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Notes -
A Case For/Against Education, Intuition.
My submission to @FiveHourMarathon's Essay Competition.
Education - Catchall term to refer to mass primary+secondary schooling, not specifically the act of educating oneself through any means.
Intuition - Defined as follows in the paragraphs below.
The case against education is well trodded territory among The Motte users. Bryan Caplans and Freddie deBoers work can be considered to be a part of the 'Rationalist Canon'. Of course, the majority of the rationalists who speak of educations ills are not blind ideologues. They do concede that there are a certain set of benefits to education. However, a benefit that I (think that I) benefit from strongly yet hardly ever see talked about, is intuition building.
I am not talking about intuition in the sense of "learning how to learn", or transferring patterns of thoughts/ideas from one domain to another, those ideas rest on shaky foundations, to say the least. I am referring to a very narrowly defined type of 'intuition', intuition of material/mechanical systems of The World. More specifically, I am referring to the ideal outcome of well-integrated baseline knowledge of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. This subset of general intuition in my estimation is a proxy for one's "bullshit detector", if something runs afoul of 5th grade science, there is (probably) something fishy afoot (treat it as a loose heuristic and spare us the string theory).
One can make the case that a large number of people, especially educated people lack that body of intuitions. However, I think the reason I do have those intuitions is largely because I generalized the latent ideas of certain topics taught in middle/high school. But one can absolutely argue that the mass failure to impart these intuitions means the education system is not doing its explicit job well enough.
It's difficult to highlight successes of said type of intuition, but it is very easy to highlight failures of a lack of said intuition.
Case Study 1: Outdoor Mask Mandates/Adherence
(I would extend it to mask adherence at all, but I'll steelman myself here)
Outdoor Mask Mandates (OMM) are idiotic. The evidence they "work" is nonexistent. Despite its (I assume) obvious idiocy; They were adopted in practically all of South America, East Asia, and some countries in Europe. OMMs being a spectacular form of Security theatre can explain their being used as policy more than well enough. The shocking revelation for me was that a large number of people, including "well-educated" people actually could not parse out that fact and act as such. Everyone has seen some confused bastard wearing a mask alone while walking in the park, and sometimes even performatively distancing themselves as they walk past people.
Where does my formulation of intuition tie into this? If you recall reading your textbook in middle school physics class, there were probably pictures of the process of diffusion. Usually demonstrated by adding a drop of food coloring to a beaker full of water, and showing how the water picks up the color. It doesn't take much creativity to infer that, that same drop of food coloring added to the ocean would practically 0 effect on the ocean. Is the logic not the same with someone wearing a mask outdoors (especially if they are alone, for the steelman)?
The fact that fluids diffuse/disperse is fundamental to my baseline understanding of the physical world. In that what I intuit about physical reality without exercising any thought. I wonder what went wrong for anyone to mask outdoors ever at all and not see the futility of it.
Do those people know something I don't? Did they not internalize what is essentially 6th-grade physics? Whatsoever the reason, their model of physical reality is much unlike mine.
Case Study 2: Reflexive HBD Skepticism
Once again, we are back at middle school biology. Most middle schoolers learn that certain traits are determined by genetics (and that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell). Examples are usually explored via differently colored flowers, eyes, corn, cauliflower, and dog breeds (Not only their color but their behavior as well). Being middle schoolers by all means they still don't have a clue how about genetics works, and neither do I. But the seed intuition is valuable nonetheless, that genetic determinism exists at all to begin with, and that its a powerful force.
Of course I would have to fight a weakman to claim that HBD skeptics or the "race is a social construction" people literally don't believe in genetic determinism. But It seems to me that if you studied middle school biology at all, genetic determinism should be your prior, your null hypothesis (literal meaning not hypothesis testing meaning).
By all means, it seems like a modeling failure to me if your model assigns negligible weight to the overwhelming force that turned wolves into dogs and selected all sub-par vitamin d synthesizing skin havers out of Scandinavia (also taught in middle-high school).
Case Study 3: Newton's Third Law, The First Law of Thermodynamics.
