bigjeff5 comments on Two More Things to Unlearn from School - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 July 2007 05:45PM

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Comment author: bigjeff5 03 January 2012 01:45:04AM 7 points [-]

Yeesh, that's terrible. It kind of figures that he'd rather mislead a class full of students about the way physics works than own up to his mistake.

It reminds me of an error I had been taught about the way airfoils work that wasn't corrected until I read a flippin comic strip on the subject almost a decade after I graduated high school.

I was stunned, and spent the rest of the afternoon learning how airfoils really work. What makes this particular example so tragic is it leverages another principle of physics that you won't realize doesn't fit if you are taught to accept everything the teacher says as gospel. What's worse is I'm pretty sure the mistake is still there in the vast majority of textbooks.