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Education Science

The Case For Teaching Ignorance 237

Posted by Soulskill from the pi-is-exactly-3 dept.
HughPickens.com writes: In the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled "Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance." Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown. "Textbooks spend 8 to 10 pages on pancreatic cancer," said Witte, "without ever telling the student that we just don't know very much about it." Now Jamie Holmes writes in the NY Times that many scientific facts simply aren't solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations. According to Homes, presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist named Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. "This crucial element in science was being left out for the students," says Firestein."The undone part of science that gets us into the lab early and keeps us there late, the thing that "turns your crank," the very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown, all this is missing from our classrooms. In short, we are failing to teach the ignorance, the most critical part of the whole operation." The time has come to "view ignorance as 'regular' rather than deviant," argue sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey. Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.
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The Case For Teaching Ignorance More

The Case For Teaching Ignorance

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  • Ignorance? (Score:5, Funny)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @02:28PM (#50389703) Journal
    Finally a subject I can get a PhD in!
    Finally a topic where I don't need to read the summary!
    I've been prepared my whole life for this!

    • Re:Ignorance? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RenderSeven ( 938535 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @02:50PM (#50389839)
      And unlike most PhD degrees, this one has numerous career paths!

    • Re:Ignorance? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by VernonNemitz ( 581327 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @02:52PM (#50389857) Journal
      There are two major types of ignorance, which we can call "passive" and "active".
      Passive ignorance is the same as simply not-knowing something. Like, we are ignorant of whether or not there are any living organisms on Mars.
      Active ignorance is the deliberate ignoring of facts. See the Flat Earth Society for an example of active ignorance, although there are plenty other offenders, like Creationists who claim the Earth is only a few thousand years old (so explain this [wikipedia.org]), abortion opponents who claim the Earth isn't overpopulated (so explain this [howmany.org]), etc.

      • wow, that page is so full of ignorance! I bet they've never even heard of Norman Borlaug or understand the IFR cycle. But since they don't follow the "you first" principle, I think "willful" is fair to assume.

    • Re:Ignorance? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheMeuge ( 645043 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:22PM (#50390073)

      Actually I also disagree with the title... not because it's wrong but because it will be coopted by the truly ignorant to "prove" that everything they disagree with has no scientific basis. This is the academic equivalent of clickbait, with the unfortunate consequence of being distributed outside the academic community.

      I do think that the author has a point in that we are taught "best available" theory as fact. That's not wrong, however, it's only missing the concept that our school system has been ignoring for decades - actually teaching the basis of the scientific method, logic, critical thinking... not to mention applied statistics. All of these are necessary in the modern world to do the one important civic duty that most people exercise in a state of utter ignorance - voting.

      I have pursued a rather rigorous scientific training career (MD, PhD) and getting the PhD training really altered my way of thinking about the world, and learning how to ask questions that are appropriate, can be answered, and how to design ways to answer them. I can understand where they author is coming from. I just think that to truly understand what he is saying one needs much more training than lay people get, and this headline just gets me into more trouble when I talk to patients and they refuse to believe me cause they read in the paper that everything science does is bollocks.

      • Umm, a theory is a proven set of hypothesis. A hypothesis is an educated guess. So I think you mean hypothesis not theory because last time I checked, gravity was a fact.

        I begin to question your scientific training when you don't understand the difference.

        • There is no proven theory, there's merely ones that have not been disproved. A hypothesis may be substantiated by evidence, and when our observations are repeatedly verified and the theory is shown to have significant predictive power we start teaching it as fact. That doesn't mean that tomorrow we won't find a better explanation for our observation. I stand by my wording. It may be redundant, but I think it gets the point across better. Just trying not to be an arrogant academic ...

      • The exhibits in the radio observatory visitor center routinely talk about what remains unknown.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      Finally a subject I can get a PhD in! Finally a topic where I don't need to read the summary!

      I have books from some of my Master's classes that are still in the packaging Amazon sent them in....

      I graduated over 3 years ago

    • Reading the summary, it looks like this is mostly aimed at the biological sciences. In my experience, they could use something like this, as it's quite common for biology textbooks to continuously be 'updated' with recent and unconfirmed discoveries and to state them as facts. I don't 100% blame them though, as biology has been moving so rapidly in the past few decades that even our most basic assumptions (like the 'genetic code') have turned out to be either entirely wrong or at least grossly disjoint with

  • Agree with content, not the name (Score:5, Interesting)

    by s.petry ( 762400 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @02:31PM (#50389719)

    Too many people will simply be turned off by the name. I fully agree that we are ignorant, but most people refuse to admit their own. We don't teach people to check facts or even show them how. We teach them to "Google" which returns the popular answer and that may not be correct (and probably is not).

