets much worse the later in the budget year your are ("Don't get sick after June").
Sure doctors "fix things" but that's an oversimplification of their jobs. It's like saying rocket scientists are like construction workers because they "build things". There is a vast difference in the knowledge/schooling required. I didn't think the simple analogy as a doctor/technician as an insult as much as the description of their duties (1. Look in manual, 2. Hotfix, 3. If not there, done) - this is insulting whether describing technicians or doctors.
And no, doctors aren't "done" when the problem isn't in the manual. You're referring to something completely different, "I don't have money or healthcare and expect you to work for free". Maybe they're like technicians after all.
I guess I don't believe a definition of a real technician is simply someone who looks in a manual to fix thing. I believe technicians of all stripes need knowledge and a good feel to fix things. I think your definition of technician is limited and does disservice to a wide variety of professions.
"I don't have money or healthcare and expect you to work for free" - no, the USA was paid in land via treaty, so the bill was paid.
Good point, but it can only be said of certified auto mechanics. I don't know the percentage of auto-mechanics that are certified and tested to know "why" but I'm guessing it's less than doctors (100%).
Either way, it's a pointless argument comparing the systems and schooling required to understand automobiles vs. the human body.
Both of my parents are physicians (pathologists). What you're saying isn't true at all -- they do diagnostic medicine all the time. This is in every way scientific. At the moment they're both doing research, but previously my mother was in private practice.
The further up the specialization ladder you travel, the more scientist-like the doctors become until you reach the pinnacle where doctors at research hospitals are doing ground-breaking treatments and publishing the results.
The gulf between the average MD doing GP and this pinnacle is huge. Much larger than most people suspect.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. First, the average MD isn't a PCP with generalist training. In fact, a lot of PCPs now are IM specialists. In fact, when talking about PCPs, there are many cases when no generalists come into the equation at all -- kids should see pediatricians as their PCP.
> In my experience, almost every single doctor will not only talk down to patients who know something, they will also put them in the "crackpot hypochondriac" bucket.
In fairness, that's generally the appropriate approach. Given the choice between "crackpot hypochondriac" and "disease most doctors won't see in a lifetime of practice", the former is far more common.
Yeah, so as it turns out, speaking in generalities is useless. Let's talk about the specific condition so those of us with a medical background can talk about the degree of difficulty of diagnosis and treatment. Saying "being dismissive is bad" is just universally true.
In a perfect world, perhaps. Here in the States, though, there's already a shortage of general practitioners.
Expecting them to spend significant extra time with all the hypochondriacs is simply not practical. Doing so would be a detriment to every patient in the system.
But for "disease most doctors won't see in a lifetime of practice" it generally is appropriate (or at least some form of dismissal is appropriate), since the patient is generally wrong.
NB: "generally" in this case means approx 99.9% of the time.
Well, no offense but anecdotal evidence does not a large dataset make. I personally have the opposite experience. Since my parents are physicians I've grown up in and around hospitals all my life and met probably hundreds of physicians. In talking with them and talking with my parents about them I've found maybe two dozen that are either unscientific or incompetent. I completely agree that ~20% is way too high, but insulting all doctors based on your knowledge of maybe 3 or 4 of them is like saying all computer scientists are unscientific (although many are) just because you had a ten minute chat with three or four bottom-level PHP programmers.
Oh, I thought it was clear I was simply presenting this as counter-anecdotal evidence (although my anecdotal data set is probably an order of magnitude higher than the ops). I was arguing more for the null hypothesis than "physicians are definitely scientific."
I wonder if African doctors are taught "When you hear hoofbeats, think of zebras, not horses"?
That might sound like a flippant comment, but I found it interesting that such a subjective example is used to demonstrate what should be an objective axiom.
With the explosion of information and data collected about diseases, it is quite possible for a patient to walk in with a rare disease to be FAR more informed about his condition than any doctor.
If you have a rare disease, then it behooves you to put on your Science hat and get creative about how to motivate smart people to investigate your condition rather than going to a doctor to have him tell you that it is hopeless and the best he can do is give you a battery of drugs which might work, and that you have 1 year to live.
You're right, but don't forget about all the many hypochondriacs out there; unfortunately, given the current Western model of medical care, a doctor may not know their patient well enough to know if the patient has rationally, logically, and objectively diagnosed themselves, or if the patient has a psychological disorder instead that's manifesting as a rare physical disease.
Yes, the situation today is an extraordinary dilemma. I'm not sure why hypochondriacs are so common today but I would speculate that this it is because many people are starved for attention.
But you have a situation where a doctor, who is a highly professional but not a research scientist, confronts a growing number of individuals who have gotten a mass of scientific information from the Internet but are proportionately even less likely to engage in a rational process of determining what malady they have. Some of these patients probably know what's wrong with them much better than the doctor but what percentage is it? What is likely to happen given a health care system which measures the doctor's visit times by the second?
Perhaps there should be online exam for patients wanting to diagnose themselves, including basic test of inferential reasoning? Hey, there's a startup idea for you - a website which prepares your diagnosis using language your doctor can understand.
There's also something called "medical students' disease" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students_disease) where people who research medical conditions become convinced that they have those conditions. It's easy to see how a hypochondriac researching their medical problems online would end up developing medical students' disease.
With the explosion of information and data collected about diseases, it is quite possible for a patient to walk in with a rare disease to be FAR more informed about his condition than any doctor.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything, though. When I broke my collarbone last year, I joined a massive 'community' of patients with the most commonly broken bone in the human body. Initially I thought it'd be easy to get advice online with regard to what to expect in terms of healing time, mobility, pain, and long-term outcome, and what therapies were most/least effective. It wasn't. What I found made me realize that self-diagnosing pretty much anything on the Internet, no matter how trivial, is a really bad idea... and that this is true regardless of whether the doctors have better advice to offer.
