[HN Gopher] My Favorite Liar (2008)
___________________________________________________________________
My Favorite Liar (2008)
Author : camtarn
Score : 160 points
Date : 2022-05-20 11:20 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.overcomingbias.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.overcomingbias.com)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> to focus our attention - by offering an open invitation for
| students to challenge his statements,
|
| I did this with some lectures (law, but to undergrad forensics
| class) and ran into a cultural limitation. A large subset of my
| students were Asian, kids of Asian immigrants. They had
| significant issues with speaking up when they disagreed with the
| obvious lies I told. They internalized the conflict and assumed
| that they were misunderstanding the lesson. Or they thought that
| I was making a mistake and didn't want to embarrass me by
| pointing it out. Then when someone else was brave enough to
| challenge me by pointing out the absurdity, these students felt
| left out. I really noticed this cultural limitation while talking
| about a historical US supreme court case. I said that the judges
| were wrong, that they were showing an improper bias. Then one kid
| challenged me saying basically "who are you to criticize a
| Judge!" He was genuinely offended and more than a little scared
| that I would so casually "disrespect" a legal authority. It had
| taken him a while to build up the courage to say what he did.
| That is when I realized teaching techniques reliant upon students
| challenging authority might not be the best idea for all
| students.
|
| (I did explain that cases at the supreme court only gets there
| because someone openly disagreed with the decisions of lower
| courts. The western legal system is based on constantly
| challenging authority.)
| jancsika wrote:
| Are you saying you implemented the _exact_ same game of telling
| a single lie per lecture and explicitly described the game
| ahead of time to the students?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I wouldn't say explicitly, but that is basically how most law
| lectures happen. You generally start with a basic rule such
| as the definition of a crime. Then you proceed to discussions
| of case law that explain nuances behind that rule. Rule:
| murder is killing people. Nuances: All these cases where
| killing people isn't murder. By starting with a simple rule,
| then proving that the rule is not simple, every lecture
| revolves around a single lie. That perspective on how every
| simple rule can in practice be expansive and difficult is
| probably the biggest and most useful takeaway of law school.
| rcoveson wrote:
| So the impression you got while teaching was that Asian
| students struggled to follow lectures that took the form of
| stating a generalization and then contradicting the
| generalization with non-central examples? E.g.:
|
| Teacher: Murder is illegal.
|
| Students: _take notes_
|
| Teacher: A man kills another who was threatening him with a
| deadly weapon. Was this illegal?
|
| Asian Students: _silently unwilling to contradict the
| earlier statement from the classroom authority_
|
| I don't think that's an accurate generalization of Asian or
| any other culture. From what you've described, it sounds
| like you ran into was a very specific circumstance where
| you voiced an opinion about a _real_ court decision which a
| student disagreed with, and they challenged you to justify
| that disagreement.
|
| I wonder what OP's professor's experience was with various
| cultures. I would bet that nobody struggled to catch on to
| the game, even those raised with a relatively high default
| respect for authority who would usually be unwilling to
| challenge it.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I said asian, children of asian immigrants. Both aspects,
| culture and recent immigration, are factors. That isn't
| all Asians ... whatever definition of "asian" you mean by
| that.
| rcoveson wrote:
| Okay, but whatever the geographical/cultural/racial
| criteria is, it would be extremely surprising to me if a
| college-age population was stymied by contradiction of
| authority _in a totally abstract, gamified context_ like
| OP describes. The whole "study hard to find the lie in
| the lecture" thing does not seem like some radical
| Western counter culture teaching method. Adult students
| will understand the intent and play along, yes, even
| first generation immigrants from Asia.
|
| I think what you've described in your anecdote is a clash
| over a contradiction of _real_ authority, opining that a
| judge was incorrect. I wouldn 't be surprised if
| upbringing was a good predictor of the likelihood that a
| student question a teacher who questions somebody
| perceived as an even higher authority.
| jancsika wrote:
| > I wouldn't say explicitly, but that is basically how most
| law lectures happen.
|
| That's a qualitative difference.
|
| For OP's prof, the students know from the beginning that if
| they catch the prof in a lie they "win the prize" per the
| explicit protocol. Even for a student like me who is
| reluctant to participate in such a lecture, I'd feel both a
| responsibility and a measure of safety in blurting out that
| I caught the prof in a lie!
|
| For you, a critical mass of undergrads almost certainly
| didn't know how most law lectures happen. Maybe "arguing"
| with you gets them "the prize," but maybe it gets them in
| trouble, or just brings them more confusion, frustration,
| etc.
