Ben Eng on Nostr: We have come to understand, chiefly through the teachings of government education, ...
We have come to understand, chiefly through the teachings of government education, that 'science' means the expert opinions espoused by an authority with more clout than you.
I wonder if the style of how science is taught plays a role. Every science course spends a lot of time on the history and the scientists credited with discoveries. This puts the focus on persons more so than the method and the substance of each discovery. Putting aside shoulders and giants that are disregarded by venerating specific individuals, this style of teaching conditions the mind to believe what is told by people anointed with special mystique. In this way, we train a society of non-player characters.
To train scientific minds, we must not tell them to believe what they are told. It is not even enough to demonstrate and have students reproduce well-known experiments. When we teach Newton, we need to finish with an apology that although he got it mostly right, his understanding was incomplete, and thus ultimately not entirely correct. Same for Einstein. Same for Bohr. Same for Schrodinger. Same for everyone and everything we know today. Everything we think we know in science today is in fact incorrect at the extreme limits of our understanding. Observations disagree with our best theories, and our best scientists cannot yet explain them. The emphasis of our training must be to teach scientists to not be married to our incomplete and incorrect knowledge passed on to us by our predecessors and the current crop of experts. Science is about seeking the truth, not about being told the truth.
One of the most valuable ideas I didn't fully appreciate until only a few years ago listening to Sean Carroll's "Biggest Ideas in the Universe" series of videos was the distinction between an "effective theory" and a "fundamental theory". Almost everything we know is an effective theory. This means the theory is only useful within some narrow range of conditions. To teach the theory without that caveat is to lie by omission. Almost everything science students are taught suffers from lying by omission. That's why I often quip that everything we know today is wrong or everything we know today is a lie.
I'd like to take the formal definition of "effective theory" and dress it down to business casual.
I am reminded of second and third year in engineering Skule™, where most students learn for the first time the real-world relationship between theory and practice. First year is occupied entirely by maths-and-sciences 101. Most students have not ever built anything of their own design (without someone telling them how) at that point in their life.
Even during first year, students start to see a difference in mentality between professors from math and science faculties as compared to engineering faculties. It was my first exposure to the routine application of "first order approximation", whenever any calculation became difficult. Engineering profs literally did this at every turn, and the 'good enough' quality of this spun my head. It was quick and dirty, and yet presented with the same mathematical formalism and rigor. Most importantly it was effective. Engineering is all about applying theory, but knowing when and how to apply rules of thumb for practical work.
Eye opening was digital circuits. One would imagine that logic gates that only compute based on 1 (5v) and 0 (ground) are pretty well-behaved. A student naively building circuits will quickly realize that this so-called digital world is a mess of analog madness. WTF are capacitance, resistance, and inductance doing in this binary world? What do you mean I have to put a capacitor across the ground and 5v pin? Madness!
Holy shit did the theory ever lie by omission. Reality is 'complicated'.
I wonder if the style of how science is taught plays a role. Every science course spends a lot of time on the history and the scientists credited with discoveries. This puts the focus on persons more so than the method and the substance of each discovery. Putting aside shoulders and giants that are disregarded by venerating specific individuals, this style of teaching conditions the mind to believe what is told by people anointed with special mystique. In this way, we train a society of non-player characters.
To train scientific minds, we must not tell them to believe what they are told. It is not even enough to demonstrate and have students reproduce well-known experiments. When we teach Newton, we need to finish with an apology that although he got it mostly right, his understanding was incomplete, and thus ultimately not entirely correct. Same for Einstein. Same for Bohr. Same for Schrodinger. Same for everyone and everything we know today. Everything we think we know in science today is in fact incorrect at the extreme limits of our understanding. Observations disagree with our best theories, and our best scientists cannot yet explain them. The emphasis of our training must be to teach scientists to not be married to our incomplete and incorrect knowledge passed on to us by our predecessors and the current crop of experts. Science is about seeking the truth, not about being told the truth.
One of the most valuable ideas I didn't fully appreciate until only a few years ago listening to Sean Carroll's "Biggest Ideas in the Universe" series of videos was the distinction between an "effective theory" and a "fundamental theory". Almost everything we know is an effective theory. This means the theory is only useful within some narrow range of conditions. To teach the theory without that caveat is to lie by omission. Almost everything science students are taught suffers from lying by omission. That's why I often quip that everything we know today is wrong or everything we know today is a lie.
I'd like to take the formal definition of "effective theory" and dress it down to business casual.
I am reminded of second and third year in engineering Skule™, where most students learn for the first time the real-world relationship between theory and practice. First year is occupied entirely by maths-and-sciences 101. Most students have not ever built anything of their own design (without someone telling them how) at that point in their life.
Even during first year, students start to see a difference in mentality between professors from math and science faculties as compared to engineering faculties. It was my first exposure to the routine application of "first order approximation", whenever any calculation became difficult. Engineering profs literally did this at every turn, and the 'good enough' quality of this spun my head. It was quick and dirty, and yet presented with the same mathematical formalism and rigor. Most importantly it was effective. Engineering is all about applying theory, but knowing when and how to apply rules of thumb for practical work.
Eye opening was digital circuits. One would imagine that logic gates that only compute based on 1 (5v) and 0 (ground) are pretty well-behaved. A student naively building circuits will quickly realize that this so-called digital world is a mess of analog madness. WTF are capacitance, resistance, and inductance doing in this binary world? What do you mean I have to put a capacitor across the ground and 5v pin? Madness!
Holy shit did the theory ever lie by omission. Reality is 'complicated'.