Even if the consensus of doctors, nurses, authors, coaches, and fellow sufferers was that "Each case is different, so it's impossible to generalize about any of those things," that would've been fine. Unsatisfying, but fine. It would've been the correct conclusion for a new patient to reach. But it wasn't. If you look up clavicle fractures on the Web, you'll find a ridiculous array of claims, anecdotes, and received wisdom... and that's just in the peer-reviewed literature, never mind the various sports and health forums.
It turns out that nobody really knows the best way to treat collarbone fractures of a given type and severity. Ultimately you just go back for x-rays every couple of months (weeks) until the doctor tells you you can (remove the sling carefully) (get back on the bike) (pick fights with bears.) The nature and location of the fracture affects the prognosis, but doesn't have much to do with the treatment for those patients who don't opt for surgery. Some doctors swear by sling type X, others by brace type Y. Some doctors will yell at you to keep your sling on at all times; other doctors will tell you not to bother with it past the first three or four weeks unless you actually experience pain. Some doctors say not to lift anything at all; others say it's OK to lift until it hurts. The spectrum of advice given to patients who post essentially the same x-rays to various sports forums is amazing, as are the anecdotes ranging from "I blew off the doctor and went swimming in 4 weeks, no problem" to "I followed the doctor's advice and ended up in painful/painless surgery six months/two years later."
Again, none of this is unreasonable given the differences from one case to the next... but you won't recognize this fact based on advice found online. What most people will be tempted to do is surf until they get an answer they like, and then walk away from the browser thinking they know more than they did when they sat down.
As an exercise, I recommend that even HN readers with intact clavicles spend a couple of hours researching the condition from the POV of a newly diagnosed patient. You may not come away as disillusioned with the wisdom of the Internet as I did, but I believe you will think twice about the quality of online information if you're ever diagnosed with a serious, uncommon condition like Crohn's. Sorry, Crohn's (and collarbone) patients -- sometimes the truth just isn't out there.
Your friend was smart, but most people who come into the doctor with self-diagnoses are whack jobs. Doctors don't know who to take seriously so they take no one seriously, unless you approach them the right way.
a group blog with bloggers of varying professional credentials that occasionally has truly excellent articles on human cognitive illusions and how they influence medical diagnosis and treatment.
Since this is someone you know and not you, can you at least share what condition this was? If it's something truly rare in the place you live (say, tropical sprue) then it may be a difficult diagnosis that gets misdiagnosed as something more common because of the following approximation:
var i = 0;
while(patient==ill){
if(hoofbeats){
if(i<20){
return horses;
}else{
return `hunt zebras`
}
i++;
}
}
If you read reddit, Digg or any other social news site, the format for stories like these seems to always be:
1. Some "obviously" stupid decision.
2. Some bureaucrat that made it.
3. A critical article talking about how obviously stupid this all is and how stupid the bureaucrat(s) are.
4. The implication that the writer (and the reader) would never make that "mistake".
Some of the articles are justified, I'm sure. I have no idea if this one is... I don't have all the facts. I wasn't sitting in the room was the decision was made, I don't know what the reasoning was.
All I know is that the frequency of these stories is absurd.
If we were all so smart all the time and everyone else that wasn't us was so dumb all the time and in desperate need of correction, I don't think the world would function.
Generally speaking (again, not specific to this story) I think we all need to cut each other some slack. What good are these expose articles really doing? Is the world getting any less dumb and more in-line with my expectations of humanity?
No
Is the embarrassment of articles like this helping to decrease the occurrence of stupidity?
No
Are articles like this improving the discourse between groups?
No
The negative carpet-bomb article style, something I'm certainly guilty of, is something that I hope dissolves as we move forward. It's done nothing for actual coverage and in certain areas, like political debate, it has made the topic almost unreadable to me.
For all of your "no" points, can you please provide some proof? We are getting smarter - when you need water for your crops, do you dance, or do you install an irrigation system? Extreme example, but, well.
pavel, that's a fair point. Those were a bit too broad of brush-strokes I painted.
What I was masking is my internal frustration with how fundamentally un-accepting we are of each other's differing opinions in popular culture/media now. I can't remember the last political debate I saw on TV that:
1. Actually answered the question and didn't just hit talking points.
2. Constructively analyzed the differences of opinion.
I am sure there are pockets of civil debate and I don't want to wave-away the folks that are making an effort to. I should have been more honest about what I was critiquing.
It's possible to overdo "civil", though. Consider the belief that the sun orbits the earth: a televised debate in which several accomplished scientists respectfully engage some crazy is civil and will teach the average layperson something, but it gives the belief far too much credibility.
Even with the extra information, the layperson may consider it more probable that the sun orbits the earth after the debate, which means that the general belief is less accurate afterwards.
[Yes, I'm aware that we live in a relativistic universe in which the sun is no more the center than the earth or any other point; but you get the idea.]
"The negative carpet-bomb article style, something I'm certainly guilty of, is something that I hope dissolves as we move forward."
I think the larger problem is that it's generally impossible to know if anything you read in the newspaper is true or not, it's just that these sorts of articles tend to make that more salient.
As for this particular style of article, there seems to be some sort of freudian conflict within each of us between how internal or external our locus of control should be. The stuff that becomes the most popular on social news sites tends to be highly masturbatory, and creating a mythology around the 'correct' locus is the all time #1 way of masturbatorifying content. That's why every popular movie ever starts out with the main character waking up and discovering that they're 'different' and they have some sort of destiny. And it's why HN articles alternate between portraying life like an XYZ quest versus articles like these.[1]
[1] Go to X, kill Y, take Z. Possibly attributable to Ralph Koster.
Not having all the facts (knowing if the information you are reading is true) is one of the core reasons I find political debate with others totally useless.