In the most simplest terms, the essence of the aforementioned laws are "something can't be created out of nothing". Although both these laws apply to specific instances in physics, the essense generalizes to justt about every domain. Economics has its analog, There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The failure to internalize and crystalize this group of ideas is responsible for just about all of left-wing economic theory.
A loose extension of these body of ideas is the acknowledgment of the idea of complex systems. A lot of the seed intuition is imparted in physics and biology class (food chain, ecosystems, etc). I'm sure there was plenty of support for fucking about with complex systems in the last two years. I'm aware that to tamper or not with complex systems just boils down to liberalism vs conservatism, but I am highlighting the lack of intuition towards the system's existence at all to begin with, not the insistence to act otherwise with proper knowledge.
What you seem to be talking about is the overemphasis of structured analytical thought over common sense thought. This seems to be very similar to what Nassim Taleb says about the Intellectual Yet Idiots.
The best example is Taleb's hypothetical interaction between Dr. John and Fat Tony:
Taleb: “I am going to flip this fair coin 100 times, and after the 99th toss, I want each of you to tell me the probability of the 100th being heads. You should know that each toss is independent and the that the coin is fair.”
Taleb flips the coin 99 times and each of the 99 tosses results in a heads.
Taleb: “Now before, I toss the coin for the 100th time, I want each of you to tell me the probability of heads on this next toss.”
Dr. John using principles of probability arrives to the wrong answer, and Fat Tony using common sense arrives to the correct answer.
Your example of mask mandates is a good example of how Dr. John types tend to favor institutional wisdom over common sense, I did argue with many of these types what evidences was there of masks actually working, and no one ever gave me a definitive study. A lot provided this "study" An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19, but when I read it, it says the current studies don't show conclusive evidence, and this paper does is develop a model that shows how effective masks would be if certain percentage of the population uses them given that they do work.
The model actually shows that if mask do not work, 100% of the population using them do not matter.
Now, I'm in the opposite camp, my common sense tells me masks should work, not in protecting me, but in protecting others. I have seen no study proving that though. I used masks not because I knew the worked, but because I didn't know that they didn't. Small price to pay just in case they did work I guess.
I do not think the role intuition has been properly assessed though. In my entry My intuition about intuition, I try to build a case as to why I think it's much more important than people realize. However, I suspect Dr. John types are going to be biased against intuition and in favor of analytical thinking, because obviously if they are good at it, it has to be more important.
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I don't think it's obvious outdoor mask mandates don't work for any disease and mask type. It is obvious that, given the experience we have now, or even after a bit of experimentation in 2020, that [covid, cloth masks] or even [covid, n95s] outdoors aren't useful, but the way diseases spread can take many forms, and such a strong claim isn't really justified by intuition from 5th grade science. Maybe some other disease has such small particles / high virality that not wearing n95s outdoors does lead to it spreading more.
Claiming that not understanding physical "something can't be created out of nothing" laws is directly connected to left-wing economics is too strained. Many prominent physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers who certainly understood that were left-wing radicals in their day.
Also, such intuition (is this really different from knowledge) using physics/math/biology/chemistry/statistics/<...> may come easier to 130+ iq people, and that school doesn't impart this in the general populace, many of whom don't understand algebra, doesn't necessarily say that much about school.
That school teaches many people math/physics/biology is important, and to much more than teaching general intuition - it, together with university education in specific technical fields, creates most of our our mechanical engineers, research mathematicians, semiconductor fab techs, etc. A select few would self-study their way to it anyway, but most wouldn't. That's a flaw in 'just don't do education, it's bad' cases, although it doesn't make the current form of education any better.
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I get what you're trying to say but I think your choice second example significantly undermines your point.
An educated person will tell you that individual agency doesn't matter. Because this is a claim that is fashionable amongst the educated.
Meanwhile An intuitive person will find the claim that Barack Obama's Daughters are somehow "less privileged" than or otherwise "oppressed" relative to poor white trailer trash absurd regardless of how well argued, and maybe they'll notice that the loudest advocates of biological determinism (and the incontrovertible truth of identity politics) almost never seem to be "prime specimens" and draw the cynical conclusion.
You're making a mistake of trying to use an intellectual arguments (an academic understanding of genetics and "material/mechanical systems of The World") against a position that is not founded in intellectualism.