    I could spend hours discussing "Classical" versus Industrial education. I could spend days explaining why teaching a rounded education is necessary and teaching only specialties runs counter to education. Liberal Arts (PHI) is essential, but most kids get a couple semesters of history instead.. and we wonder why people can't think critically, defend their own position, and perceive that disagreements with their opinions are personal attacks.

    Yeah, I got a college age kid so I see what's been happening.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Dear Jesus. I hope your teaching kids critical thinking before college. If not we'll, that's a damn shame and a failure. My 6 year old can explain why something is right or wrong or if we don't have enough information to make an informed decision. That's just because we taught him that it's ok to ask why and we'd explain everything to him even if it took forever.

      • Re:Agree with content, not the name (Score:5, Insightful)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:07PM (#50389953) Journal

        My 6 year old can explain why something is right or wrong

        That's not the same as critical thinking.

        That's just because we taught him that it's ok to ask why and we'd explain everything to him even if it took forever.

        Asking "why" and getting an answer isn't how you learn critical thinking.

        Critical thinking is more like, "We have fact A, B, C, and D. Do these make sense together? Where did these facts come from? Should I trust them? How can I improve my confidence level in these facts?"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          Well I think we can all agree that blindly accepting what other people tell you as fact shows absolutely zero critical thinking. Questioning it, being able to understand explanations and making logical arguments on their own is a good step. Sure, the next step is being able to detect questionable premises, faulty logic, spurious reasoning and other fallacies [wikipedia.org] but that's a pretty tall order for a six year old. Basically, if you don't know how to do it right you're not going to spot anyone doing it wrong, so I

      • Dear Jesus, I hope you don't teach your kid that the only thing they ever need to know is right and wrong. If you do, that's a damn shame and failure. I had taught my kid what an appeal to emotion was before he was 6, but that does not mean he ran into every instance where someone would use that appeal to sway his opinion. He knew what an appeal to authority was not long after that, but even those simple fallacies are not all that's required for critical thinking.

        Amazingly, there is very little "true/fal

    • Re:Agree with content, not the name (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pr0fessor ( 1940368 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:07PM (#50389957)

      Too many people will simply be turned off by the name.

      I agree, the words "ignorance" and "ignorant" are used far to often in a negative context. I can see how someone might think it insulting.

      When dealing with people you sometime have to choose your words carefully. "You may not have studied this..." is far less likely to cause an argument than "You may be ignorant of this..."

      • Re:Agree with content, not the name (Score:4, Insightful)

        by lgw ( 121541 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:47PM (#50390265) Journal

        I agree, the words "ignorance" and "ignorant" are used far to often in a negative context. I can see how someone might think it insulting.

        Colleges have become obsessed with how students feel about words. That's the first thing to fix. Life doesn't care how you feel, and you can't be an adult without accepting that.

        In this specific case "ignorance" is the point. There's so much that humanity just doesn't know, and there always will be. The best thing my high school physics teacher taught me was "the bigger the island of knowledge, the bigger the shore of ignorance".

        Every question you answer provokes more questions you can't answer, and that's what science is all about. Heck, sometimes new discoveries reveal quite surprising degrees of ignorance in humanity. "Wow, look at that, 80% of the matter in the universe is something we know nothing at all about. 80%! The best we can say is it's some sort of particle, probably. We can't even call the stuff we're made of 'normal matter', as we're the outlier."

        Research only exists because of ignorance. That fact does need to be taught - we have too much unquestioning acceptance of science-as-religion these days (there's just no way to reconcile unquestioning acceptance of authority with critical thinking, regardless of the selected authority).

        • Yup (Score:2)

          by s.petry ( 762400 )

          I like your choice of wording there, because obsession is a good description. Simply saying "I disagree with that" is now a micro-aggression with racist and/or misogynistic intent.

          That said, I don't believe that "science-as-religion" is new. We seem to run through cycles of this in history. Balance always shifts back and forth.

        • "the bigger the island of knowledge, the bigger the shore of ignorance".