As for "masturbatorifying content", a fantastic term.
You also hit on another great topic that could be a separate post entirely... appealing to our ids with the "you MIGHT be special" mechanic. Very very true, and something that appeals to me just as much as the next guy.
"As for 'masturbatorifying content', a fantastic term."
Yeah, I've thought of writing a blog post on this. The basic idea is that you give a voice to things that people already want to believe are true. This opens up a sort of window of credulity, which allows you to sell whatever you're trying to sell in the context of this unconscious angst that you're channeling. The best is if you can find some sort of belief that millions of people share but that no one has ever articulated or properly defended, that's how you make millions of dollars whether you're running a startup, writing a book, etc.
You should read, watch and listen to Hitler's speeches. He told the German people they were different, special and they had a destiny. That it would be wrong (all of the metaphysicals) to not fulfill that destiny. That they were a perfect beautiful people and he could see that it was so by being an imperfect non-full blooded aryan looking in on what their true potential could be.
I think there are a great many topics (libertarianism, moderate religion, socialism, …) where your assessment of the situation is spot on – but …
I wonder whether nice articles about beliefs which are most certainly crazy (creationism and biblical literalism, astrology, homeopathy, rapture, moon conspiracy, …) really are useful. They sometimes might be but in most cases the believers are beyond redemption.
Those articles have a different purpose. Rallying the troops is a valid reason for writing such articles.
(Well, and sometimes it’s just good to be able to vent about stupid things someone else did. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.)
The point of the article - that kids have a bullshit detector - reminds me of a great article in The Age that I read years ago.
The writer was given a hard time for bullshitting his young nephew and his response was that "It's important to bullshit kids, so that they don't grow up trusting adults". He maintained that you had to tell kids stuff they would find out later was fake, so that they developed scepticism. Otherwise, they would swallow adult dogma as fact.
He was honest with kids once they pushed past the first barrier (Uncle Joe, you say you landed on the moon, but I checked and you are aren't on the list) and he said that was his duty to teach them to not accept things at face value, no matter what the authoritative source.
I don't think kids have a bullshit detector (but maybe you agree and that's why you are quoting that article - if you need to develop a bullshit detector, that implies you don't already have one). Kids are completely gullible, and trust anything you tell them about Santa Claus, ancient Assyria, the continent of Lemuria, chemistry, God, traffic laws, the Easter Bunny, poisons, Jesus etc.
That makes perfect sense, since they spend so much time being taught true things - they have a lot to learn (think about the infamous 'why' question, or the general progress of AI), they can't afford to disbelieve and question unless something seems really out of whack.
The listed examples seem more like exceptions proving the rule, possibly combined with a bit of naivete and 'beginner's mind'.
A lot of what we perceive as obvious common sense relies on a huge amount of background knowledge that we don't really think about when performing them. Take for example the seemingly simple action of pouring a glass of water. This relies on knowing the glass has to be oriented the right way up, that liquid is subject to gravity, the general behaviour of liquids, viscosity and lots of little things that we take for granted.
For some good writing on the subject have look at Douglas B. Lenat's essays about knowledge pumps and Cyc.
Knowledge and hardwiring. Consider the feather-and-cannon-ball experiment in counter-intuitive gravity. Our unphysical hardwired heuristic assumes that heavy things go faster (and with air drag, they do). But also experience. We know water stays in upturned but not overturned glasses because we've seen it do so.
A lot of knowledge seems hardwired. Infants who can barely see already knows things like inertia and persistence of invisible objects, and then there's the whole Chomskyian linguistics argument that kids learn language too fast and well.
> Infants who can barely see already knows things like inertia and persistence of invisible objects
No, they do not. Object permanence is a good example of how even fundamental principles about reality are learned. In this case, it happens when a child is about a year old:
It's quite possible that if you dropped a newborn into a simulated reality that has completely different rules from our world, this child would learn the "fake" rules without knowing the difference.
And in the vein of hardwired preferences, notice the mention in the later section of that article of 7 minute old babies preferring faces - unless you want to suggest that unbiased algorithms would learn the importance of faces in that little time?
> Infants who can barely see already knows things like inertia and persistence of invisible objects
Do you have evidence / references for that? (Genuine question; I'd like to see it if you do.)
As far as language learning goes... there are plenty of linguists who disagree with Chomsky on that point. Among others. In particular, the cognitive linguistic school is fairly at odds with the generative grammar school.
There's a lot of research on infants these days. There's a great deal of discussion on what infants do and don't know in _The Philosophical Baby_ (because the issue has obvious philosophical relevance to Kant's categories and Locke's tabula rasa).
A proud moment for me was when my then-six-year-old daughter wrote a letter to Santa that said, "Dear Santa, I know that you can't exist because you would have to go faster than light to deliver all those presents." I don't know where she got it from, but I was impressed by her skeptical attitude!
I think so. I try to tell my kids the truth, including when I am not sure of my answers and why.
However, the point resonated with me, mainly due to my memories of what I believed simply because an adult told me so. I'm a little ahead of my kids in understanding the world, but not so far, and probably in the wrong direction. I try to remember that I need to make my position as clear as my answer.
What's the negative? He's teaching them that not only do you need to call people out when they're wrong, but especially when they have something on the line, or because they might be offended.
I’m not an expert on affect or children, but it does seem kind of mean. That would be the negative: the youth’s possible feeling of betrayal or a negative effect on the relationship with the kid.
As a kid, it was frustrating to be BSed, but not really to the point of feeling betrayed. There was a big difference in how I felt when someone was just having fun at my expense vs. when they lied to me "for real".
At the same time, if you go too far in the opposite direction, you start banning games in school that not everyone can win, everyone starts getting A's, etc.