|
| Or maybe-- just maybe-- this undefined behavior leads to a
| clever optimization that ends up deleting all their
| harddrives. (Sorry, I couldn't resist an undefined behavior
| joke.)
| phkahler wrote:
| >> teaching techniques reliant upon students challenging
| authority might not be the best idea for all students.
|
| That depends. Do you just want to teach the material? For some
| people the cultural thing is so strong they won't ask questions
| because it may imply that you're a bad teacher and offend you.
| You have to at least address it that much or you're not going
| to be able to teach the material effectively.
| SilasX wrote:
| I don't feel like that's a show-stopper. With some work,
| preferably in the first two lectures, you could train them
| out of the habit, perhaps by reframing it in a way that
| doesn't offend their habits e.g. ask them to say, "I have
| solved your challenge" rather than "this is wrong/a lie"
| which they have a revulsion to.
| malfist wrote:
| You think a professor can "train them out of the habit" in
| two lectures that a life time of cultural habitation built?
| SilasX wrote:
| No, I think it's possible he may he have to resort to
| reframing tricks that have the same functional outcome,
| which is why I suggested them in the other part of that
| sentence.
| fartcannon wrote:
| I really hope you didn't stop teaching them about lies and to
| challeng authority. That's extremely valuable, especially to
| people from countries with dictators.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Actually, I did stop. This was a lecture series about law
| taught within a forensics program, which is not the place for
| political grandstanding. When teaching law you always have to
| be very careful else every lecture devolve into debates re
| big/small government and freedoms of the people. Iirc the
| case I was discussing dealt with the search and seizure of
| laptops at airports. We needed to cover jurisdiction and
| encryption issues, not the rights of a democratic people to
| be free from tyranny.
| bombcar wrote:
| Sounds like the right decision - as anyone knows you're
| only supposed to teach "challenging authority" when the
| authority is one of the "accepted to challenge".
| fartcannon wrote:
| You'd probably get fired if you pushed the point anyways.
| thih9 wrote:
| Funny but also disrespectful and manipulative. In general I'd
| prefer to decide on my own how much time I should spend on a
| particular class.
| hgomersall wrote:
| "And it turns out the first lecture was the only one with a
| single lie about there only being one lie per lecture. In fact,
| this being economics, most of your course is a lie. So long
| suckers."
| SilasX wrote:
| (article tldr: You warn them there's one lie per lecture, and
| that focuses their attention on figuring it out, which
| necessarily requires a deep understanding of the material.)
|
| The thing is, this rests on the (far more important) teaching
| skill of "presenting an actual, consistent, interrogable
| worldmodel to the students, rather than a list of isolated
| factoids to memorize".
|
| If you don't have that -- if you're doing the latter -- you're
| just imposing a huge, tedious workload that doesn't translate
| into a persistent understanding.
| gumby wrote:
| This is a classic parenting technique: kid asks about something;
| you give an obviously wrong or even absurd answer; kid object and
| says why ("but cats don't float!") and you can have a fun little
| Socratic dialogue.
|
| For a true expert level example of this process, read the novel
| The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (no it is not science fiction and
| no, do not spoil it by reading Wikipedia)
| tonypace wrote:
| Good lord, do not hold up Frank's dad as a role model. [but you
| should definitely read the Wasp Factory. Wild energy beats
| skill, i think, and this is brimming with that]
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Random trivia: The author always uses "Iain Banks" for non-
| fiction and "Iain M. Banks" for science-fiction.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is not that uncommon of an approach. I had a calculus
| teacher once who pointed out that we, the students, were not
| being presented with the mathematical proofs that underlie
| calculus, and so had no real way of determining whether what we
| were being taught was reliable or not, and this was the case for
| the vast majority of applied mathematics courses. The point was
| that 'real mathematics' is all a series of theorems and proofs of
| theorems.
|
| The same is true for physics, but there it's the experiments that
| are mostly taken on faith; who has actually seen particles
| rebound from the dense inner cores of atoms? Yet we all believe
| in the structure of the atom as presented in intro
| physics/chemistry courses.
|
| As far as economics, that's more like theological studies than
| math and physics, so the true / false determination probably just
| amounts to looking up the relevant passage in the appropriate
| holy text.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| A physics undergrad definitely includes _most_ of the most
| damning experiments in physics. Muon capture for verifying
| Special Relativity, the photovoltaic and single-photon double
| slit experiment for Quantum, the spinning mirror thing for
| measuring the speed of light.
