Followup to:  Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You, Expecting Short Inferential Distances

A few years ago, an eminent scientist once told me how he'd written an explanation of his field aimed at a much lower technical level than usual.  He had thought it would be useful to academics outside the field, or even reporters.  This ended up being one of his most popular papers within his field, cited more often than anything else he'd written.

The lesson was not that his fellow scientists were stupid, but that we tend to enormously underestimate the effort required to properly explain things.

He told me this, because I'd just told him about my experience publishing "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning".  This is still one of my most popular, most blogged, and most appreciated works today.  I regularly get fan mail from formerly confused undergraduates taking statistics classes, and journalists, and professors from outside fields.  In short, I successfully hit the audience the eminent scientist had thought he was aiming for.

I'd thought I was aiming for elementary school.

One of the great weaknesses of Science is this mistaken idea that if an experiment contradicts the dominant theory, we should throw out the theory instead of the experiment.

Experiments can go awry.  They can contain design flaws. They can be deliberately corrupted.  They can be unconsciously corrupted.  They can be selectively reported.  Most of all, 1 time in 20 they can be "statistically significant" by sheer coincidence, and there are a lot of experiments out there.

Unfortunately, Science has this notion that you can never go against an honestly obtained experimental result.  So, when someone obtains an experimental result that contradicts the standard model, researchers are faced with a dilemma for resolving their cognitive dissonance: they either have to immediately throw away the standard model, or else attack the experiment - accuse the researchers of dishonesty, or flawed design, or conflict of interest...

Someone once presented me with a new study on the effects of intercessory prayer (that is, people praying for patients who are not told about the prayer), which showed 50% of the prayed-for patients achieving success at in-vitro fertilization, versus 25% of the control group.  I liked this claim.  It had a nice large effect size.  Claims of blatant impossible effects are much more pleasant to deal with than claims of small impossible effects that are "statistically significant".

So I cheerfully said:  "I defy the data."

In Three Things to Unlearn from School, Ben Casnocha cites Bill Bullard's list of three bad habits of thought: Attaching importance to personal opinions, solving given problems, and earning the approval of others. Bullard's proposed alternatives don't look very good to me, but Bullard has surely identified some important problems.

I can think of other school-inculcated bad habits of thought, too many to list, but I'll name two of my least favorite.

I suspect the most dangerous habit of thought taught in schools is that even if you don't really understand something, you should parrot it back anyway. One of the most fundamental life skills is realizing when you are confused, and school actively destroys this ability - teaches students that they "understand" when they can successfully answer questions on an exam, which is very very very far from absorbing the knowledge and making it a part of you. Students learn the habit that eating consists of putting food into mouth; the exams can't test for chewing or swallowing, and so they starve.