Sometimes life sucks, and children should be carefully exposed to this fact, lest they grow up to be useless little doe-eyed innocents.
Luckily for me my parents supported my constant questioning of nearly everything. Neither were very religious, but my mom did go to church and made me go to Sunday school and church. Eventually I was thrown out of Sunday school for asking too many questions [1], and at that point laid out a pretty good argument why it was a waste of time for me to continue to go to church. That was the last time I was a part of any organized religion.
[1] "The bible says so" is simply not a good enough answer - ever. To me a much better answer is simply that a person wants something beyond themselves to believe in even though they know they will not ever prove it to be true. I may disagree with that, but I can respect a person who is honest with themselves.
My parents are not religious at all, but for some reason (proximity of home and their work places mainly) I attended a religious-school for two years when I was 6 and 7. At the beginning I was constantly "punished" during religious-courses because of my questions, but the punition was to be in the library while the other kids had religious classes, so I can't disturb the class and make everyone questionning what the teacher says. Soon they didn't wait for me to ask an embarassing questions they'd just make me go to the library during religious-courses.
You could think that people at this school were rather clever to have me "punished" by being in the library. But they also sent me to the "school director class" when I was talking too much in class, and the school director class was for kids 3 years older than me, and they were doing way more interesting stuff. Even if I was not allowed to ask questions there, I often managed to get punished on purpose (it was really not difficult for me ^^) and it seems they never understood that.
>Soon they didn't wait for me to ask an embarassing questions they'd just make me go to the library during religious-courses.
You assume it was embarrassment. It was probably [also] simply disruptive. Teachers do not generally (depending on where you are of course) have free rein, they have a curriculum to wade through with proscriptions on the manner of it's transmission.
I was disruptive in science classes at 16-17 by being a smart-ass.
That reminds me of a Bill Cosby sketch. "So she sent me to my room. Which is where I wanted to be in the first place!"
I was fortunate enough, for the most part, to have very good Sunday School teachers, of the sort who were not afraid to say "I don't know", or "why don't you try to find out yourself?" As a result, I am still active in organized religion, and well acquainted with theology.
I have occasionally accidentally caused some people to assume that I'm a atheist in awkward circumstances; but that is usually resolved by explaining that I actually do agree with their religion, just not their justification )or lack thereof) for it. I found my own justification.
While judging a science fair last year, I was talking to a student who had come to a definite conclusion about his hypothesis based on exactly three data points. I asked him if there was any other possible outcome from an experiment besides "I have proved my hypothesis" and "I have disproved my hypothesis", and he said those were the only two options. When I told him that "I can't conclude anything because I don't have enough information" is sometimes a perfectly valid conclusion, he didn't understand how or why.
Not sure if that's a personal misunderstanding about the philosophy of science or he was never taught it, but I sure hope that concept is not missing from school curriculum.
In my experience, it is. I went to a Sci/Tech magnet school, and it still never came up. The 'correct' answer is always either yes or no; 'I don't know' is not acceptable in a paper or on a test.
At least they were good about generating your own conclusions, and not just trying to make your observations fit with what the teacher thought they ought to be. Most of the time.
Argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or "appeal to ignorance", is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not been proven false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that there is insufficient investigation and therefore insufficient information to satisfactorily prove the proposition to be either true or false.
I don't know would have been a fine answer. The problem is that I was never told I don't know and was told either the bible says so or I says so and your going hell.
Keep in mind some of my friends (who also went to church with me) went to a Metalical concert (showing my age lol) and were immediately condemned. Even as a teen at this point I realized what BS this was. How could a God who is supposed to be all great, all knowing, and all powerful condemn someone for going to a musical concert. (metalica? really, I've been to more tame Slayer concerts lol).
I dated girl in college and watched her and her friends get sucked into religion because they had never seen how it worked before. I went to a couple of services with her and LOLed at the preacher when I knew more about the bible than he did (those years of sunday school paid off). I don't have a problem with religion except when it's complete BS.
I definitely sympathize. My Sunday school teachers were a bit anti-intellectual and could rarely answer the questions a smart kid might have. It didn't take me long to realize that the teachers weren't the people best qualified to teach kids on religious subjects. They were just the people who were willing to babysit for an hour every Sunday.
Though I probably wouldn't have reached this realization if my parents didn't have some fairly intellectual theology/religious books on the shelves that I could pick up and read.
In defense of organized religion, I know people who have had the opposite experience; i.e., whose teachers, pastors, and priests were very encouraging of questions and did their best to answer them. I have heard that the Catholic Church in particular is much more welcoming of this (or was for one person, anyway) than I had expected.
I wish those people were more forthcoming. I am deeply and devoutly religious, but I don't blame many for their reactions to religion given its common course. I was always taught to ask questions. My teachers, parents, and other role models were generally welcoming and did not seem afraid of inquisition (in fact, they would invite it, and invite us to explore other religions -- the opposite occurs in most Christian denominations), and I think that played a big role in my continuance in the faith.
There is a deep, endless reality to pure religion, found in many sects. Most, however, follow their religion because it's part of their tradition, and it's something that makes them comfortable. They have a very superficial understanding of its components and mainly practice (to the extent that they do practice) to help themselves feel better. Of course, when challenged, they take the intellectually lazy out of belittling and discrediting the source instead of ever considering their questions on a philosophical level.
That is not pure religion. Pure religion is a rigorous, demanding, constant program of self-improvement, discipline, learning, and love. It can be found in many sects to the degree that its practitioners embrace and internalize the principles espoused. Pure religionists love inquisition and they love learning. They are also generally more intellectually active and less likely to tout religion as a badge when pursuing political office (not that that happens very often either), etc.
