BN: I quite agree: great diavlog. Carl never fails to deliver. The people he interviews are always fascinating and his preparation for the conversation is always commendable.

... I just read a news story that claimed that the seemingly mindless drilling in handwriting that students have to suffer through is actually essential for further learning -- so, who knows, maybe all those damn memorized dates are worthwhile too.

I have an intuition that drillwork and memorization is good, too. This is not to say this should be the sum and substance of schooling by any means; I think Gary was quite right to say that we should be trying to teach kids more about how to think, how to be aware of what their limitations are, and how to work around them. But having a set of facts and basic skills burned into easily accessible memory seems to help in a lot of ways. It's easier to think about more complex things if you don't have to stop to reinvent the wheel every time. So, for example, knowing dates helps you organize an understanding of history. I always drew timelines when I was taking history classes, as big

A perfect example of getting locked into one way of thinking. ;^)

Not really -- if you mean on my part. It's just that you can buy a book in a second without even leaving your house on the Kindle. I have by now been to the library and picked up _Birth of the Mind_. A lost sale for Gary, and a free read for me.
Of course, had it been available in Kindle edition, I would have made an impulse purchase that a perfectly rational, non-kluge-y mind wouldn't have made.

This was fascinating, and led me to consider how easily I assume that my thinking is clear and arrived conclusions would satisfy logical examination. Methinks I ought to reconsider.
My instinct was to try to adapt Gary's theory about why "intelligent design" falls short of complete, to bolster my own sense of sureness in evolution (descent with modification). I guess this would be an example of convincing myself reflexively without doing the thought experiment. Is it an adaptive mode to believe without doing the logic problem that so many real time situations demand? And doesn't the memorization or foundational logic that Brendan refers to allow short-cutting?
I hope Gary would agree that having Wiki replace rote memorization is not neccesarily ideal. But I like Bloggin's idea of applying these principles to education. I think you have made this point before in one of your philosophy threads? And by extension, to our forum threads. Especially regarding some of these emotional positions, vis a vis the candidate of choice (Clinton vs. Obama.)
Example: Presenting a logical case for why one would choose Obama. Only to be counter-argued and left unresolved. How can one make a wholly logical decision. Or

First of all Vista obviously wins hands down when it comes to evolutionary baggage and Kludges. Apple forces people to re-buy both hardware and software creating something of a clean slate every couple of years. I bet there is still some needed DOS code in Vista.

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Reasoning is clearly one of the things we do really poorly and it's clearly the main skill we need for being good citizens and for just getting through life. And we (as a culture, not individually) actually know a good deal about how to reason better. Why don't we focus on THAT throughout education?

I can give you billions of reasons why reasoning is something we don't teach well enough in school. Those are the profit margins of thousands of companies that rely on people not paying attention and reflexively buying based on something other than need or well researched want ( people do need their toys). The profit margins of many religious institutions would also be affected ( I am not against prayer but I don't think you should have to pay for it to "work" ). Honestly if the terrorists want to

thouartgob, Thank you for the fine example of a perfectly illogical rant. Could there be a simpler reason that schools are not teaching students the skills of logical analysis? Possibly, in post secondary education, could it be that too many professors are more interested in indoctrinating their student than challenging them to defend the views they do have? Or in the public school systems, could it be that mandated outcomes required by programs like No Child Left Behind make it easier to teach students how to memorize and regurgitate information to prove they are educated rather than to learn how to think analytically?

Quoting jh in sd: thouartgob, Thank you for the fine example of a perfectly illogical rant.

Your Welcome. I get very few "thank you"s for my rants and I appreciate the pat on the back ;-)

Quoting jh in sd: Could there be a simpler reason that schools are not teaching students the skills of logical analysis?

Sure but I would hazard a guess that most business's REALLY don't want consumers of any age to think critically and that facilitating children in disregarding the thousands of commercials that are designed to wiz past the frontal lobes to some reflexively "primitive" part of the brain would actually be a real problem for this country.

Quoting jh in sd: Possibly, in post secondary education, could it be that too many professors are more interested in indoctrinating their student than challenging them to defend the views they do have? Or in the public school systems, could it be that mandated outcomes required by programs like No Child Left Behind make it easier to teach students how to memorize and regurgitate information to prove they are educated rather than to learn how to think analytically?