          It's the opposite (sorta). The more you expand the shore of knowledge, the bigger the island of ignorance. The more we know and discover, the more we realize what we don't know and have yet to discover.

          And then there's the ocean of information around the island that in the famous (paraphrased) words of Donald Rumsfeld, you don't know you don't know.

    • I could spend hours discussing "Classical" versus Industrial education.

      I totally agree, and have been pointing out the distinction to anybody who'll listen for 20 or 30 years. However, what you call "classical education", I simply call "education", while what you call "industrial education", I call "job training".

      ...we wonder why people can't think critically, defend their own position, and perceive that disagreements with their opinions are personal attacks.

      Unfettered critical thinking among average citizens is not what corporate overlords want. People who can think critically and effectively, might put aside the bread and circuses and start asking embarrassing questions about concentration of wealth, war as an economic

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        All your pretense does is serve to make you more difficult to communicate with. It's less useful and less descriptive. The only thing it really have going for it is "snark" and that's not really productive unless you just want to troll.

        • Pretense? Sorry, I don't understand.

          Otherwise, I suppose the post is a bit snarky, but I wasn't trolling, (I don't do that, at least not consciously), and what I said is an accurate expression of what I believe to be true. But if what I've said, (or the way I've said it), makes me more difficult to communicate with, then I apologize, and thank you for the heads-up.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by s.petry ( 762400 )

        I have no idea why you would want to call "classical education" something other than the name it has held for centuries. I also have no idea why you would call the Industrial system something other than it's name for nearly a century (it was the Prussian system prior). I perceive it as pompous, and believe it only muddies the waters for a rational discussion.

        The last part I agree with, and will simply say this is a historical normal. Knowledge is power, and just like other forms of power certain people a

  • Cosmology and Astrophysics Too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chris Reeve ( 2962081 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @02:37PM (#50389761)
    It's a very large problem. We teach the students to memorize problem set recipes (aka exemplars), and the paradigm over time extends the exemplars to new observations regardless of how good the fit is. People then go online to criticize competing ideas, oftentimes without any awareness of the details of the debate. It's very rare to observe people running claims back-and-forth between the theorists and their critics -- and that's even though many theorists who disagree with the textbook theories make themselves available by email for rebuttals.

    We should teach scientific controversies, and we should be teaching them very differently than the other domains which might not significantly change for another hundred years. Currently, academia simply pretends that many longstanding controversies simply do not exist, and these controversies can predictably act as an innovation bottleneck over time. If all we did was show students that there are competing arguments which oftentimes differ at the point of the initial hypothesis, students would become far better at asking good research questions. And this single change to the way that we teach science could secure our technological lead for another century.

    Thank you for posting this article. It's honestly very rare to see here on Slashdot, and yet also very important.

    • even though many theorists who disagree with the textbook theories make themselves available by email for rebuttals.

      That's a good point.

  • Awesome draw for budding scientists (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @02:39PM (#50389777)

    When I was in high school, I found anatomy and biology boring, because it seemed like memorizing a finalized taxonomy of living creatures' details. If I'd had an appreciation for both how insanely awesome living creatures' designs are and that there are lots of mysteries still to be solved, I'd have been far more likely to get into the field. Ditto for chemistry and physics.

    • Ditto for chemistry and physics.

      Compared to biology, there's less taxonomy in chemistry and far less in physics.

      • Re:Awesome draw for budding scientists (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:49PM (#50390277)

        Ditto for chemistry and physics.

        Compared to biology, there's less taxonomy in chemistry and far less in physics.

        I'd say that as a highschooler, taxonomy made biology seem like a completed field, and the supposed explanatory power of Newton's laws (at a medium scale) and relativity made physics seem approximately completed. In both cases, I was left with a distinct lack of sense of wonder, because it seemed like ongoing research was just spending huge amounts of effort tidying up arcane little corners of the knowledge base.

    • Basic sciences generally tend be taught wrong--it's too much learning by rote exercise, almost no exploratory learning. It turns out real science isn't that hard, and you could have kids doing real experiements pretty much from the time they start learning. The way they teach it makes it much less interesting and fun.

  • I think if you have to teach that we are ignorant, you are acknowledging that your students are simply not very curious or are regurgitating data to pass the exam, get good GPA, enter workforce to earn money. Which is, in fact, the reality the majority of the time, and that's just fine.