To you atheists, we know you've had bad experiences, and we know that there are a lot of people out there trying to embarrass religionists, but please remember that there is a non-vocal minority, much smaller than the general religious population but still not insignificant, for whom religion is deep and serious, and not a matter of silencing curiosity to make way for comfortable lies about ourselves.
I found a book at my local library that I really loved. "The Faith of a Scientist" by Henry Eyring [1], a brilliant chemist and devout Mormon who has a beautiful, refreshingly rational take on religion. The chapters are succinct and cover specific scientific principles that often receive a lot of undeserved friction from religious people - the age of the earth, evolution, etc. There doesn't have to be a discrepancy between intellectual curiosity and religion. I recommend it to all of my friends who are religious but find the general attitude of those within their faith intellectually unsatisfying.
>[1] "The bible says so" is simply not a good enough answer - ever.
Axioms are fine in logic, mathematics, physics, ... so why not elsewhere?
It's certainly an unsatisfying answer.
If however you assume for a moment that it portrays the will of the Creator then The Bible saying so is no worse (or better) than the fine-structure constant not having a logical derivation as to it's value.
People trying to give a reason for a Biblical injunction have, I suspect, often not discovered the reason the Creator made things one way or another but are really just speculating. Like one might speculate why a universe might have a fixed light speed in vacuo.
>The fine structure constant is not axiomatic; its value and its contantness are experimentally testable.
Yeah, I plucked a little too randomly perhaps - the point there is not that it is axiomatic (which I didn't claim) but that it is an arbitrary value; indeed it is a complex of arbitrary values that apparently define the physics of our universe somewhat.
Why is it that value, well, er, just because (or some version of the anthropic principle if you swing that way).
"...arbitrary values that apparently define the physics of our universe somewhat."
In other words, this constant is a piece of a model, fitted to observable behaviour, subject to refinement based on empirical data. And the model may at some point be able to offer insight as to why things are as they are; "just because" is not viewed by most physicists as a permanent explanation.
This is the exact opposite of religious thinking which offers conclusions in advance of, and regardless of, any empirical data.
My point is that the parallel you're trying to draw between religious prescription and the things that scientists call "axioms" is not valid.
>"just because" is not viewed by most physicists as a permanent explanation
Why do you suppose this is any different for a Christian physicist, say, than for any other physicist? That aside I imagine that many physicists hold to a form of Anthropic Principle which almost fits the definition of "just because".
As an agnostic I always felt that God was the cop-out answer that replaced "we don't know". As a Christian not knowing everything still frustrates me but knowing now that within our current knowledge it is provable that not everything is knowable softens the blow of that somewhat (Godel, Church-Turing, etc.).
>religious thinking which offers conclusions in advance of, and regardless of, any empirical data
You suppose that religion is false to state your position, of course you do, but if you suspend your supposition then you see that religion 'offers truth in advance of reason'.
Christians generally, IME, don't say that God exists as the conclusion of a logical argument it's presuppositional in the same way as assumption of the validity of ones own sense data, or the assumption of ones actual self or of an external world.
Christians take that 'Christ died for our sins and was resurrected to heaven' and live by it and find that it works. Physicists take that 'c is constant for all observers' and live by it and find that it works. Obviously 'it works' means many different things both to the Christian and to the scientist (coherentism, instrumentalism, etc.).
"...if you suspend your supposition then you see that religion 'offers truth in advance of reason'"
This statement is a tautology, and also completely beside the point. It matters not whether a belief held religiously is actually true. By definition, a belief held religiously is held without regard to reason or evidence. The extent to which reason and evidence intrude is the extent to which faith is obviated.
This entire process, this way of thinking, is and should be entirely alien to science. And the anthropic principle is not science. It's not even a principle -- it's conjecture. It's not testable, not falsifiable, and it has no material effect on any scientific research, influential though it may in philosophical terms.
Your last statement is ..., it's ... no. Just, no. There is nothing alike about those two things. The constant c is, again, eminently isolatable in experiment, quite testable, and part of part of a quite falsifiable theory. The statement that following Christ has worked well for your life, even if true in whatever sense you like, is everything science is not: anecdotal, unfalsifiable, and untestable if only for the presence of millions of variables that cannot be isolated, controlled, or even known. You're conflating two completely separate things.
btw, I'm a big fan of this anthropic jazz. It is aesthetically pleasing to me, like the thought of any finely crafted machine, but it is in no way shape or form scientific.
Yes. Do you have a conclusion to that thought or more to add? I'd like to read it.
Alternative logical axioms are something I find interesting but I've only really studied a couple of alternative axiomatic systems of arithmetic (Peano - limited as it is by Godel's incompleteness theorem, Robinson, ZFC, can't think of any others of the top of my head).
Axioms are fine in logic, mathematics, physics, ... so why not elsewhere?
The axioms that I believe in are provable. Things like 1+1=2. There is no proof that <insert your god here> created the world in <insert your days here>.
So tell me an axiom, preferably religiously based, that I can go out and prove.
Religion by its very definition is faith based. As soon as you start proving/disproving it, religion simply doesn't exist anymore.
>Because those axioms work, and are verifiable independently
Can you expand on what you mean by this. Are you saying, for example, that you've proven GR without axioms - you've verified independently that a specific constant c is a necessary condition based on other axioms (or somesuch)? I take it you're a foundationalist?
An attempt at an example: The Bible says excessive greed is wrong. One can argue that it is a simple consequence of other more elementary moral statements within. Lets assume here that it's an axiomatic moral statement anyhow (I don't think it matters for these purposes). It works; it's independently verifiable that excessive greed is destructive. In Biblical terms such destructiveness is wrong (another axiom) whilst clearly wrong is not a scientifically determinable position.
I don't understand your "hint" it sounds like an attempt at snarky humour from a position of petitio principii but I really can't unravel the intention inside the gag.