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Worse than outdoor diffusion was spraying surfaces. Everybody knew, or should have known, that COVID was spreading aerially. Remember the much-publicized cruise ships where they all got sick despite staying in their rooms and washing their hands? It was coming in the ventilation system. I'd imagine that it would be trivial for a microbiologist to use a microscope and see 'oh this is a very small particle so it's spreading by air as opposed to surface contact'. Or they could do experiments to quickly find out. Even from a symptoms perspective - it wrecks your lungs so clearly it has a method of getting in there. What more obvious way to get into someone's lungs than being breathed in?
And yet everyone was spraying surfaces like a maniac, until 'the science changed' about a year in, if not longer. A close friend (who has an obsessive trust in the media) was spraying her own shoes with disinfectant after going shopping. I was made to spray the surface of my table after eating communal meals by my institution. How much toxic chemicals were we spreading around, how many man-hours were wasted globally? People were doing the same things in elevators, spraying down surfaces three times a day.
Few were thinking about ventilation, I can't recall anyone doing anything about that outside Japan, where they had machines measuring CO2 concentration as a proxy for ventilation. I conclude that most people just obey instructions without thinking about them. I also conclude that the medical communications apparatus is completely useless and should face serious consequences.
In the Seven Years War, 1756, the British Admiral Byng was sent out to relieve Minorca which was being besieged by the French. His ships were in poor condition, local forces were inadequate, the whole operation was ill-concieved and he then lost the battle with the French. Minorca fell. Byng was relieved of his command and executed for 'failing to do his utmost'. It was a bad start to the war, Britain was losing on several other fronts and there were food riots. So they decided to find a scapegoat.
Many have criticized the decision as unjust and politically motivated. But since then, British naval commanders were much more aggressive. In Voltaire's words:
I'm not calling for a massive Stalinist-style purge. But if our ancestors could kill Byng, a man who really did nothing wrong other than failing to provide a superhuman performance whilst set up to fail by his superiors... We can kill officials who completely drop the ball and totally fail to provide rational advice, wasting enormous amounts of time with nonsense like spraying surfaces as opposed to useful recommendations. We can kill the reckless and highly suspicious Ecohealth people, who look like they have megadeaths on their hands from negligent gain-of-function coronavirus/furin-cleavage-site insertion. Even if they weren't responsible, it would certainly encourage other researchers not to tempt fate and court death, a valuable boon.
People must have skin in the game, especially in matters of vast importance. There should be prizes for success, punishments for failure. The British retook Minorca in the peace treaty of 1763 - we will never get back all those who died.
If you want to talk about the incentives this creates, consider how many people will try to avoid jobs where they have any real responsibility, lest they be executed because someone somewhere suspects that they didn't do everything perfectly. A plane crashes and it cannot be determined conclusively whose fault it was? There go the thousands of engineers who worked on it, every technician who inspected or serviced it, and the entire management of the airline.
I think it's reasonable to assume that they were doing their best and their mistakes can be attributed to the need for a fast response in a complicated and novel situation. In other words, no one could have (realistically) done better.
Outside of internet conspiracy theories, is there any indication they actually did anything wrong?
I specifically stated I wasn't calling for Stalinist style mass purge. The whole point of 'responsibility' as a concept is that it incentivizes people to do a good job. That's why it exists, it balances the wealth and status that these people get.
If you sell someone an aircraft that thinks it's a Stuka and sometimes automatically nose-dives and hundreds of people die, you deserve severe punishment. $20 billion in fines is not enough, it's not like executives are paying from their own pockets. They need a stronger incentive to balance the enormous wealth they receive from the company, an incentive that has them actively pursue a culture of precision and care.
At any rate, this disastrous error would only cause a few thousand deaths over thirty years, it's a nothingburger compared to COVID. A prison sentence for the one who oversaw the 737 MAX project would be appropriate.
There's a tonne of evidence. These people (Daszak and Ecohealth) were asking for money to put furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses, they were importing them from Laos, they were training them on humanized mice. Lo and behold we get a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site whose closest known biological predecessor is from a bat in Laos, well adapted to human biology.
