Comment on Community roles: teachers and auxiliaries

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:59:49 GMT

I wouldn't think you better off if instead of believing this, you believed wrongly that it is never appropriate to deviate from standard models.

No, I believe that it is not appropriate to deviate from a model you are trying to learn, before you have mastered it. This also means that it's inappropriate to critique a training program on the basis that it advocates not deviating from a model; it is, after all, material for people trying to learn that model.

[various confused things]

In order to explain why I think the rest of what you said is wrong and/or tangential, I'd have to take a lot of time to expand out each of your terms and assumptions, and I really don't want to take the time right now. So, all I'm going to say at this point is that your map of "belief" does not match the territory of the brain's hardware. Rather, it's a naive intuition of an idealized non-physical mind, not unlike the intuition that makes humans inclined to believe in things like souls.

IOW, the term "belief" is extremely overloaded. I deliberately have been referring to "models" rather than beliefs, specifically to narrow down the overloading. At minimum, we can divide beliefs into anticipative (Kahneman/Tversky System 1 aka "near") beliefs and verbal/symbolic (K/T System 2 aka "far") beliefs. Anticipative beliefs control your actual real-world anticipations, behaviors, and emotional responses, while verbal/symbolic beliefs drive your verbal reasoning, professions of belief, and long-term expectations.

This split explains why one can "not believe in ghosts", but still be scared in a haunted house, or "believe" that one is just as deserving as anyone else, yet have trouble speaking up in a group.

However, the system 1/system 2 distinction is only the tip of the iceberg with respect to how beliefs and models work in the brain - there are meaningful subdistinctions within both system 1 and system 2, and there are differences in how permeable the systems are -- the rate, you might say, at which a belief can "diffuse" through the brain and influence other things.

None of this, AFAICT, is incorporated into your naive model of epistemological contagion.

That being said, I don't advocate teaching things that would be contagious.

For example, I wouldn't support NVC's teaching that violence is just learned and not inherent to human beings; that's plain stupid. However, the apparent intended function of that belief is to communicate that the expression of violent impulses is modulated by choice and learning, and so I'd need to replace that belief with some other idea that conveys that same point... perhaps in a story or metaphor that conveys the idea implicitly, so as to help push it into students' System 1models (where it really needs to be, anyway, if you want people to behave differently, vs. being able to regurgitate things on tests).

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