= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
mwengler comments on Dead Child Currency - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (56)
As a matter of pedagogy, I think you would be better off telling them how many children had to die so you could have your house, or your car, or your last vacation. What you are doing seems too much to me like singling someone out for embarassment which I would imagine would alienate many students rendering you relatively useless as a teacher.
No -- It's better to show how economics relates to their lives than mine.
No, because they know I could have done the same to anyone.
For better or worse, this is not psychologically reassuring to the student picked for the example. It's a cognitive bias, but that doesn't mean that singling out a student was low-risk. That said, you were there, and thus had a better sense of whether the benefit was worth the risk.
Interesting, does the bias have a specific name?
It probably does, but I tend to call it the "Why Me?" mode of thinking, people looking for an underlying reason for the bad things that happen to them by pure chance.
I'm not sure if the dynamic I was referencing has a specific description. But it is the case that in ordinary society, X can be true, everyone can know X is true, and someone declaring X is true will receive negative feedback. Cognitive-behavioral therapy might call it a part of the avoidance dynamic.
All I'm really trying to say is that college students who lack self-reflection can be giant pains for college professors. And someone upset by being singled out (per your example) has a reasonable justification for the emotional reaction, which the idiot the link discusses definitely does not.
the depressing reality is that the child in the emperor's new clothes would have been lynched.
The specific story described is perfectly plausible, because it involves political pressure rather than social, and (due to the technology level and the like) the emperor's guards can't kill everybody in the crowd, so once everyone starts laughing they're safe. However, as a metaphor for social pressure it certainly is overly optimistic by a long shot.
I would really like to know the name for that dynamic if it has one, because that's very useful.