And then Daszak has the temerity to go rally together some scientists to publish a Lancet paper accusing everyone of publishing dangerous conspiracy theories unless they accept that some unknown sick bat from Laos got to Wuhan, infected a pangolin and then a human - where none of these animals have been found. By far the most parsimonious explanation is that of gain-of-function research and a lab leak. But of course the medical establishment is going to drag this out as long as possible lest they be smeared with the blame for the disaster they negligently caused. Donald Trump would never find Donald Trump to be criminally negligent and responsible for the greatest disaster of the century thus far - why would we expect anyone else to admit responsibility even if it's clearly their fault? They can find specious technical arguments against a lab-leak and hide behind their status as experts. Daszak delenda est.
I could have done better. From the Diamond Princess and Ruby Princess onwards I was confident that it was spread primarily by air, cleaning surfaces was a waste of time. I wouldn't have gone for the 'oh masks don't work' angle either and then backflip - it's obvious that masks work. That's why doctors wear them! They took months and years to fix these stupid, inexplicable errors, it's not a snap decision like those of the battlefield. They created doubt in their own wisdom and effectiveness - then they complained that people weren't trusting them sufficiently. Why would you trust anyone who gets away scott-free for lying to you, wasting immense amounts of time and creating the crisis in the first place?
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Which, to be fair, was a completely valid assumption... and then they started supporting the protestors/rioters intentionally violating their rules because they support a political cause they favor while simultaneously prosecuting everyone else for the same kinds of gatherings.
The deadliest job in history is "politician" for a very, very good reason; not only do they get summarily executed from time to time (be it partisan action or not), but hilariously there are even some countries that actively encourage their citizens to retain the capacity to do this. The only crime they need commit is "fail to be seen to have done the utmost", and that definition is not only pretty vague, but can be retroactively defined to mean just about anything that any person or group with the resources to impose it wants it to.
And honestly, that's probably OK; not only do they know the price of hilariously gross failure, but the rewards (though they need not be completely monetary nor immediate) are generally enough that it's worth taking the risk.
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All this would achieve is dramatically reducing the number and quality of applicants to civil service positions.
There needs to be a balance between reward and punishment. If you get things done quickly and effectively, there should be a bonus. If you save the state millions of dollars, there should a significant prize. But if you make a huge disaster like the Afghanistan war, you should be punished severely. Not a single general or politician has been so much as imprisoned, let alone executed. Why should we expect them to do any better in the future without skin in the game?
Quality is already abysmally low. We have people squandering vast amounts of money on all manner of things, pursuing terrible policies incompetently. We need a shake-up.
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This jogged my memory of seeing roughly 20% of all solo drivers in cars masked up, throughout 2020 and into 2021. I can’t even.
Sometimes it was just easier to do than put it back on three minutes later at your next stop.
I can’t relate. The inside of my mask is a hot wet cave that I can’t wait to rip off. It’s like 15% of the anxiety of being underwater and needing to breathe, while simultaneously noting the progress of 17,000 individual sweat beads forming. I just run hot I guess. I never ever forget that I’m wearing a mask.
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Outdoor transmission and whether it's significant isn't something that anyone knows from first principles. It's true that you can probably guesstimate that it's significantly less than indoors, because of diffusion, mixing patterns, etc. But you can't simply wave around diffusion to claim that outdoor air is always good; after all, there are chemical weapons that are highly effective outdoors. You need a model of how many viral particles are produced and the actual mechanism of infection to know that it's not significant. (You could make a solid zero shot prediction by knowing that the most communicable diseases we know of like measles are not transmitted outdoors, but that's not physics and isn't taught in school.)
To your actual point, asking for mass scientific intuitions is going to be a failure; most people aren't cut out for it and never will be. What's useful is heuristics. Mass education should impart a small set of heuristics (inherently limited and coarse) that maximizes social well being. And given the world and actual people in it, the most reasonable fallback heuristic when others don't exist is "the elites are always right, ignore when they're wrong." In exchange, elites have the responsibility to build an internal culture that produces more correct directives than it does wrong.
