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Comment on Education doesn't increase intelligence by making people memorize things, but by constantly reminding people that they might be wrong.

captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

I am a flight instructor. I had to study the fundamentals of instruction to earn that title, so I believe I can speak with some authority on this subject.

When discussing facts, figures and such, we consider four levels of learning. The easiest, fastest and most useless is rote memorization. Rote memorization is the ability to simply parrot a learned phrase. This is fast and easy to achieve, and fast and easy to test for, so it’s what schools are highly geared toward doing.

An example from flight school: A small child, a parrot, and some Barbie dolls could be taught that “convective” means thunderstorms. When a meteorologist says the word “convective” it’s basically a euphemism for thunderstorms. You’ve probably already memorized this by rote. You would correctly answer this question on the knowledge test:

Which weather phenomenon is a result of convective activity?

A. Upslope Fog

B. Thunderstorms

C. Stratus Clouds

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nuggie_ss@lemmings.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I agree, and hopefully this will help put things into perspective.

Theory is not a substitute for experience.

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Peanutbjelly@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Love this comment. If anyone knows anything about machine learning or brains, this resembles modal limitations in learning.

A lot of our intelligence is shaped around our sensory experience, because we build tools for thinking via the tools we’ve already built, ever since baby motorbabbling to figure how our limbs work. Why Hellen Keller had such trouble learning, but once she got an interface she could engage with for communication, things took off.

We always use different tools, but some people don’t see colour. This doesn’t mean they are stupid when they answer differently in describing a rainbow.

Also why llms struggle with visual/physical concepts if the logic requires information that doesn’t translate through text well. Etc.

Point being, on top of how shitty memorization is as the be all end all, learning and properly framing issues will have similar blindspots like not recognizing the anvil cloud.

This is also why people in informational bubbles can confirm their own model from ‘learning’ over people’s lives experiences.

Like most issues, it doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but epistemic humility is important, and it is important not to ignore the possibility of blindspots, even when confidence is high.

Always in context of the robustness of the framing around it, with the same rules applied at that level. Why “nothing about us without us” is important.

But also we gotta stop people giving high confidence to high dissonance problems, and socializing it into law. We should be past the “mmr causes autism” debate by now, but I’m hearing it from the head of health in the USA.

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SpicyLengthiness@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Ok, but you never finished the example with the child, parrot and barbie dolls. What is the punchline there?

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- captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Children can be taught to repeat something even if they don’t understand it. So can many species of parrot, they famously mimic sounds they hear including human speech without understanding the meaning behind the sounds. And I seem to remember a model of Barbie doll that had a little sound recorder built in so she can “really talk.” These things can repeat something they’ve "learned’ without any deeper understanding.
  
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