eSkeptic: Science Education is No Guarantee of Skepticism

By Wayne Brown

This from the eSkeptic .. (subscribe now!!!)



Bottom line: The way "Science" is taught in the schools, it fails to provide the "Baloney Detector" that Carl Sagan felt was the #1 piece of intellectual equipment that schools should be providing for their students.

Thankfully, the issue is front and centre in the serious scientific community, specifically the AAAS, the one of the premier organization of professional Scientists.


The main problem is simple: Schools tend to teach Scientific "facts" but not the process of Science or the Scientific mind-set, which is inherently skeptical. Kids need to be taught to think "What is really going on here?", to pose theories, to discuss them, to do experiments and conduct investigations. Most importantly, they need to learn to discuss their observations and learn how to rule out theories that are not backed by experience. Perhaps the most important experience in a young life is to feel what it is like to have a cherished, "obvious" belief overthrown by his or her own classmates just on the basis of evidence and logic. After all, Science seldom tells us for sure what is right. It is a method for ruling out what is wrong.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Facebook and Bing - A Killer Combination

By Wayne Brown
Image
 This is a partial list of groups I belong to that focus on Generative AI art: Facebook creates community. I use BING as a kind of Generative AI university: BING U.  I prefer the role of student, so my job is to find good teachers. Think of me as the guy who shows you around the campus and knows his way around, but he's a student himself. Microsoft BING is free and very powerful. It's an excellent way to learn Generative AI and a standard tool that everyone in my imaginary school has. The way to find a teacher is to see their work in a Facebook group. Then, save the picture that caught your eye in a Word document (or document editor of your choice). For example ... Joe McIntosh What we have found here is not only the prompt for the picture but a teacher who shares the prompts for all his pictures. Look for artists who work primarily with BING. Don't get distracted by other platforms or techniques. Learn to do one thing well before shopping for better tools. The best Facebo
Read more

A Process ...

By Wayne Brown
Image
She will be 105 in September. She struggles to recognize her four children, let alone her countless grandchildren. Today, she said, "Nobody told me how to die." She has always wanted to die in her own home, an oversized place that has always had room for an endless parade of visitors. She has always been very "social." Although she struggles to remember the old friends dropping by, she chats happily "on automatic." There are a lot of relatives. She was raised on a farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where her Russian parents raised 16 children. I asked "AI" - specifically Claude 3 Sonnet , to describe this situation in a short essay. I have taken the liberty of letting Grammarly , my AI writing assistant, make a few corrections to Sonnet's purple prose. This is the slightly edited version: She sits in  the twilight of her extraordinary life, a living embodiment of resilience and grace. At 105 years old, her eyes, dimmed by time, still h
Read more

Warp Speed Generative AI

By Wayne Brown
Image
Jump to Warp Speed Warp 2 Warp 3 Warp 4 "Warp Speed"  Illustration of " Language is a Virus " Laurie Anderson Completed in the time it takes to perform the song For a very long time, I have tried to master information processing tools and "wire" them together into a "machine" that suits my purpose. "Warp Speed Generative AI" combines several powerful families of AI tools to turn an idea into one or more pictures. Along the way, we get an explanation of the original idea, references and a detailed explanation of the style. I call it "Warp speed" because AI seems to give me whiplash as it takes my idea and runs with it. I just hang on and enjoy the ride. "Warp Speed" is a response to the current obsession with prompts: how to write them, when to share them, how to monetize them, what books to read, what courses to take and so forth. AI can write pretty good prompts. "Prompt Engineering" is an endangered speci
Read more