|
| You definitely see enough that you don't need to take the
| models on faith.
| lazide wrote:
| There is still a lot taken on faith for quite awhile, as the
| knowledge to judge the accuracy/meaning of each of those is
| also built on a lot of theories and prior experiments which
| are not usually personally tested. But Physics as noted is
| much less so than most everything else.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| True story. I live in the US. A [famous] colleague of mine was
| invited to give a lecture at a major German university in front
| of a professor's class. At the end of his lecture, the professor
| picked a random student out of the class, and the student came
| down and gave a perfect 1-minute summary of the lecture.
|
| My colleague asked how the students could be so disciplined. The
| professor said it was simple: they knew he would pick one at
| random, so they all had pre-prepared summaries of the lecture
| based on studying my colleague's submitted lecture notes the day
| before.
| thih9 wrote:
| I wouldn't want to participate in a course like this. I'd say
| it's the lecturer's job to explain a topic well enough so that
| the students can summarize it.
|
| If students have to memorize a summary before the lecture then
| something feels wrong. Good for the lecturer, I guess.
| arkitaip wrote:
| The purpose of great lectures isn't to regurgitate what is
| readily available in the literature or slides but to give
| students an opportunity to Q&A the parts which they don't
| understand.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly - many talks and lectures would be much better if
| the audience reviewed the material beforehand and didn't
| need to spend most of the time having powerpoint slides
| read to them.
| [deleted]
| bsedlm wrote:
| > _a exceptionally dry and boring subject matter, encumbered by
| complex mathematic models and obscure economic theory._
|
| by this point, considering the amount of technical understanding
| around narrative, storytelling, and enganging media production,
| the fact that these matters are so dry, complex, and such a slog
| to work through, feels like a choice not to make them any more
| accessible.
| munificent wrote:
| Making deeply technical material requires someone who has
| _both_ mastery of an uncommon challenging field _and_ expertise
| at narrative, storytelling, etc.
|
| For any given obscure field, the set of people who have
| mastered it is small. The intersection of that with the set of
| people who are great explainers is _very_ small.
| NickRandom wrote:
| An excellent article and an interesting method that struck a
| chord with me. I've been on both sides of the student/instructor
| podium and it seems genius level and would work well. His final
| move (no spoilers) instantly generated a 'what a dick move'
| response however. 9/10
| pvg wrote:
| Recent thread from a couple of months ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833984
|
| Not so recent one from 12 years ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=959550
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _My favorite liar (2009)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833984 - Jan 2022 (33
| comments)
|
| _My Favorite Liar (2008)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680424 - May 2014 (1
| comment)
|
| _One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed
| liar_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=959550 - Nov 2009
| (58 comments)
|
| * My Favorite Liar (Econ prof's lectures include a lie that
| students must find)* -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124386 - Feb 2008 (2
| comments)
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| This reminds me of a professor I had on numerical methods.
|
| The guy was an absolute genius. He helped write some amount (a
| lot?) of the FORTRAN compiler for at least one of its variants.
| And... we used state of the art numerical methods. We had a
| textbook on numerical methods, sure, but this was always just a
| starting place for what we used. (To this day, I've got some
| numerical algorithms I coded in FORTRAN that can crush those from
| common libraries.) If you missed a lecture, there was no making
| it up by reading the book. You were SCREWED if you didn't get a
| really good copy of the notes.
|
| Another thing: When lecturing, he barely glanced at his notes
| even in the middle of complicated derivations of error bounds and
| things like that.
|
| But here's the real point of this discussion: He had a way of
| testing that produced similar results to what this article is
| talking about.
|
| We wouldn't be tested on a general survey of the methods we
| covered in the class. No. We would be tested on just one or maybe
| two of the methods we had learned over the entire semester, and
| the exam questions would be a DEEP, DEEP dive into that method.
| (I had this guy for 3 semesters, always the same.) When asked
| what the exam would be on, he'd basically just say: "The
| numerical methods we've covered thus far". So you had no idea
| which method you'd need to learn to the maximum degree of depth.
| This forced you to simply study the shit out of them all. I mean,
| you had to know some really subtle things about the method if you
| wanted to get a reasonable grade on the exam.
