Guessing the Teacher's Password

"Then you may think that "Light is arglebargle" is a good explanation, that "arglebargle" is the correct password. It happened to me when I was nine years old - not because I was stupid, but because this is what happens by default. This is how human beings think, unless they are trained not to fall into the trap. Humanity stayed stuck in holes like this for thousands of years."

Okay, but there's one innocent interpretation even here. People learn language, and when we learn language we copy the verbal behavior of other people. Maybe "arglebargle" is a synonym for light in some language, or maybe it's a supercategory of light (a category that includes light among other things). Maybe the teacher is still in the process of explaining to us what arglebargle means and the first step is to say that light is arglebargle - later on the teacher will tell us what else is arglebargle so that we will gradually build a good concept of it but initially we need to retain the point that light is arglebargle while not yet knowing what arglebargle is, because this is a step in learning what arglebargle is. In that case, we're learning new language when we learn that "light is arglebargle". That's innocent, it's not a mistake.

This suggests that the error may not be learning the teacher's passwords per se, as such, but learning the teacher's passwords when we should ideally be learning something else. The context matters.

But the student is the student and therefore ignorant by assumption, so it may in many cases be too much to expect the student to know when it is time to learn the passwords and when it is time to learn something else. If the student experiences academic success only from learning the passwords, then it may be that the student is not at fault, it's the curriculum that is at fault - the teacher.

So the right recommendation may not be to tell the student to stop learning passwords. Passwords are a legitimate thing to learn, sometimes, and the student, being a student, doesn't know ahead of time which times. The right recommendation may be to adjust the curriculum so that only the right kind of learning yields academic success.

That's probably not easy.

90% of anything is crud, including schools and perhaps the scholarly motivation of most students, but the better schools don’t teach the better students by rote learning.

The magic words, as you point out at the bottom of your essay, are helpful for getting one’s thoughts into the right part of science. Most people would have a train of thought that is not quite as reflective as what you described, something a bit more confused like:

• "Heat conduction?"
• Something to do with heat spreading out from hot to cold.
• This is strange. The near side should be hotter.
• Well, maybe the plate’s made of some weird material or something.

The teacher is posing a trick question, by requiring thought outside physics and in the area of teacherly psychology. This is a good way of reminding the students that all areas of science are connected. But good science works by creating models which are simplifications of the world. In a physics class, the model focuses on physics and not human psychology. Too many trick questions, and students will never learn the laws of thermodynamics, as they spend their brainpower trying to outwit the teacher.

You touch into a topic that is all too common in the first half, and that is the problem of definitions. It is not unusual to find people having an argument over something, without first doing a clear definition of the question.

For example, what is intelligence, and what is conscience? There are lots of discussions about the possibility or impossibility to create artificial versions of these, without first having a common definition. Such an argument is almost a waste of time, except for the situation where it may lead to better understanding of definition.

Another famous example is the question of the meaning of life. Define life first, and I think the question will be easier.

Yet another example is the Chinese Room (a human not understanding Chinese will take a chinese question and use a set of written rules to produce an answer in chinese). The question is then, can this construction be considered to understand chinese? This is a very hot discussion, but I see no attempt to first define what you mean with "understand chinese".

I can't help thinking about the the computer that produced the answer 42, because the question wasn't exact enough. While quite funny the first time I read it, people still ask questions that way.

Excellent post Eliezer.

Bravo.

I think of politics here: trying to guess the electorate's password. An elected official is rewarded for giving the answer that will get him the most votes. If that happens to be a well-conceived policy decision, that is a happy coincidence.

The hard part about teaching students not to guess the password is teaching teachers not to accept password guesses, and how to distinguish verbal behavior from thought.

Unless my memory decives me very badly, Richard Feynman has made a closely related point in the opening chapter of "Surely you're joking Mr.Feynman" (when his father told him that things move because of the sun, while he learns in school that things move because of "energy").

There's a lovely bit in Egan's Diaspora showing the viewpoint character understanding a concept from physics by applying it in various contexts.

More generally, I don't know if much is known about how people get from input to understanding.

Possibly of interest: Mathsemantics, which grew out of a project to find employees who understood what numbers mean. The book (about a questionaire for the purpose) is very interesting, the articles listed mostly look minor except for the one about grokduelling (you win if you understand the other side better), and they're looking for research ideas.

Okay, but there's one innocent interpretation even here. People learn language, and when we learn language we copy the verbal behavior of other people.

This is not innocent! Just because everyone does it, doesn't make it okay. You can't trust your instincts! Humanity stayed stuck in a thirty-thousand-year trap because of this - because we took everything confusing, and found we could imitate verbal behaviors about it just as well as we could imitate verbal behaviors about anything else.

Too many trick questions, and students will never learn the laws of thermodynamics, as they spend their brainpower trying to outwit the teacher.

Need they have such limited brainpower? Next time, use a special material with the insulator nearer the radiator.

You touch into a topic that is all too common in the first half, and that is the problem of definitions.

What do you mean by "first half"? But in any case, yes.

Richard Feynman has made a closely related point in the opening chapter of "Surely you're joking Mr.Feynman"

Good point. I changed "arglebargle" to "wakalixes" in the text.

