evand comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 06:16PM

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Comment author: evand 02 October 2012 03:18:47PM 3 points [-]

If the teacher does not have a precise codification of what makes a writer "post-utopian", then how should he teach it to students?

I would say the best way is a mix of demonstrating examples ("Alice is not a post-utopian; Carol is a post-utopian"), and offering generalizations that are correlated with whether the author is a post-utopian ("colonial alienation"). This is a fairly slow method of instruction, at least in some cases where the things being studied are complicated, but it can be effective. While the student's belief may not yet be as well-formed as the professor's, I would hesitate to call it meaningless. (More specifically, I would agree denotatively but object connotatively to such a classification.) I would definitely not call the belief useless, since it forms the basis for a later belief that will be meaningful. If a route to meaningful, useful belief B goes through "meaningless" belief A, then I would say that A is useful, and that calling A meaningless produces all the wrong sorts of connotations.

Comment author: loup-vaillant 02 October 2012 03:56:48PM *  1 point [-]

The example assumed bad teaching based on rote learning. Your idea might actually work.

(Edit: oops, you're probably aware of that. Sorry for the noise)