Fair enough, but with a little bit of updating from what was mainstream news, one could have easily updated his model that covid isn't as potent as chemical weapons, given that very early on we knew that prolonged indoor mass gatherings of people with covid positive people only had a fraction of the people actually catching the virus, rest assured if you dropped a chemical weapon everyone in the building and possibly the neighborhood would be dead/hospitalized. So initially covid is somewhere between as deadly as nothing and {chemical weapon}, Then onwards it would have taken a month or two of updating from just watching the news and observing anecdata to arrive at a reasonable assessment of how deadly covid really is.
No dispute that it's possible for some people to have come to the conclusion that outdoor masking is silly, from multiple lines of evidence.
My point would be that expecting any mass schooling system to create the ability to do this in most of its students is an unrealistic expectation. Broadly diffused critical thinking, scientific intuitions, learning how to learn, etc. can't be the basis for how society makes decisions, because people are really, really bad at those things. Best case scenario is that elite channels have the ability to drive mass behavior, and that the behaviors they drive are in fact good ones.
What's the role for schooling, then? Teaching basic academic skills (reading, arithmetic) necessary for success in life and giving rules of thumb that when followed will lead to good lives, while identifying exceptional students and tracking them to places where they can be most useful.
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But wouldn't the virus particles diffuse in a room as well? The difference is they are restricted, but within 6 feet it does not make a difference according to the pro-mask argument, only at the boundaries of the container/room, which are father away, does it matter. I think the steelman of OMM is when there are people in close vicinity. Being being alone or large distances, I agree it's pointless, stupid.
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Sounds good, doesn't work. No matter what they know of first principles of a domain, people do not generalize it to real world automatically, and their experience in school cannot teach them when to generalize scientific principles. Some learn it on their own. Most learn... something else.
The official premise of basic school education is murky in itself. It's such a vast enterprise with such questionable returns that its advocates can't help but peddle it as a panacea, I guess. There's the plausible-enough aspect of teaching people object-level trivia (although they forget virtually all of it); the dubious claim of teaching advantageous habits of mind (e.g. the shift from concrete operational to formal operational thinking that Flynn believed explains some of the eponymous effect), the related basically-misleading promise of raising intelligence and thus improving outcomes (beyond the contribution of credentials themselves, and isolation from antisocial environments for the most unfortunate kids... who are lucky enough to get into schools for higher strata). All of that list is pretty worthless in my book, in comparison to the human cost of a decade of imprisonment (I'm essentially with EB/JB on this one). Then there are less popular but more convincing arguments, «school as a day care» mainly.
But the key error undermining the premise, I think, comes all the way from the conceit of actual teachers, who are overwhelmingly not bright enough for high-fidelity metacognition and theories of mind. You don't upload data into a child. You do not even «train» a child. You prompt experiences, and children learn from those experiences. Their intuitions are grounded in the context of their interactions with the curriculum, teachers and each other. And I posit that intuitions they form are the opposite of what you'd like them to get.
Among my abandoned Substack drafts is one dedicated to Stonetoss meme about HBD/dog breeds (dogwhistle, as it were), or rather to its edit (Taken from Twitter. Apparent origin on reddit). Some excerpts:
For whatever reason, you are confident in your ability to apply principles of natural science to the real world. I'd venture a guess that you're used to being smarter than your peers and the teacher too. A regular person, meanwhile, learns that reality has a surprising amount of detail, that figuring out nontrivial questions is way over one's head, and pattern-matching the problem to password-generators is the way to go. What is the teacher's password to «are masks useful outdoors»? You claim diffusion is enough to say no. But a normal person remembers the punishment for overconfidence, the sense of getting stuff wrong. And if you really think about what you've learned in school, there's wind direction, laminar and turbulent flows, uncertainty about survival rates of viral particles, and sufficient loads, and relative movement of people, and probabilities of them coughing in your general direction, and... conclusion: the correct password is «trust the Science», where the Science will be defined by the consensus of Experts. I'm saying it like it's bad, and the Stonetoss example is IMO sufficient to show how it might be harmful... but it's honestly a reasonable intuition for a normie.
The sort of intuition that doesn't get forgotten after school.
Can you share your Substack? Wasn't aware you had one.
There's nothing there, it's preemptively abandoned. Was supposed to be here.