I don't know what a foundationalist is. I think the difference comes down to what you demand from your knowledge of reality. Every time I use the GPS on my phone to see where I am, I am relying on the axioms underpinning GR to hold true within the precision required to correct the atomic clocks on the satellites for time dilation.
The principles of GR may not model reality completely -- and it would be really unusual and surprising if they did -- but they're good enough for me because they're testable.
I don't understand your "hint" it sounds like an attempt at snarky humour from a position of petitio principii but I really can't unravel the intention inside the gag.
Here, I'm poking fun at you because (assuming you're not just adopting a religious POV as a rhetorical exercise) you have to die to find out if you're right, while all I have to do is open my eyes and compare my location to what my GPS tells me. To the extent these locations differ, I can ask questions and eventually understand why.
I see no need to consider the supernatural until I have perfected my understanding of the natural... which ain't gonna happen anytime soon. If that makes me a 'foundationalist,' then so be it.
Heh, I love it that kids have so much faith in people. Eventually they'll figure out that some people are not overly concerned with reality and do not allow it to interfere with the pleasure of believing exciting or gratifying things. Many people live their whole lives in suspension of disbelief, like you or I live when reading a novel or watching a movie.
No one who could be reached by evidence or argument believes in things such as Therapeutic Touch or "Mineral Miracle Solution" anyway, so there is no point in gathering evidence or presenting an argument. It's okay; humanity will survive despite them. The concrete problem here is that we do not respect education as a profession, so we have allowed it to be infested with dingbats and morons. Pay teachers a salary that reflects their importance to our society, scale pay according to rank and performance instead of seniority, and attract some worldly, intelligent people into the profession to displace the dingbats. As for the silly and vapid parts of the internet, let the dingbats have them.
Learning is obviously hard to quantify, but some teachers are much better at inspiring and helping children to learn than others.
But that's a high bar. Currently the bar is far below that, with many teachers obviously phoning it in to anyone paying attention. They can't be fired, and that's the problem I was talking about. I went to an excellent public school, and I was tiered with the 'smart kids', so I generally had relatively good teachers, and some that were absolutely excellent. Even there, though, some were blatantly awful, and should have clearly been fired. I took a couple of non-"Gifted and Talented" classes, and the teachers there were a good bit worse on average. Some seemingly knew less about their subject than some of their students, and taught things that were just false in some cases.
It's demoralizing to have terrible teachers. A few terrible teachers, and it makes kids restless and bored during the school day. Talent/quality density is important in many organizations, and schools are no exception.
The stakes are a good bit higher, though. It's cliched, but the kids in schools do form the base of the country's economy a few years down the road, and if a high percentage of them can't do much more than manual labor or service work because they weren't inspired and decided that learning sucked, the US is screwed in the long term. None of the benefits of a teacher's union are worth the risk they're creating. It's really important that we not throw our hands up just because we can't objectively measure them. As dkarl says, it works in other professions.
> It's really important that we not throw our hands up just because we can't objectively measure them.
Straw man much?
Avoid the question? You wrote a lot, but said absolutely nothing.
By what measure should we measure teachers? It's easy to say "get rid of terrible teachers," but if you can't define it, then you are back to square one.
I'm not the one throwing my hands up. You and dkarl are basing saying one thing: "Fire bad teachers." I asked you to define bad, and you merely respond with: "You have to fire bad teachers."
So, I'll try again: By what measure should we measure teachers? Test scores? Student performance? Parental voting? Secret peer ballots? Teacher testing? School board review (which pretty much amounts to parental votes)?
You're trying to find an objective/standardized measure of performance, and I was trying to illustrate that it's not necessary. Most of that crap is talked about because the situation has gotten to the insane point where one needs concrete evidence of failure to fire a teacher. That's not needed in almost any other profession, and it shouldn't be necessary in education.
All that "saying nothing" was trying to illustrate anecdotally that it was obvious to anyone who actually watched the classes who needed to be fired.
If one gave absolute firing power to every principal, minus the ridiculous hoops they have to jump through and conditions that need to be met, they would undoubtedly take care of the worst offenders quickly and accurately. That alone won't get us to uniform excellence, but it would be a very good start. That's why I was harping on the inability to fire bad teachers.
There's no fair and objective way to measure the performance of programmers, managers, doctors, lawyers, chefs, marketers, or actuaries, yet we have no problem with giving them performance reviews and performance-based raises and promotions. In government, we have soldiers, FBI agents, CDC researchers, traffic engineers, and prosecutors, all front-line workers who are paid and promoted according to their performance. Soldiers don't become SEALs through seniority. In all of those fields we find it adequate to rely on the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful.
It would expose teachers to injustice and favoritism, sure. So what? Those are professional hazards we all face. It is teachers themselves who inform us that grades are always imperfect measurements of performance yet must be accepted because they play a constructive role in our system of education. It is in school that we learn how favoritism and personal animosity affect the official story of our performance. Those are important lessons because they prepare us to work in a world where judgment is necessary but perfect justice is never achieved. Don't you find it ironic that teachers refuse to submit to any unscientific and less-than-perfectly-just evaluation of their performance when they themselves teach children to accept such evaluations as an inevitable fact of modern life?
> There's no fair and objective way to measure the performance of people... blah blah blah...
You've avoided the question, and assumed I'm arguing against measuring performance. Basically, wrong on both accounts.
I'm not arguing that teachers shouldn't have some form of review. However, considering the nature of a public school system, knowing what we know, how should teachers be reviewed? The goal is to have good teachers teaching. Simply saying "we need to review teachers" doesn't help matters, as the question isn't whether we need to. It's the method that is the question.
> the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful.
No. That's merely saying "Their performance should be measured" with a few more words.
> augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful.
So, once again, I repeat: What metrics are useful? You can't judge someone without knowing what metrics you are using.
