Nornagest comments on Rebutting radical scientific skepticism - Less Wrong

17 Post author: asr 30 April 2014 07:40PM

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Comment author: Nornagest 09 May 2014 06:40:34PM 6 points [-]

What I remember of middle-school science had less to do with reproducing basic results and more to do with memorizing lists of organelles and looking at rotifers under a microscope.

Comment author: asr 10 May 2014 04:06:32AM *  1 point [-]

Yes. Perhaps we might say, this is what middle school or high school science should be.

Likewise direct demonstrations are the sort of thing I wish science museums focused on more clearly. Often they have 75% of it, but the story of "this experiment shows X" gets lost in the "whoa, cool". I'm in favor of neat stuff, but I wish they explained better what insight the viewer should have.

Comment author: CAE_Jones 09 May 2014 09:38:52PM 0 points [-]

Same, here. To get a course that taught replication and experimental design and analysis, I had to go to a residential high school specifically for Math and Science. It was a required first-semester course that spent a lot of time on how to enter data into a calculator and generate graphs/t tests/etc, and I had this nasty habit of spacing out and still completing the assignments. Suffice it to say, I was not prepared for college Physics.

I only ever had one teacher in public school who put emphasis on the science part, but that was primarily in the evaluation I got at the end of the course; meanwhile, I'd been reading Hypephysics and had been commenting excitedly about the particle zoo in the time before the bell, to no good reaction from anyone. Needless to say, rather than getting the point, I applied for the afore-mentioned Math and Science school.

Middle school science was all memorizing lists and labeling diagrams. Hell, College Biology 101 was all memorizing definitions and labeling diagrams and occasionally poking dead animals (in order to label more diagrams).