    I see no reason to teach people what we don't know, because to quote Rumsfeld about something entirely different: "...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns

  • I teach a course somewhat similar (Score:4, Insightful)

    by edremy ( 36408 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @02:41PM (#50389793) Journal
    More on how we know things rather than how little we know, but it touches on a lot of the same issues. We spend a lot of time on the trial of Galileo and how we know the Earth goes around the Sun. It's far harder to show than most people think. If you exclude "I've seen photos from space" I suspect less than 1 in 100 people can give the correct answer of stellar parallax. Galileo proudly announced in 1610 that we'd soon see the proof - he was still waiting for anyone to see it by the time of his second trial in 1633. It wouldn't be officially discovered for 200 more years- so why was Galileo so sure he was right?

    Science isn't blindingly obvious- if it was someone would have discovered it ages ago. It's piecing together tiny bits of evidence until something coherent starts to become visible, and even then most of the time someone else comes and kicks apart your jigsaw puzzle with new data

    • Of course, the reason why stellar parallax proof was so long in coming was because the stars were so much further away than anybody suspected, making the parallax incredibly tiny. What really convinced people was how simply it explained planetary motion (as opposed to the impossibly complex epicycles of the Ptolemaic system) combined with the discovery of Jupiter's moons, which, while not in itself a proof of the Copernican system, was proof that not everything revoled around the Earth.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by edremy ( 36408 )
        Except you then have a problem- why aren't we flung off the Earth? Spin around while holding a ball and let the ball go- it doesn't stay stuck to you.

        Aristotle has the answer here- we're stationary and earth moves towards its natural place at the center of the universe. Copernicus and Galileo have no such explanation, and indeed their result seems to be physically impossible.

        (And for everyone who thinks "duh, gravity", check the dates we're talking about)

    • Re:I teach a course somewhat similar (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:15PM (#50390035) Homepage

      We spend a lot of time on the trial of Galileo and how we know the Earth goes around the Sun. It's far harder to show than most people think.

      I sometimes cite a similar example of Ptolemy. People too often thing the Ptolemaic model is stupid, but really it's very good at predicting the phenomena that people at the time would experience. Ptolemy wasn't stupid. IIRC, he seems to notice that the epicycles line up so that the centers seem to coincide. He even cites the example of being on a boat, watching the shore recede away when really the ship is moving, the way that motion seems relative to the observer, and relates this to the possibility that the earth is moving. He just doesn't have a firm reason to think that the earth is moving.

      It's easy now, in hindsight, to see that Newton's model is much better. It especially makes sense once you've had the opportunity to get up onto the moon and some other planets, and you know for a fact that they're made of the same material that Earth is made of. But then, even Newton's model isn't quite right, and a lot of physics these days ultimately come down to, "We don't really understand why things work the way that they do, and some of our rules don't seem to apply the same way at all times and at all levels, but we know enough to do most of the things we're trying to do." On a deep level, we still don't understand how time and space work.

  • Good luck with that in the US (Score:3)

    by H3lldr0p ( 40304 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @02:48PM (#50389825) Homepage

    We don't teach how to fail in any segment of our schooling, which is somewhat necessary in addressing ignorance. Failure is taught to be avoided at all costs. Failure is mocked, ridiculed as a personal flaw instead of something that everyone experiences. We don't teach that failure is something that happens even when we've put our best effort into the work. That failure happens when you've done everything right and according to the rules. And in neither of those cases is failure something bad. It's just something that happens in life.

    • I've noticed this too, and recently started to wonder whether this attitude towards failure varies with cultural or other social factors. But then again, I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to those kinds of things.

  • What causes gravity? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Snufu ( 1049644 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:01PM (#50389903)

    That boggles the mind. Even something as fundamental to our daily experience as gravity, and we don't know what it is. We describe its effects, and we have a few theories about its cause, but when an apple falls out of a tree, we don't know why it falls to the ground.

    The fact of this ignorance should be taught in the first lesson.

    • Re:What causes gravity? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by strikethree ( 811449 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @09:39AM (#50394785) Journal

      Gravity is the result of space being curved in relation to time. Space and time are a result of energy being "tied in knots" to create matter. A black hole is literally the edge of the universe. There is no spacetime without matter. There is no matter without bound energy. Hence, the infinite point of energy for the big bang is the only descriptive term for a universe of pure energy since there is no matter to create space time.

      The big bang was a "cooling" of the energy, which solidified into matter. As matter was "created", spacetime was created and expanded as a result thereof. The rest is pretty clear at this point although the implications are not.