> Just like most other jobs.
Most other jobs use specific metrics. When you come up for review, you know what you are being judged on. Take a sales position. The total revenue brought in, along with net profit from that revenue might be one metric that is useful. For programmers, meeting deadlines and customer needs consistently might be one of those metrics. For a writer, meeting deadlines for first draft, second draft, as well as overall sales of a book.
In the end, you are simply saying the same thing over and over again: Judge them by whatever useful means. You've yet to provide any opinion on what those useful means might be. If you don't know, just say you don't. But don't pretend like you are offering any insight. Essentially, you've answered the question of "What's air speed velocity of a laden swallow?" with the answer of "The air speed velocity of a laden swallow."
You're missing the point. I'm being vague because it's entirely appropriate to be vague. Performance in most jobs is highly subjective. People judge employees the way they judge code. There are vague rules of thumb for judgment -- software developers are expected to write solid code, use source control well, follow company standards, and keep their manager informed of their work -- but there is rarely any way to measure performance. Metrics are often disregarded, if they're gathered at all.
For example, did a writer miss a deadline after an unexpected event required changes (e.g., someone writing a piece about Bin Laden needing to make major changes after his death)? That's a pretty solid defense, but if the editor knows that the writer has been screwing up and consistently running behind, he might use the delay as an excuse to reprimand him anyway.
Did a programmer not finish his project because he was asked to support someone else's failing project? If his boss values him, he will run damage control and explain to upper management why the project did not get finished.
Were a salesman's numbers down because of bad PR from a safety scandal? If the salesman's peers felt that he expressed a flippant attitude towards the safety problems in front of customers, thus contributing to the company's bad safety image, his boss might fire him. That can't be measured.
Was a prosecutor's 80% conviction rate actually pretty crappy because he handled nothing but slam-dunk cases? The difficulty of his cases can't be measured. There is no difficulty grade for a legal case like there is for an ice skating routine.
Sure, there are exceptions: call center employees and data entry clerks come to mind. The point is that we don't limit performance evaluations and performance-based pay and promotion to jobs where performance can be measured. Instead, we fall back on human judgment, justified -- but not fettered -- by accepted rules of thumb about how a person should do their job. Do you really think I need to spell out what those are for teachers? There's an entire college curriculum for teacher training. I don't think they spending four years telling them to "just go do what feels right." Even today, teachers' classroom performance is evaluated before they're certified. There's a rubric. And in the end the rubric doesn't matter anyway, because it boils down to personal opinion of the evaluator. Big bureaucratic companies, including mine, have rubrics for performance evaluations where workers are given numerical ratings in various categories, but that isn't measurement. It's just a way for a manager to record his opinion about whether an employee is doing a good job or not, using numbers instead of words. No boss sits down to write a glowing review, fills out the ratings and adds them up, and says, "Oh my goodness! I thought Jason was doing a great job, but the numbers say he's only average! I must have been wrong." If the numbers don't reflect his intuitive sense of whether you're doing a good job or not, he'll fix them.
Heck, even my subsidiary's baseline bonus for last year, which is calculated according to a precise mathematical formula, got a hefty boost because the VP over our subsidiary made a convincing case to the top executives that the numbers didn't accurately reflect our contribution to the company's bottom line. A few numbers got adjusted here and there, the formula was recalculated using the new numbers, and our bonus went up. Human judgment for the win.
rkalla's comment about the "negative carpet-bomb style" that this article follows got me thinking: The story focuses on something that seems ridiculous when taken out of context - and no doubt reminded many HN readers of various childhood memories (including me). But it brings up the following question:
What is the best way to go about teaching children of greatly varying abilities/talents/developmental speeds? If you put 2 or 3 really smart and talkative "bullshit-detecting" kids in a class of 25 other regular kids, will all their BS detecting help or harm education of the other 25 kids? If teachers end up allocating a large portion of class time to the 2 or 3 smart kids, wouldn't this detract from teaching the other 25? (And I have to say, I'm at the moment thinking back with embarrassment at the number of times I pointed out exceptions that rendered a teacher's assertion incorrect - was this a good use of classroom time taken as a whole?).
In reality, public schools teach to the middle. It could be that most kids aren't ready to learn independent thinking skills before age 15 or so, and that trying to encourage this is just a waste of time. Or perhaps it could be taught to all at an early age. I don't know, but it's an interesting question.
In my mind, there's an obvious solution which is to some extent already done. Segregate the bright, BS-detecting kids into classes more appropriate for them. Encourage them to continue along their path of independent thinking and accelerated learning without disrupting the education of those in the middle.
I will join your gentle threadjack, because it runs along an interesting tangent.
I think a lot of schools give lip-service to segregating "advanced" students but miss the point of the exercise. I was placed in an accelerated maths class at school. The school determined which students were ready to learn more advanced mathematical concepts by test grades.
Long story short, the class was generally filled with unquestioning swots who could complete hundreds of worked examples according to the textbook but had no critical analasis skills whatsoever.
When the "advanced" class is seen as a bonus option available for successful students, unfortunately teachers aren't inclined reward the BS-detecting students, who have questioned their authoritah too many times.
Good point. One way to address your point is to try to understand what is appropriate for each kid at the age of 5-6 and slot them in the right school before it's too late. See my reply below.
I want to get on a tangent inspired from your comment. Myself included, many Hacker News readers would probably be in the BS-detecting, questioning, critical category of students. However, I personally really think that every school child can become great at something, regardless of whether they are the little questioners in the classroom or not. And I personally think that an education system that labels children into "regular" and "advanced" is not a good idea, because it really hurts the self-esteem of the "regular" students.
My point is: different flavors, different emphasis, different difficulty in homework among the essentially same-subject classes is fine. However, we should phrase education as an experience with choices, especially for pre-college (because their personalities are very malleable, imo), instead of making kids feel like they are laggards.