|
| I actually grew to appreciate this as a testing method. It was
| the first class I'd ever had where I actually really needed to
| study. And study I did. Every other class would involve at most a
| cursory review of a couple of example problems I thought I might
| run into. This class though was always a minimum of like 3 full
| days of complete and thorough review, in teams with the other
| students.
| FredPret wrote:
| Loved your post, but as an aside, this stood out to me:
|
| >It was the first class I'd ever had where I actually really
| needed to study
|
| I wish we had a way of challenging every smart kid with proper
| material. When I got to university and suddenly had to try, it
| was quite a shock to my system. I could, in theory, have used
| the first 18 years of my life much more productively.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Aside from varying paces at which children learn, temperament
| makes a big difference too. I remember in elementary school,
| there was a subject I didn't like. Finally in 5th grade, I
| decided to try a different approach for one grading period. I
| did not participate in that subject. As in, when the teacher
| said to get out the materials, I instead got out a novel and
| read it. I turned in no work and did no homework.
|
| When my report card came out, I was astonished to find I had
| a D (the lowest passing grade). My lesson for that quarter:
| it is impossible to fail at school (this lesson proved to
| generalize all the way through high school). At this point, I
| stopped putting any effort at school into something I didn't
| find personally gratifying. Most of my fellow cohort of
| "smart kids" were mystified by this; they would go through an
| existential crisis in the very rare event that they got a B+.
| Pretty much any of the straight-A students could have had
| almost-straight-As with 10% of the effort they put in to
| ensure they would never get a B+.
|
| When I finally reached college, it became possible to fail,
| but still not particularly easy. I would skip evening exams
| to save myself the trouble of having to reschedule my weekly
| D&D session. I only studied when failing an exam would put me
| in danger of being kicked out of school (this happened maybe
| two or three times). I graduated with a C average.
|
| I'm not sure what the moral of this story is other than to
| say that some kids will study no matter the difficulty of the
| material while other kids will not.
| stocknoob wrote:
| You did a n=1 study to show GPA is a proxy for
| conscientiousness.
|
| https://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/jgrice/psyc4333/Five
| F...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm not entirely convinced it's a very good proxy (at
| least for the hard sciences). Certainly in my physics
| classes, raw-intellect trumped conscientiousness; using
| tidiness as a proxy for conscientiousness and "holds an
| advanced degree from a distinguished university" as a
| proxy for GPA, a walk-through of the professors offices
| in that same department would also dispute that.
|
| I think GPA is closer to a proxy for (A + g) * (B +
| conscientiousness) with values A and B varying from
| school to school and department to department (as well as
| the threshold for "perfect" varying). I had 3 roommates
| with higher conscientiousness than me flunk out, so YMMV.
|
| [edit]
|
| While we are talking personality traits, I think a high
| GPA is probably also a proxy for neuroticism; certainly
| many of the straight-A students exhibited these traits
| (as does the child of mine who gets the best grades).
| FWIW I score low in both conscientiousness and
| neuroticism on a Big Five test.
|
| [edit] changed from "not convinced this is true" to "not
| convinced it's a very good proxy"
| stocknoob wrote:
| Yep, per the paper the mean correlation was about .26,
| which is still fairly strong.
|
| "Proxy" isn't great phrasing, "correlates with" is
| better.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Wow, I completely missed the link in your earlier
| comment. Looks like my theory about neuroticism was not
| supported by that paper though.
| asiachick wrote:
| how did you get into college with Cs?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Competitive colleges are a small minority in US. Less
| than 300 colleges reject more students than they accept.
| CUNY isn't the only college with no entrance standards
| (open enrollment) and community colleges are also open
| enrollment and have transfer agreements for fours year
| colleges. Lots of countries have similar institutions.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Mainly that it was easier to get into college 25 years
| ago, but also I scored in the top 1% on the SATs. I also
| was a bit scared of not getting into college, so I
| managed to get my GPA up to a 2.9 by the end of junior
| year (which included a metaphorical rolling-over and
| showing my belly to my English teacher, who was giving me
| bad grades out of spite).
| t-3 wrote:
| Most colleges don't care, especially if your standardized
| test scores are high enough. The main problem is with
| obtaining scholarships, they will care about grades a
| lot. I left before completing even a single semester
| because I hated it, but my 2.0 GPA didn't stop me from
| getting admitted anywhere.
| lazide wrote:
| Did it help you or hurt you?
|
| One could argue it was a failing on your parents to set
| proper boundaries/discipline. I'm a lot of environments,
| you'd certainly not be helped by it.
