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DilGreen comments on Fake Explanations - Less Wrong
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I agree with AC...you're being too hard on the students. I doubt very much they were stating anything with confidence. It's quite possible that some of them didn't really care about understanding physics and were just trying to get the right answer to please the teacher, but others were probably just thinking out loud. Thinking "maybe it's heat conduction" might just be the first step to thinking "no, it can't be heat conduction," or even to realizing "I don't really understand heat conduction," and there is nothing wrong with this train of thought. They were probably "biased" towards the idea that there was some physical principle causing the effect, but that was entirely rational because the professor set them up to believe that.
Great story, though.
I think that EY's problem with this point of view is a typical one that I find here at LW: a consideration of the rational thinker as loner in heroic mode, who is expected to ignore all contexts (social, environmental, whatever) that are not explicitly stated as part of the problem presentation. On the other hand, these students were in a physics class, and the question is obviously not part of normal conversation.