I see your point. But segregation can also occur by entire schools. In CA (where I live), budget constrains and therefore class sizes makes it very difficult for public schools to cater to the individual needs of students. For this reason, our son is going to a private school (partly an economic decision for us - the cost of a house in a town with great public schools was $500,000-$600,000 greater than the house we actually purchased).
We checked out many public and private schools to find the best fit for him. Given the kinds of math he was doing before entering Kindergarten and his inquisitive nature, we could see that he would be bored and not challenged going through any of the public schools we checked out. His private school does a great job of exactly what you say - different flavors, different emphasis, different difficultly in homework among essentially same-subject classes.
So it strikes me that part of the issue is that most (certainly not all) education professionals have a different and non-scientific perspective. This presents large problems because the larger society needs kids to grow up with an appropriate understanding of critical thinking.
The vast majority of school administrators don't actually care that much about helping kids become thoughtful, independent people. Their incentives push them to produce kids with core "skills" and achieve various financial objectives. Evidence-based evaluation of commercial pedagogical methods can run counter to the administrators' interests.
Which just means that these kids are working in the finest traditions of scientists throughout history.
The free, short ebook “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion” has some insights on the issues of respect, control, authority, and conservatism, especially as it relates to minors. Highly recommended read: http://www.freedomainradio.com/FreeBooks/OnTruthTheTyrannyof...
The authority/truth mismatch is something that (especially) the first chapters of #HPMoR deal with, as well as rational thought and scientific inquiry (which the end of the linked article gets into):
> "You think you have what it takes to be a scientist in your own right, with or without my help? Then let's see how you investigate a confusing phenomenon."
> "I..." Hermione's mind went blank for a moment. She loved being tested but she'd never had a test like this before.
This article also reminds me of some hurtful moments from my youth. Once, in high school, I was almost kicked out of the house merely for attempting to have a reasonable, rational, calm discussion about a parental rule, despite being told the “conversation” was over. (Perhaps “monologue” fits better.) Then a few short years later, I was told I could no longer come home for Christmas as I no longer shared my mother’s faith. (A lot like this, except for my age: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mcOIyf9TOQ) Sure, lots of teens had it worse than I did, but this kind of thing is extremely hurtful, and really put a damper on my relationship with my family.
Kids who spot bullshit, and the adults who get upset about it, indeed.
Seriously, getting the truth makes for occasional good press, but not a good career, and this is a problem. It's typically much more financially rewarding to be the guy selling industrial bleach to patients with Crohn's, which is why our world looks the way it does, with Groupon legally stealing and Sequoia investing in grilled cheese.
It's time for atheists and agnostics need to "come out of the closet". Something like 10-20% of Americans are non-religious, but they don't realize how many others are out there.
They are expected to keep their beliefs to themselves, yet believers in any random religion are allowed to express their diverse beliefs. Polls show that Americans would prefer to elect a homosexual president over an atheist president.
> the guilt I felt for my alternate vision of the world was intense
Man, I feel you on that. I grew up in a religious household but started going, "seriously, over an apple?" when I was quite young. The responses always distilled down to my not having enough "faith."
Kids can spot bullshit, but how often do adults spot bullshit and have less power to do something than the kids cited in the article did. This article is cool because it gives specific examples of children wading through the muck to deliver the truth when that's something that all of us wish we could do in our different contexts.
Reminds of when Mrs Mevec told us in 8th grade that sound traveled through space. I objected, because sound is just vibration of molecules and space is fairly empty. I was wrong, she told me. And then many of the students mocked me as well.
Just because someone is an adult and you're not doesn't prove a thing. Neither does having every other person disagree. The evidence may still be on your side.
Thanks. I really enjoyed reading that fanfic, but I don't think it will appeal as much as a teaching aid. My current plan is to go through the 'How To Actually Change Your Mind' sequence on Less Wrong ( http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_M... ), and distil that for my daughter. I want something that's systematic, a canonical list, if there is such a thing.
So it's an opinion piece, that kids have a "bullshit detector" of some kind. Fine, have that opinion. But look at the counter-arguments: Santa Claus. Easter Bunny. Generally-unquestioning adherence to parents' religion. Etc.
Sure, once they start thinking for themselves more, they start to find inconsistencies. Adults, of course, do nothing of the sort. They're not the cynical, doubting types, no siree.
So, cherry pick a couple high-profile success stories and project to the population as a whole. This is high quality content, apparently, as it has over 200 votes. Maybe people are just voting on the concept, as everybody has encountered someone getting upset over being told the truth?
Another question is whether these studies show that any doctor can provide acupuncture services without training in TCM. All your doctor needs to do is insert the needles randomly. In fact, pressing with a toothpick may be enough to cause the placebo effect associated with sham acupuncture.
Finally, how much would you pay for the "service", knowing what you do from the literature?
>All your doctor needs to do is insert the needles randomly.
be careful with random acupuncture points ...
"If a woman in China is pregnant with a second child, or in numerous cases, if the couple knows the first pregnancy is a girl, the couple will go to the medical clinic for an abortion. One common method of abortion is simply to use strong acupuncture point stimulation of San Yin Chiao (SP6) in conjunction with He Gu (LI4). The abortion is generally realized within 24 hours."http://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=...
I hope we do indeed achieve and maintain reduced friction / inhibition of access to information. So that, for example, bright kids do not wait years to get into an environment that simply lets them proceed at their own pace, not to mention receive encouragement.
And find some interesting, challenging communities in which to participate.
It wasn't until he got into touch with a scientist who did research into the same disease he had that they were finally able to convince doctors to take a closer look and start receiving treatment. Turns out he was right but had to suffer for a few years because of the arrogance of a few "professionals".