|
| If you did well though, then who is to say?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Did it help you or hurt you?
|
| My gut feeling is that I was successful in spite of these
| things, not because of these things. With counterfactuals
| there's no way to be sure though.
|
| > One could argue it was a failing on your parents to set
| proper boundaries/discipline. I'm a lot of environments,
| you'd certainly not be helped by it.
|
| My parents did everything short of beating me to try and
| get me to do my homework. After school they sat me at the
| dining room table with nothing but my textbooks, pencil,
| and paper. I had to have my list of HW assignments signed
| off on by my teacher; if it wasn't signed I wasn't
| allowed to go out and play after school. All of that
| resulted in me sometimes doing my homework.
|
| By the time I was in high school they loosened up on the
| structure just because they believed that I only had 4
| years left to figure out how to do this on my own, but I
| still was banned from attending various social events
| because of my lack of effort in school. By the end of
| 10th grade, I had grown distant from my main group of
| friends just because I essentially never hung out with
| them outside of school so there was a lot of missing
| shared-experiences.
|
| As a parent now, I have no idea what they could have done
| differently. My own personal nightmare is one of my kids
| acting like I did (despite my parents saying I was the
| "easy kid")...
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| OMG, yes.
|
| The real tragedy there is that how to handle being challenged
| is a super important skill. And many of our best and
| brightest don't get to practice it all until it's too late.
| You can't learn a skill without practice. That's just not how
| it works.
|
| It makes no sense to me at all that children from all
| different backgrounds and abilities go through an identical
| curriculum at an identical rate. Like, have the people that
| set that up never met humans and human children before?
|
| My sister has the luxury of home-schooling her kids. And so
| they all have workbooks they can go through at their own
| individualized pace. As a result, one of them, my 6 year old
| nephew is now at about a 7th or 8th grade level in
| mathematics. He just loves doing math. Can you imagine how
| long that kid would have had to wait to actually be
| challenged in math if he went through the public school
| system? ...And they're actively trying to get rid of advanced
| study paths for such kids.
| bombcar wrote:
| We lost something in the path from homeschooling to one-
| room schoolhouse to the massive school factories we have
| today - which was pacing the students. Now we try to group
| everyone by age.
|
| It's much easier when there's only a small group of kids -
| but who's to say the massive schools shouldn't be close to
| large groups of one-room schoolhouses instead of the age-
| segregated blocks we have now?
|
| Done correctly this helps _all_ kids, except those who just
| happen to be perfectly aligned with their age.
| lazide wrote:
| Individualization is hard to do at scale, and expensive.
| FredPret wrote:
| We need something like the Young Lady's Illustrated
| Primer. I'm sure you can hire a couple of thousand
| professors and experts and map out a huge interactive
| curriculum tree.
|
| This can't replace school - you still need socialization,
| disciple, adult supervision, sport, etc. But academically
| this would beat my high school experience six-love.
| bombcar wrote:
| I think part of the discussion will be realizing you do
| NOT need teachers who are expert in the _subject_ to
| teach; you need teachers who are good at _teaching_ -
| especially at the elementary /high school levels.
|
| And part of that may be having the same teacher or group
| of teachers throughout the student's career, and with
| authority and flexibility to modify the curriculum as
| needed.
|
| But we'd also have to admit that some students are going
| to do better than others, and the outcomes may not be all
| equal and at the same time.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Very true but allowing and encouraging students to skip
| grades isn't.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > I wish we had a way of challenging every smart kid with
| proper material.
|
| We do. It's called acceleration. It's not used because no one
| cares. The school system is not set up for learning. If it
| was students who were proficient at grade level could learn
| the material of the next grade up or two levels up.
|
| https://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Nation_Deceived/ND_v1..
| ..
| lazide wrote:
| The difficulty of course, and the reason that doesn't happen
| often, is it requires deep knowledge of a subject by the
| teacher and a keen and interested mind.
|
| Hard material with someone who doesn't understand it or isn't
| interested in it just burns students out, or doesn't go
| anywhere.
|
| There aren't a lot of people capable and interested in doing
| it for every subject, and even fewer interested in doing it
| for the amounts typically paid in school.
|
| It is unfortunate.
| FredPret wrote:
| Luckily with the internet we can have great teachers
| achieve scale for the first time ever. This isn't a solved
| problem yet but at least a tantalizing possibility.