  • When I was in elementary and high school, I learned the incompleteness of science well enough; it was not omitted, at least not for those who were actually interested enough to PAY ATTENTION. No, it wasn't described explicitly in big neon flashing letters, but honestly should it be? As I said, someone paying attention would have extrapolated this message. Don't we want scientists who are actually interested enough in the subject to pay attention to the messages not presented in neon?

    • When I was in school in the early 1980's, the history textbooks stopped before Vietnam and Watergate. My fellow classmates were content that history stopped before they were born, and didn't care about what came afterward. I was always bothered by history being missing like that. College did a much better job on current history since the publishers needed to change something each year to charge higher prices for new editions and undermine the used textbook market.
  • The constant learning, the exploration of what is not known?

    .
    The constant updating of our knowledge as we learn new things?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tnk1 ( 899206 )

      Not necessarily. The scientific method by itself does none of those things by itself. To do those things, you have to apply that method to unanswered questions which you can suggest a hypothesis for.

      If you don't have a question to ask, you don't have a hypothesis to falsify. Science isn't equivalent to exploration.

  • Sure, and I'll decide who's ignorant thank you (Score:4, Interesting)

    by codeAlDente ( 1643257 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:13PM (#50390019)
    Teaching ignorance directly would require an honest assessment of things like religion, central banking, chiropractors, mathematical ability and pharmaceuticals. This would require strong tenure protection for an individual teacher, or it would likely devolve into trivialities and historical anecdotes that would lead students to assume that important questions are generally irrelevant or settled in modern times. One idea is that education exists to convey the certainty by which things are known, and to prepare students for critical thinking that will improve their estimates of factual certainty with time. Another idea is that education should firstly prepare students to be productive citizens. While these ideas are not always in conflict, knowledge and critical thinking will not be tolerated when money, ideology or power can be gained or preserved through ignorance.

  • Identifying the unknown inspires students (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ganv ( 881057 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:16PM (#50390043)
    When the instructor effectively places the material they are presenting in a larger framework including unknowns, it is often quite inspiring. Textbooks in mathematics and physics are the worst in this regard. They try to paint their presentation as the complete story on the subject and that leaves students bored. Even just a little bit of explaining the complex problems that are being sidestepped by the way the course material was chosen can greatly enliven a course. Even better, the students come out with an understanding of where the methods they learned will work and where they will not.

  • Teaching ignorance would be a tricky balancing act. Too far on one side and you're right back into the "here's the set science - nothing new to discover and no arguments exist" camp. Too far on the other side and you're in the "Evolution clearly isn't 'set science' because we don't know all of these things*" camp. The key is to teach kids "this is our best understanding given the evidence we have today but science is constantly learning more every day." This way you give kids a foundation in established

  • Frankly, this is something that I recognize as wisdom.

    As I've grown older, it's become more and more apparent to me that "experts" may be especially well TRAINED, but that doesn't mean they're particularly smart, or even good at what they do (per the observation that half of all the doctors you meet are below-average).

    I've found that basic common sense, reason, and a willingness to ask questions whenever something doesn't make sense - and to recognize a line of bullshit when it's being delivered - are far,

    • Half of all doctors may be below average, but 68% are still above the median when it comes to recognizing a line of bullshit ;)

  • I've summarized all known and unknown information accurately, and published it. You can buy any papers you need, and stop worrying about this topic now. Why not take the extra time I've made for you to adopt a new vegetative state? Finally, you've arrived! Congratulations, GRADUATES!!!

  • It's under So-crates (Score:4, Funny)

    by Etcetera ( 14711 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:53PM (#50390323) Homepage

    "The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing."

    "That's us, dude." The Two Great Ones [imdb.com]

  • It seems to me that many (in some fields possibly most) scientific papers have always pointed out that further work needs to be done. Calling it "ignorance" isn't profound nor does it help when applying for additional grant money.
    • However, “more work needs to be done” often seems more like a disclaimer than an actual admission of the current state of knowledge. For example, author writes paper about neural networks, author assumes synapses are simple linear devices, author emphasizes importance of work, author notes that more should be done to undertand how brains work. But the proposed work to be done is not an admission that the author’s model assumptions violate everything we know about synapses. The actual level
  • My doctor positively recommends a medication siting clinical tails and studies. I look at him and think "he really believes that will suit me" - strange for an intelligent person.. While I, working in electronics, know I can be sure that our measurements (when interpreted correctly) can lead to truly accurate conclusions.

