What happened to that thread entitled "open letter to the community from LongTheta?" In it, I offered the theory that what we consider "smart" is more like a repertoire of tricks and shortcuts, than anything about the structure of the brain. It turns out a guy named "Gardner" has done some hard research related to this.QuoteFar and away the most significant characteristic inculcated by undergraduate "education" is obedience. Repetition, memorization, and imitation is the whole game in the vast majority of classes in any school. Howard Gardner, MacArthur fellow cognitive science researcher, studied junior undergraduate physics majors at MIT, Hopkins, and other top schools and found that the majority of them, when taken outside the context of a formulaic textbook problem (1. identify relevant equation from obvious cues 2. translate word problem term for term into equation 3. crunch numbers) and forced to think on their feet in unfamiliar situations, failed to apply even Newton's basic three laws of motion and fell back on the same intuitive Aristotelian wrong physics that ten year olds use. Anyone who's been in a top level PhD program in a technical field knows the best one can generally hope for from incoming students is that they know essentially nothing--that they haven't been permantently harmed. (Now of course there are complicated, analytical procedures that have to be learned, which are a foundation for a graduate student, no doubt, and are difficult and perhaps beyond the reach of many people. But those procedures are essentially mechanical. Learning them doesn't make one a physicist--someone who thinks physics to work through an unfamiliar situation.)Gardner, The Unschooled Mind Basic Books 1993. p.3 a by now overwhelming body of educational research that has been assembled over the last decades. These investigations document that even students who have been well trained and who exhibit all the overt signs of success--faithful attendance at good schools, high grades and high test scores, accolades from their teachers--typically do not display an adequate understanding of the materials and concepts with which they have been working. Perhaps most stunning is the case of physics. Researchers at Johns Hopkins, M.I.T., and other well-regarded universities have documented that students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different fom that on which they have been formally instructed and tested. In a typical example, college students were asked to indicate the forces acting on a coin that has been tossed straight up in the air and has reached the midway point of its upward trajectory. ... 70 percent of college students who had completed a course in mechanics gave the same naive answer as untrained students: they cited two forces... p.4 Students with science training do not display a blind spot for coin tossing alone. When questioned about the phases of the moon, the reasons for the seasons, the trajectories of objects hurtling through space, or the motions of their own bodies, students fail to evince the understandings that science teaching is suppposed to produce. Indeed, in dozens of studies of this sort, young adults trained in science continue to exhibit the very same misconceptions and misunderstandings that one encounters in primary school children. p.152 Such students in fact get high scores on standardized tests of physics knowledge, and they are likely to earn honor grades when they are tested at the conclusion of a semseter or year of college physics. ...p.153 So described, the game sounds simple enough, and, indeed, both naive elementary school children and college physics students approach it with enthusiasm and confidence. Yet nearly everyone at both levels of expertise fails dismally. the reason, briefly, is that success at the game requires an understanding and application of Newton's laws of motion. To succeed, the player must be able to take into account the direction in which and the speed with which the Dynaturtle has already been moving. Whatever their formal training, however, players of this game reveal themselves to be dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelians. They assume that, so long as they aim the Dynaturtle directly at the target, they will succeed, and they are mystified when the KICK does not result in the desired collision. ... p.154 [of course it would be wrong to draw excessive conclusions from a computer game but] [this] behavior turns out to be quite typical of what is found when students with training in physics or engineering are posed problems ouside the strict confines of class--that is, outside what might be called the text-test context. Here are some further examples drawn from the large literature on the topic: [objects propelled thorugh curvilinear tube are presumed to take a curvilinear trajectory upon exiting.]: "an object that moves through a curved tube acquires a "force" or "momentum" that causes it to continue in curvilinear motion after it emerges...After a while, this force dissipates and the trajectory eventually becomes straight. p.154-5 [re more advanced students who have taken special and general relativity]: Students are able to repeat back accurately the principal claims of relativity theory, according to which ... . And yet students reveal in their responses that they in fact adhere to a belief in absolute space and time. Even a tutor in the course "shows a firm Newtonian commitment to a mechanistic view of the world, which require that objects have fixed properties such as length, mass, etc." Only when students and the tutor are made to confront the inconsistencies between the claims of Newtonian and Einsteinian models of the universe do they begin to engagte the problems in the proper fashion."

Has that been posted on some website recently? I just saw the same excerpt on another forum.

QuoteOriginally posted by: cvzI just saw the same excerpt on another forum.No kidding?I actually came across it digging through a dumpster behind the abandoned movie theater on sixth street.

Long time ago Hamilton posted something that was along these lines. This find, however, is quite more elaborate and has actual examples. CogSci is a very interesting field of study.

Do you think these guys would have trouble with oral questions on physics?Freshman Mathematics: Greek Mathematics, Geometry and Astronomy.The study of mathematics begins in freshman year with Euclid’s Elements, concentrating on the geometrical books, with some attention to Euclid’s treatment of number and to the relation between number and magnitude. The study of Euclid introduces students to a reasoned account that articulates its presuppositions and proceeds by demonstration. The last seven to eight weeks of the year are devoted to Ptolemy’s Almagest and primarily cover his account of the motion of the sun. Ptolemy’s Almagest uses the geometrical understanding gained from Euclid and begins a new inquiry: how do heavenly bodies move? Reading the Almagest also gives rise to questions that will recur over the four years, such as: what is meant by “giving an account” of how such bodies move?

Oral Examination and Questioning Is Superior Because It Probes UnderstandingThe distinctions between memory and understanding; and knowledge and opinion force the conclusion that oral examination of a student, "the probing of the mind by persistent questioning that penetrates its depths as far as possible," is the only effective means to test or measure a student's understanding:67 "Only an oral examination can succeed in separating the facile verbalizers and memorizers from those in whom genuine intellectual skills are beginning to develop and whose minds have become hospitable to ideas. Written examinations, even term papers or senior essays, are inadequate for this purpose. Where serious written work is undertaken by the students, it should only be made the basis for examining the student orally to see if he can defend his thesis with some depth of understanding that goes below the surface of his written document." 68 John Henry Newman John Henry Cardinal Newman, in his 1851 discourse on elementary education, illustrates the ease with which the verbalizers and memorizers are spotted in an oral examination by providing two sample transcripts of oral examinations covering grammar, history and geography.69 The first transcript compellingly demonstrates the weak performance of a student who has been indoctrinated while the second illustrates a student who knows what he is about and has mastered what he has read.70 For Newman, it is better if our students understand "a little, but well" rather than know a great deal of information about a variety of topics yet be incapable of true analysis and understanding. It is better if a student learns to "compare one idea with another; adjust truth and facts; form them into one whole, or notice the obstacles which occur in doing so. This is the way to make progress; this is the way to arrive at results; not to swallow knowledge, but (according to the figure sometimes used) to masticate and digest it."Socrates v Dewey

Well gosh, Mob -- if you're self-conscious about your lack of formal education, why don't you just go back to school?