I will agree with everything said here save

Quoting thouartgob;
Sure but I would hazard a guess that most business's REALLY don't want consumers of any age to think critically and that facilitating children in disregarding the thousands of commercials that are designed to wiz past the frontal lobes to some reflexively "primitive" part of the brain would actually be a real problem for this country.
[/QUOTE:
While your point is difficult to dispute, it is a much harder case to prove complicity on the part of "business." Which isn't to say that a concerted effort isn't plied with each and every advertising dollar.
But it smacks of a conspiracy minded spin which can approach reason without logic.
I think that it is more likely that business succeeds in spite of whatever critical thinking is applied. It's just that the natural inclination of mindless yielding to stronger forces (commercialism), let alone conscious disregard of better judgement (I really don't need that new BMW M3 - even though it is the first ever production V-8 in that series) wins.
I need it? I want it? I think I do... I just don't know what to think. But I know what I want, don't I?

That link about the garbage patch really made me reconsider my fantasy of sailing from CA to HI.

thouartgob, I don't think it would necessarily be expensive to teach students to think critically. One good start would be to require students to do more reading and then writing in critical analysis of what they read, and to do this across the curriculum.

Quoting graz: While your point is difficult to dispute, it is a much harder case to prove complicity on the part of "business." Which isn't to say that a concerted effort isn't plied with each and every advertising dollar.
But it smacks of a conspiracy minded spin which can approach reason without logic.

I would say it smacks of deliciously conspiracy minded spin actually :-)

Quoting graz: I think that it is more likely that business succeeds in spite of whatever critical thinking is applied. It's just that the natural inclination of mindless yielding to stronger forces (commercialism), let alone conscious disregard of better judgement (I really don't need that new BMW M3 - even though it is the first ever production V-8 in that series) wins.
I need it? I want it? I think I do... I just don't know what to think. But I know what I want, don't I?

That link about the garbage patch really made me reconsider my fantasy of sailing from CA to HI.

My rhetoric was sensational but in the service of brevity. As you point out you do not need to a clan of maniacal cabalists trying to control and influence the populace, you just need a mindset that

Quoting jh in sd: thouartgob, I don't think it would necessarily be expensive to teach students to think critically. One good start would be to require students to do more reading and then writing in critical analysis of what they read, and to do this across the curriculum.

I would think that machine readable standardized tests would end up being cheaper that hiring more teachers and or graders to parse the results of essay type questions. I am speaking in generalities here of course but it seems to me that reading,writing, analysis then re-writing takes time and time is money. I sense that it would also necessitate a more hands on approach and that is labor and that means money as well. I could very well be making some simplistic assumptions here but I ain't getting graded either :-)

thouart gob, Just because it costs more doesn't mean it will be too expensive. Evidently, you are not aware of how little many teacher earn.

Quoting jh in sd: thouart gob, Just because it costs more doesn't mean it will be too expensive. Evidently, you are not aware of how little many teacher earn.

Oh yeah I know a few and they don't make what they are worth. The question is not whether it is worth it from a cost/benefit analysis (it is), but rather what are people willing to pay. Everybody says they want better education but there isn't as much local interest in paying for it. A quick link that showed up in my RSS feed : http://www3.whdh.com/news/articles/local/MI3410/ The status quo wins.

thouartgob, I agree that most people are reluctant to invest in education by taxation. Another part of the problem for teacher salaries lies in supply and demand-many times there is a surplus.

If this has been posted in the forums somewhere else please forgive the repeat "In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them." http://www.wired.com/science/discove...lComments=true Now I am sure there will be other studies that place different "skew" times between when we make decisions and we realize that we make decisions but there does seem to be a difference. So if rote memorization is something that might be done 7 or so seconds before I am aware of it, can I just be kept out of the loop, I get bored :-) ( higher level thinking might not have the same lag time though )

thouartgob: I've seen the reports of this study, and reports on others like it that tend to show the same thing. I think these results are fascinating. I wonder much rote memorization, drillwork, and other things that enhance familiarity with the task at hand affect the lead time. It'd be interesting if it could be shown that there's a correlation between "rehearsal," so to speak, and how much in advance the brain lights up with the decision to carry out the task. My gut feeling is there ought to be something there.

First line of the piece you link to:

You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.

So, I'm not my brain -- just a little atom of consciousness hovering around the pineal gland? It's funny how much the "ghost in the machine" still infects science writing -- and even scientists themselves. (Libet took his experiment as disproof of free will, but this only makes sense on a number of assumptions, including the ghost in the machine or the "movie theater in the brain" image.) I'm glad at least that the author notes that the kind of "decision" we're talking about is not representative of the kind of decision we actually need consciousness to make -- essentially, you're telling some part of yourself to randomize and get back to you (at least if this experiment is like Libet's). That's not to say it isn't interesting, but the experiment only achieves grand philosophical conclusions by unconsciously assuming Cartesianism.