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Basically everyone has experience with dispersion in air from people breathing out via seeing visible breath in cold weather or seeing/smelling smoke from someone smoking. The former is generally visible about 1-2 feet away at most while the latter is quite noticeable several feet away. I'm not sure if it's obvious whether viral transmission is analogous to the first, the second, or neither. My layman's understanding is that smoke goes a lot further than viruses because the relevant particles are a lot smaller/lighter, but that's not obvious and I've seen tweets explicitly using the intuition of smelling smoke far away as a justification for outdoor distancing/masking.
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Yes, they understand the value of social signaling. Probably not explicitly, but in a much more valuable fashion - their intuition that they should Be A Good Person is so strong that modeling the likely physical efficacy of their behavior doesn't even register as the kind of thing that a Good Person would do. Sure, it's obviously true that wearing a mask as you walk twenty feet from the door to the bar isn't going to keep anyone safe from anything, but refusing to do so signals that you're the kind of outsider that won't just do the right thing.
And perhaps this is the problem about reading up on the green grocer and understanding how that seeds totalitarians. I in good conscience will refuse to do what a Good Person would do because a Good Person will often do terrible things if only because it is expected of them.
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This is I think correct. Being in good standing with your community is extremely valuable and the way you do this day to day is following the norms and expected behaviors. Whether the norms or expected behaviors actually do anything else is besides the point. Indeed the more restrictive they are, the more valuable thay are as a signal.
You can call it performative, but the whole point is that there is indeed an audience.
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Are you suggesting HBD skepticism would be less prevalent if people understood basic sciences more? I don't think that's the case. HBD skepticism has more to do with social factors than people honestly considering the evidence and coming to the wrong conclusions. The same thing is true for outdoor mask mandates, the reasoning driven by politics and fear (and to be fair, your water-coloring analogy doesn't apply to droplets, only airborne transmission, presumably an outdoor mask would prevent sneezing on others)
This plays into Caplan's argument, in which he admits his economic students go on to support minimum wage hikes, rent control, etc. Presumably these students have intuitive understanding of supply and demand.
All that said, I do agree with your premise. My case against Caplan is as follows: Education is where we go to train the models in our heads. We may forget the inputs, but the models remain. I may not remember all the dates and numbers from the world wars, but learning about those events has improved my models of reality and social structures. That sounds like intuition to me.
Is it inaccurate to suggest that people are more likely to default to "trusting the experts" on topics which they have only minor understanding of? That is, if somebody learns basic science and only partially understands it, trusting the authority of their teachers and memorizing passwords, then when an "Expert" comes along and contradicts that with "updated science" they will discard their previous vague knowledge and latch onto the new password. It's just trading one expert (the school teacher) for a new one with higher status. But if someone has a strong understanding of the science and the underlying concepts, and is confident in the accuracy of their knowledge because it's tied into a holistic framework, then they will be less likely to update in the face of new evidence, as a change in the password has to contend with how it changes the whole framework.
People tend to be much more stubborn about ideas that they know a lot about, and trust other people in things they don't know much about. And this is rational, because your previous knowledge of ideas you don't know much about are more likely to be wrong. So if people had a stronger understanding of science, they would be less likely to blindly believe what other people say without evidence strong enough to overcome their prior understanding. And while there are plenty of counterexamples, I expect it would still have a large effect on the margins.
I think that does make sense, at least in a vacuum, but going to college will probably also make you more likely to "trust the experts" on a number of topics, including OP's examples of rejecting HBD and supporting outdoor masks
But going to college =/= more educated
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sorry I wasn't focusing much while reading, are you comparing color dilution in water with a virus pathogen dilution in air?
Intrinsically, that seems mostly fallacious, a drop of color in water will easily get diluted and indeed the idea you want to express is that spatial dispersion is a non-linear (exponential?) phenomenon on the density of the agent (color).
While that is right, a drop of color in water with enough dilution will become invisible and sparse but viral load IMO does not need to reach high level to contaminate someone. It is invisible from the start but even when it has dispersed and reached low density, contrary to your coloring agent, it can still be potent and contaminate, of course the viral load needed is virus dependent and immunosuppressed dependent.
