This post is an example of the dangers both of fictional evidence and generational forgetting. Less than 100 years ago teachers did beat their pupils. Corporal punishment was an accepted part of educational practise. My parents are in their 80's and can remember this.

The script writers for The Wire are too young to have experienced this themselves, so they put a plausible line in their script: "They beat you if you get the count wrong." If they had been beaten themselves in their schools days they would know that it doesn't actually work. Worse they seem not to have realised that beating children to make them learn is only just dropping out of living memory. They could have asked around and realised just how ignorant the line is.

Being beaten into learning your sums is a perfectly plausible idea. Toddlers become competent at running about through a painful process of bumps and bruises administered by their environment. Perhaps an artificial environment with tawse administered by the dominie would work as well for sums?

Ofcourse it is no longer plausible once it has been tried and proved surprisingly useless. I'm disturbed to witness a dead educational idea coming back to life through a combination of fiction and forgetting.

(The point about toddlers may also be false. There is a rare genetic condition that results in pain receptors not working. The popular accounts I've read give the impression that sufferers run and play like normal children, with the exception that freed from the constraints of pain, they are more daring than normal children and do things such as breaking their legs by jumping off walls that are too high. So painful bumps and bruises may not be part of motor learning skills even when their presence is inevitable.)

The lecturer in our Numerical cognition course told us of a result that went along the following lines. A schoolteacher was trying to teach his students to do basic arithmetic, and seeing them get the calculations wrong time after time. Then one day he decided to follow them out into town, where he saw that some of his students handled arithmetic just fine when they were doing grocery shopping, or working part-time selling things. Inspired, he returned to class and reworded his assignments to be about shopping, and guess what happened? The students failed just as miserably as they had before. The cognitive context was just too dissimiliar to the environment where they'd picked up the practice.

I got the impression that this wasn't just an isolated anecdote, but had also been replicated in more controlled studies. The reference he gave is to Jean Lave's Cognition in Practice - I have a copy of the book from the university library, but haven't had the time to read further yet. I'll see if I can skim it through this evening to find the part he was talking about.

Indeed, our Earth's Westphalian concept of sovereign states is the main thing propping up Somalia and North Korea. There was a time when any state that failed that badly would be casually conquered by a more successful neighbor.

I have to disagree here. First of all, North Korea has the world's third largest army. Any state that tried to conquer it would have its hands full. Additionally, counterinsurgency warfare has become damn hard these days - consider the Soviet failure in Afghanistan during the 1980s. As Stalin observed, it takes a generation and a half to pacify a country and convert it to your ideology by force.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, conquering poorly defended land isn't profitable any more; some time around World War I, conquest became far more trouble than it's worth. Nobody wants Somalia, even if the rest of the world would be okay with someone marching an army into it. It's just not worth anything. The British Empire, a more modern example of conquest for profit, never occupied Afghanistan. It would have cost far more to subdue the natives than it would ever produce in revenue. Today, far more wealth is created by Internet startups than could be stolen by a modern-day Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.

To put the worthlessness of Somalia into perspective, here's some numbers:

• The GNP of Somalia is $2 billion.
• The market capitalization of Amazon.com is $32 billion. Its revenue in 2008 was $19.1 billion, and its net income was $0.64 billion.
• Bernie Madoff convinced people to invest at least $10 billion in a completely fraudulent stock fund, and reported $50 billion in bogus returns.

but according to what measure is it more complex than another part of the brain?

It directs, integrates, and regulates many of the other parts of the brain, and causes them to work together in particular ways or suppresses their output.

It is responsible for the complexity of what we regard as human behavior. The losses when this part of the brain is damaged are horrifying. Sufficient damage, and it is questionable whether the resulting creature can be considered 'human' in any meaningful abstract sense. (The biological sense is met, of course. But concepts like 'personhood' no longer seem to apply.)

"These points illustrate a very important basic principle: the mind is made out of ‘layers’ of modules and functions, starting with the most rudimentary, basic, and primitive, and moving to the most complex and subtle."

The evidence you gave doesn't point to this conclusion. Modules and functions are the dominate way of thinking about how the brain works currently, but what you've shown is only that the brain isn't a single process free of contradiction. More importantly, even in the view of modules and functions, the rudimentary/basic/primitive ladder to complex/subtle doesn't follow. Sure the front cortext is more recently evolved, but according to what measure is it more complex than another part of the brain? I could be wrong, but I think you're sort of anthropomorphizing parts of the brain (the reptilian part is primitive, the 'human' part is complex).

I must disagree with you on both points. The introduction to the piece takes up most of it, I acknowledge, and this is intended as an introduction to a later piece.

People complained that previous posts were too long, so I thought I'd try to keep this short and incremental.

I have also seen instances where nearly an entire field is making some elementary error, which people outside that field can see more clearly, but which they can't communicate to people in that field because they would have to spend years learning enough about the field to write a paper, probably with half a year's worth of experimental work, and not get rejected, even if their insight is something that could be communicated in a single sentence.

I think that you're saying that the outsiders can't be published without learning the jargon and doing experiments. But publication is not the only avenue. If it really only takes a single sentence, the outsider should be able to find an insider who will look past jargon and data and listen to the sentence. Then the insider can tell other insiders, or tack it onto a publication, or do the new experiments.

If jargon is not just a barrier to publication, but also to communication it's a lot harder to find a sympathetic insider, but it hardly seems impossible. Also, in that situation, how can outsiders be sure they understand?

These situations sound like there is a much bigger problem than the elementary error, perhaps that the people involved just don't care about seeking truth, only about having a routine.

I'm seriously thinking about asking my boss about that one. With a pro-rata decrease in salary, of course.

The extra money just doesn't seem to be worth the constant struggle with myself. Plus I think it would be good to start at a level I'm comfortable with and build on that. By forcing myself to work at a rate I'm clearly incapable of, I'm losing out on all the positive feedback that comes from small successes.

To draw a crude analogy, air pollution modelling is as hard a problem for me as say, AI is for EY. And if he needed to take every other day off once upon a time,...

EDIT: PS I have been reading OB/LW for a while but have started commenting here only recently. Hello everyone!

Fun fact - better strategy for memory: You play memory 1 vs. 1, and it's your move.

1. If you know a pair, take it (this much is obvious).
2. Chose an unknown tile at random.
3. If you know the match take it (also clear).
4. Take a tile known to both of you (if there is doubt, take one your oponent knows).

People don't do step 4 right usually.

Oh. Apparently I have been playing memory wrong all these years? I thought the peeks were private. Or maybe I am just misremembering.