Epistemology and elementary education

[Cap]

(The latest cap essay for… I don’t know why I’m doing this.)

A lot of tragedies have been caused by what I call the faithful approach to epistemology. I’ll illustrate this with an example from COVID that I saw more than once.

Somebody thinks COVID is a hoax. He attends superspreader “COVID is a hoax” events in which people engage in conspicuously high-risk behavior to show off the strength of their conviction that COVID is a hoax. He nearly dies, and while recuperating in the ICU is interviewed by someone from the media. The interviewer asks what life lesson he has learned and what message he wants to send the readers. The answer: “COVID is real. I thought it was a hoax, but it’s real.”

The answer shows that he really hasn’t learned his lesson at all. He’s saying, “COVID is either a hoax or real, it’s a question with two possible answers, I picked the wrong one, and everything followed from that. The life lesson is that I picked the wrong one of two possible answers on that particular question.”

No. The thought he needs to abandon isn’t “COVID looks like a hoax to me”; the thought he needs to abandon is “Uncertainty is for pussies, pick a side and fight.” A Bayesian thinker might suspect COVID is a hoax and still avoid superspreader events just in case, but a faithful thinker might see such doubt as weakness.

I wonder, is this thinking in part the fault of our school system? “I’m not sure, but I think probably…” isn’t an answer that gets kids good grades on tests. This kid approached the COVID question the way one might approach a question on a test in school: on the test, there are two possible answers and only one of those two answers can get you credit for answering. If you don’t know, you take a guess and go with it.

Do we need our schools to do a better job of teaching kids about recognizing and dealing with uncertainty? How could we do this?

[Kryptonic]

I don't know how to touch this subject without getting too political.... This is way to close to my chest and with multiple friends/family members in education I've seen first hand the dumbing down of America.

My buddy who teaches science at his school has kids that are flat earthers... If there's ever a good example of what you're talking about, there you go. A lot of it comes down to social media and the echo chambers people get "their" info from.

[Kryptonic]

Also... It's hard for schools to do better when funding from education is constantly being stripped.

[Cap]

I don't know how to touch this subject without getting too political....

That is understandably difficult. I’m trying not to discuss this in terms of left vs right, but there’s obviously a strong correlation. If the politics folder I probably would have posted it there, but it isn’t, so we’ll have to walk the tightrope of discussing epistemology and education without wading into issues of political controversy. I figured “Is COVID real?” is no longer a question of much political controversy and would therefore be a reasonably safe example. “Is the Earth round?” should also be safe.

[Mori Chu]

I can only speak for my kids' school where they attend 1st grade and kindergarten, so I don't know much about what is taught beyond that. But I think my kids are in a good school and that they are being taught critical thinking skills as well as fundamentals like math and reading / writing.

I think the problem is mostly with media and how we receive and consume information nowadays. Most people have a garbage information diet, reading a bunch of BS and crap served up to them on social media feeds on sites like Twitter/X, Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok, and so on. They see people talking about things like, "Is the Earth flat?" or, "Is xyz health scare really a hoax?" and they start to believe it. The algorithms combine with human behavior to become self-reinforcing. Many of us, even folks who consider themselves discerning and enlightened, fall into this. It's a very hard problem.

I don't know what the solution is. I think that broadly speaking, we are fucked. I heard on a podcast that actually this is somewhat common in human history, that big leaps in technology that enable the rapid sharing of information (such as the printing press), while extremely beneficial for mankind in the long run, often cause anger, fear, and violence in the short run. People burned churches when printed books started making it easier to learn about the "heresy" found in other churches' books and values. Of course that changed over time; it took some years to transition. It may be the case that we "figure this out" with social media within a generation or two. I hope so. For the moment it seems to have enabled the worst in us and harmed us as a society and species.

[Cap]

I can only speak for my kids' school where they attend 1st grade and kindergarten, so I don't know much about what is taught beyond that. But I think my kids are in a good school and that they are being taught critical thinking skills as well as fundamentals like math and reading / writing.

Critical thinking is one thing. Gauging one’s confidence in one’s own beliefs is another.