  • It seems to me like the path to knowledge goes as follows:

    1. Beginner - you know you have a lot to learn and don't know anything about the subject
    2. Amateur - you think you know everything you need to know
    3. Expert - you know what you know, but realize there a many things you don't know

    If someone says the know everything about something, then, in general, they don't. Amateurs tend to over estimate their ability and experts tend to under estimate their ability. Knowing that there are things you don't know (a

  • Can we stop with the fucking buzz-words. What you are trying to do is teach C-U-R-I-O-S-I-T-Y not ignorance. You want to inspire people to ask questions. That's not teaching ignorance. It's the fucking opposite of ignorance!

    We're fucked when university professors don't understand that simple fact. Perhaps they should acquaint themselves with one Richard Feynman.

  • Ignorance is perceived as "deviant" rather than normal?
    That is the most absurd concept I've come across in a long time, but it explains a *LOT*.

    Look, knowing what you don't know is pretty fscking precious.
    I love my ignorance. It's how I learn something! I'm at my boss's house fixing his network because I missed something when setting it up.
    Before I left to go here he told me 'Well, you'll learn something when you're done'.
    And I did and it works now!

    Now you tell me that the "norm" (and the Cliff, too appar

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Ignorance is perceived as "deviant" rather than normal?

      That is because "ignorance" in the colloquial definition is entirely wilful ignorance despite the technical definition including simply being unaware.

      When we refer to someone as being ignorant, it means they deliberately ignored information and knowledge rather than not possessing it in the first place.

  • ``Open Problems in Medicine'' (Score:3, Insightful)

    by IHTFISP ( 859375 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @05:16PM (#50390789)

    In mathematics & computer science, we tend to more charitably call these ``open problems''.

    For example, German mathematician David Hilbert made a quite inspiring list [wikipedia.org] of 23 of them in 1900, many of which are now famously only partially resolved (e.g., Hilbert's 2nd is only partially resolved due to Gödel's second incompleteness theorem [wikipedia.org]) while others have only recently been resolved to great fanfare (e.g., Hilbert's 10th involves Gödel's first incompleteness theorem [wikipedia.org] and relates to Fermat's Last Theorem [wikipedia.org]), and a few others stubbornly defy proof or disproof still to this day (e.g., The Riemann Hypothesis [wikipedia.org] is Hilbert's 8th).

    Beyond Hilbert, the open problem to determine whether P = NP [wikipedia.org] still intrigues, inspires and stymies many computer scientists to this day.

    But perhaps a more fitting term for the field of medicine, though, might be ``remaining mysteries in medicine'' or some such, since they may view unresolved questions in treatment, diagnosis, and underlying mechanisms more as mysteries than as problems per se?

  • I heard a podcast of a lecture given by a professor of epistemology and it was truly fascinating. My take away was really how little we know and how many things we THINK we know are built on foundations of things we don't actually know.

    Even simple statements like "the book is on the table" which would seem to be clear-cut statements of fact depend heavily on our understanding of what is a table, a book and what it means to be on something, and how we are able to state that we know what those things mean.

  • Introduction to a subject you want to present the basic known facts. When you revisit the topic in a future course then you can rework the pedogogy to explain the history of the ideas, the personalites, and the unknownns. maybe only a grad student would have time to revisit a topic.

  • I have a Ph.D. in New Testament studies, and from time to time I teach basic Biblical Greek to seminary students. Every time, I rattle off the following spiel:

    "Why study Biblical Greek? It's a lot of work, and if you spend your entire life studying you might, just maybe be as proficient as a dock-side worker in Athens around 100AD. Some of you may think "it's a requirement", but that just leaves us wondering why it's required. Some of you are enthusiasts, and have heard pastors say "but the Greek really say

    • I think it's really important to study original texts. A lot gets lost in translation, as anyone with any experience doing so knows. Even between different dialects.

      I've studied, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Ancient Greek and Latin in High School and have since gone on to a Master in Physics and Computer Science. I find that especially outside of the language studies, people often have a poor understanding of how hard proper translations are.

  • I've always wondered how many University disciplines seem to be very much teaching rote, not science. It seems to be most prevalent in the areas with a lot of prestige and a very clear career path. Medicine, Law, MBA, that kind of thing.

    If we want Universities to be mainly about creating scientists, several of these have little to no reason to be academic studies.

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