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, I doubt it. It usually requires interaction and
| understanding of the student. But for the few that can
| self direct, it is a boon!
| FredPret wrote:
| There is lots of overlap between self-directed learners
| and ones that are held back by age-group education
| munificent wrote:
| I'm familiar with this testing strategy. It has one major
| upside: It allows an exam to test the material in great depth
| without being enormously long.
|
| But it also has one major downside: Students may not learn all
| of the material equally well. If the random point in the
| material space that the exam focuses on happens to be a point
| that the student didn't learn as well, the exam result will
| appear as if the student learned _all_ of the material poorly.
|
| In other words, the exam has higher random variance.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| This happened to me in my computer graphics class. The first
| exam had a multi-part problem where the first part involved
| quaternions. I was familiar with quaternions from my time as
| a physics major, but did not remember the professor
| introducing them. I reviewed my notes afterwards and found
| that he did in fact mention them in passing in a lecture two
| weeks previous to the exam, but did not call particular
| attention to them nor did he assign any homework involving
| them.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Reminds me of the "Arabian Nights Entertainments" tale of the
| slave that was a hard worker and honest - but for one day a year
| when he would lie. "Not bad," thought the slaveholder and bought
| him on the spot. Hilarity ensues.
| MontagFTB wrote:
| UCLA used to have a tour for incoming students during summer
| orientation. At the beginning of the tour, the guide would inform
| the students that they were about to hear some pretty wild
| stories about the campus, but that only one of the claims was a
| lie. Over the hour-long tour, some pretty wild claims were
| floated (this building had to be rotated to reduce sunset glare
| hitting the 405, or that fountain was sabotaged during its design
| to look like a toilet, or that sculpture is entirely made of ear
| wax.) At the end of the tour the lie was finally revealed: that
| they were all lies, and the original claim itself was false.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Oh man, I still remember that from my tour 21 years ago. That
| whole orientation was such a magical moment in my life.
| MontagFTB wrote:
| I was a fourth year in 2001- glad to hear they were giving
| the same tour then!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| My problem with _find the lie_ , like the NPR game show "Wait,
| Wait, Don't Tell Me", is that the lies are often more
| interesting than the truth and can be the thing that sticks
| with you.
|
| That does _not_ sound like it would promote good teaching.
| _moof wrote:
| As tempting as this method sounds I'd be reluctant to employ
| it for the simple fact that the things you learn first (in
| this case the lies) are more likely to stick than the
| corrections. That's not the only factor in learning,
| obviously, and boy can I appreciate frustration around
| motivating people to engage with material more actively.
| Still, the principle of primacy gives me pause.
|
| I wonder how much of the effect is due merely to increased
| attention from the novelty. What I mean is, could a similar
| effect be achieved by some other method that grabs attention
| in some other way without introducing incorrect material?
| elliottkember wrote:
| Well, adding interesting things to your lesson would make the
| whole lecture more interesting, no matter whether they are
| lies. The other information gets in, because you're listening
| intently for the next outlandish thing.
| throw7 wrote:
| Hmmm... on the first lecture we're not told if there was
| identified a "Lie of the Day". I presume there wasn't (which is
| cool), but if there was then that's kinda shitty.
| spanktheuser wrote:
| I used this technique to teach my children about politics,
| business and governance. Essentially any domain characterized by
| imperfect information, imperiled by cognitive bias, or containing
| incentive for deceit. The larger lesson I hoped to convey was a
| healthy skepticism of purported statements of truth, including
| mine. But much as in the article, the greatest value lay in the
| boost to engagement and interaction with the material. My kids
| loved finding the lie almost as much as I loved planning them.
| scrapheap wrote:
| One of our lecturers used to ask the audience a question, but
| rather than ask if anybody knew the answer there was a paper
| airplane that he would throw into the class. The rule was whoever
| it landed closest to got asked a question. When he wanted to ask
| another question that person got to throw the paper airplane to
| see who would have to answer that one.
|
| It hadn't landed near me until the last lecture and the lecturer
| said "Is this the first time that it's landed near you?". I
| replied with "Yes", to which he responded with "Damn, that was I
| question I asked! Throw the plane"
| RegBarclay wrote:
| One of my kids' high school teachers does something similar - not
| limited to a single falsehood per class period and bonus points
| given on the spot for students piping up and correcting. High
| schoolers aren't always very forthcoming with details about their
| classroom experiences, so this one teacher does stand out simply
| because they get talked about positively at home, so I'd say
| mission accomplished on student engagement.
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