This very much reminds me of Michael Polanyi's notion of the ubiquity of "tacit knowledge." See his book "Personal Knowledge."
For some reason, I'm reminded of the passage from the opening of Augustine's Confessions -- in the true spirit of autobiography, he describes how he learned words and ideas as an infant by being shown extensional definitions:
13. Did I not, then, as I grew out of infancy, come next to boyhood, or rather did it not come to me and succeed my infancy? My infancy did not go away (for where would it go?). It was simply no longer present; and I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but now a chattering boy. I remember this, and I have since observed how...
FYI, if you look at Asch's 1955 Scientific American article, the lines on the cards were a little closer in length than in the example shown above.
Not to get too sidetracked, because your overall point about education is well-taken, but this:
A recent study here in the Bay Area showed that 80% of teachers in K-5 reported spending less than one hour per week on science, and 16% said they spend no time on science. Why? I'm given to understand the proximate cause is the No Child Left Behind Act and similar legislation. Virtually all classroom time is now spent on preparing for tests mandated at the state or federal level. I seem to recall (though I can't find the source) that just taking mandatory te...
The post reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from a Hitchcock movie (which I transcribed a while back, knowing it would be useful at some point in the future).
In Hitchcock’s 1938 movie The Lady Vanishes, the heroine Iris Henderson is traveling on a train in the same compartment as an old lady. When the old lady disappears (it later turns out to be connected with a spy ring), Iris scours the train in search of her. She meets a German doctor named Dr. Hartz, who accompanies her on her search for the old lady. But when everyone denies having seen the old ...
It's not just that the tails stop being correlated, it's that there can be a spurious negative correlation. In any of your scatterplots, you could slice off the top right corner (with a diagonal line running downwards to the right), and what was left above the line would look like a negative correlation. This is sometimes known as Berkson's paradox.
There's also a related problem in that population substructures can give you multiple negatively correlated associations stacked beside each other in a positively correlated way (think of it like several diagonal lines going downwards to the right, parallel to each other), giving an 'ecological fallacy' when you switch between levels of analysis.
(A real-world case of this is religiosity and health. Internationally, countries which are less religious tend to be healthier, but often within first world countries, religion confers a survival benefit.)