The main salient co-argument towards the viability of not wearing a mask when alone is because the virus does not survive after 24/48h? and therefore it does not persists nor accumulate. Also possibly gravity make it trapped/stays on the ground?
The other obvious salient argument is that chronic mask use is potentially very toxic, a multiplier of ageing and of teratogeny.
What I want to show is that the dose potency of a coloring agent being visible and a pathogen/toxin being non-negligible can be order of magnitudes apparts and therefore the reasoning is semi-contingent and a faillible heuristic. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#:~:text=oral%2C%20injection%2C%20inhalation-,1%C2%A0ng/kg%20(estimated),-0.000000001
also there can be free lunches, let's not fall for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking or e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Otherwise I tend to agree with the majority of things you say, that was decently written.
I think it would be a cubic function, as each doubling of distance equals eight times the volume.
Thank you
How did you arrive to that conclusion (assuming homogenous 3D spread)?
Assume that the fluid disperses equally in all directions at an equal rate. This is essentially the volume of a sphere. To model spread model the radius as a function of time. You get;
R = f(t)
V = ( 4/3 ) * ( pi ) * ( R )^3
To be pedantic, I am not sure if f(t) is linear, so it could be something other than cubic as well.
Thx, I haven't done physics in a while :)
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V = (4/3) * pi * r^3
Nice
Please don't post one-word responses.
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I will concede that intuiting airborne pathogens spread similarly to food coloring in water is a somewhat shoddy heuristic, regardless of whether it applies in the specific case of sars-cov-2 or not. I alluding towards the layman who often lacked any physical model of the world at all when questioned as to why he is masking outdoors.
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Okay, but how do you account for the fact that all of your highlighted examples likely don't lack the baseline knowledge you're promoting? I've never heard of economic lefties denying any laws of physics (well at least not since the Science Wars era), I'm pretty sure most mask mandate supporters have used food coloring before, and, though they sometimes seem like they may selectively be so (though in my experience they more commonly retreat to "Well actually genetics is complicated in a way you're too uneducated to understand, so complicated that the conclusion obviously supported by the data actually isn't true because [mountain of misdirection]"-style arguments), most HBD skeptics are not genuinely genetics denialists overall and probably understand their middle school Punnett squares about as much as anybody else.
If you truly think that A (a basic understanding of thermodynamics, genetics, etc.) should inevitably lead to B (a rejection of left-wing economics, mask mandates, etc.) here (which I think is still a debatable premise) then it seems to me that the issue can quite obviously not be one of knowledge (as there is plenty of evidence showing that quite a few people know A quite well but do not conclude B) but rather its application, that is, critical thinking. And I do not necessarily believe this to be fully teachable because I think abilities of comparative and analogical reasoning may be neurologically/genetically/IQ limited by the space of one's working memory along with the natural interconnectivity of one's brain.
That is, is the problem that people don't know the concepts, or is it that for some people, concepts in their mind are like chains of islands, whereas for others they form dense, interlinked cities?
I believe in some extent to critical periods for learning to think, and debiasing, but can we please stop the ineptia/hypocrisy and admit we live in a degenerate world that is at the level 0 of teaching critical thinking/epistemology, it's not that it's hard to do it is that we are not doing it at all, ever.
This is a kind of consensus-building rhetoric (along the lines of "everyone knows")--it is not allowed here.
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""Critical thinking""e is, itself, modern concept. There weren't any critical thinking teachers in medieval towns or primitive cultures. Meanwhile, modern schools explicitly attempt to "teach critical thinking".
There doesn't need to be a concept for something for that thing to exist. There's also no reason to assume modern schools explicitly attempting to teach critical thinking actually improves it, rather than impairs it.
I take issue with the idea of critical thinking (it has no low-level differences from other kinds of thinking), but you're right that needs to be argued for, which GP didn't do.
As for schools 'improving' thinking - thinking isn't a monolith, "improving thinking" doesn't mean much, but schools clearly teach a lot of useful things to some people. e.g. high school science or math for researchers and engineers. Or people like academic historians usually claim that high school was useful in teaching them the basics of reading, writing, and thinking about sources that they build on in their careers, which seems related to what is called "critical thinking".
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