Michael_Sullivan 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: Michael_Sullivan 13 July 2007 02:18:38PM 5 points [-]

All textbooks should contain a few deliberately placed errors that students should be capable of detecting. This way if a student is confused he might suspect it is because his textbook is wrong.

Starting that in the current culture would be...interesting, to say the least.

I still recall vividly a day that I found an error in my sixth grade math textbook and pointed it out in class. The teacher, who clearly understood that day's lesson less well than I did, concocted some kind of just so story to explain the issue which had clear logical inconsistencies, which I also pointed out, along with a plausible just so story of my own of how the error could have happened innocently.

I ended up being mocked by both teacher and students as someone who "thinks he knows everything". Because of course, we all know that the textbook author not only *does* know everything, but is incapable of making typographical errors.

Oddly, at the time I was remarking on the error to stand up for a classmate who was expressing confusion. She couldn't understand why her (correct) answer to a question was wrong.