"Need they have such limited brainpower?" -perhaps. I'm interested in our energy/environmentally constrained limits, past, present, and future, on our ability to model reality, etc. We do apparently have limited brainpower, and sloppy routes to the accumulation of knowledge. It's worth examining the most efficient paths (even if they may have irrational elements) to the accumulation of best models of reality.

On the other hand, if techers make first-graders intuitively predict what 2+2 equals, they'll never get around to making them anticipate who it was that discovered America. There are a lot of passwords. Plus, the kids just won't work that hard.

"This is not innocent! Just because everyone does it, doesn't make it okay."

That's not what I said. I said it is okay, directly. Not because everyone does it, but because it is a legitimate aspect of some kinds of valuable learning. But there's probably a miscommunication here about exactly what "it" refers to. My point was to try to draw a distinction between a couple of things which you seem to have missed in your reply.

Constant, just because something is part of how humans learn language, does not make it okay. We know that something is arglebargle without knowing what arglebargle is, but, this is not labeled as "a hint about someone else's mental associations to a word", it is labeled as knowing that something is arglebargle. That's the error, right there: a floating, non-anticipation-controlling belief that feels like ordinary knowledge, and is not labeled as a hint about someone else's word-associations. Just because this is part of how human minds learn language, still doesn't make it okay. The human mind has a crappy design. That's what blogs like Overcoming Bias are for.

"Constant, just because something is part of how humans learn language, does not make it okay."

Learning the passwords is okay in the context of learning language (I think). Take it away and you impede the ability to learn language. More generally, I think that learning empty slogans isn't wrong, it's merely incomplete. Part of learning is unintelligent aping, where we first learn to go through some of the motions without necessarily understanding them. You have to start somewhere. Understanding is complex and so necessarily requires passage through stages which do not each one constitute understanding, just as an office building as it is being built passes through many stages where what it is is just a useless structure that serves no immediate purpose. What is bad is not learning the passwords, it's failing to learn more beyond the passwords. Similarly, what is bad is not laying a foundation under a building, what is bad is abandoning the construction of the building after the foundation is laid but before the building is complete.

"a floating, non-anticipation-controlling belief that feels like ordinary knowledge, and is not labeled as a hint about someone else's word-associations"

It is almost necessarily the case that people who do not understand yet (e.g., students who are in the process of learning), do not yet have the understanding that it takes to understand that they do not understand yet. Knowing that you did not know is more easily done in hindsight once you know, than while you still do not know.

So the burden is probably better placed on the teacher to ensure that the students' education is not left incomplete.

I myself find it hard to see what the gaps are in my knowledge unless that knowledge is tested. So I think a good place to start in fixing whatever problem it is that you see, is in the testing of the students.

Eliezer,

School is all about words?

In shop class if the pieces didn't fit together, weren't sanded down smooth, or the contraption didn't work, you flunked the course.

In chemistry lab, if you didn't measure the pH right, same problem.

In physics if your measurements of waves or acceleration down the inclined plane were wrong down went your grade.

Guess we must have gone to different schools.

John

To expand on my point, I think there is not enough testing in schools, and what testing there is is too associated with grades. Suppose that you are teaching a child to ride a bike, but suppose that each time he falls you give him a bad grade. At the end of it he knows how to ride a bike really well, and any honest assessment of him should be, "great, he learned well, he's done". Unfortunately, that is not what happens in school. Instead, all his stumbles on the way to learning are summarized and then put into the report card that his parents see.

Once the child has learned, why should it matter how many times he failed in the process of learning? What should matter is whether he knows now.

Because children are keen not to get poor grades, they are worried about never stumbling even once in any of the tests of their knowledge, because they know that each stumble will make it into their permanent record. In order to make it at least possible for students never to stumble, the tests must be designed so that with enough preparation students will not stumble. This limits what can be tested.

The test of getting on a bike and trying to ride will invariably result in stumble after stumble until the child eventually learns to ride. This kind of test is therefore necessarily excluded from the tests that the school will give children. And since such tests are key to learning important aspects of knowledge, schools will fail to teach those aspects of knowledge.

Imagine a bike riding course in which children are taught the theory of bike riding but not actually placed on a bike until the end of the semester. In fact, to ensure that at least some students will pass the test, even the final exam cannot place them on a bike, but will instead need to be a form where they regurgitate the bike riding theory they learned.

I am exaggerating of course, but I do see this as a pronounced tendency in learning.

Some of the critics of Eliezer's point are falling in the trap of justifying a functional system rather than looking how to optimize it. I think Constant's point that we often regurgitate on the path to understanding. But still, I think primacy should be given to figuring out how to optimize these learning processes, rather than justify the functional elements of the learning processes we currently have.

"I think primacy should be given to figuring out how to optimize these learning processes, rather than justify the functional elements of the learning processes we currently have."

Part of the problem may be that a lot of the educational system simply has no proper criterion of success. What, after all, is a successful class in (say) physics? The teacher's success is measured by the students' success, but the students' success is measured by their performance on the exams, and the exams are written by the teacher, so the teacher is indirectly evaluating himself. Which is not a proper criterion of success. Even if the educational system as a whole writes a national exam to test the teacher, the fundamental problem remains, because the test is written by the same organization that is ultimately testing itself.

What is a teacher supposed to teach? How is this decided? I think there is such a large gap between learning and life that in effect a lot of learning goes untested, or tested badly (e.g., tested by the very organization whose performance is being tested).

This is presumably much less of a problem in vocational training. The value of a vocational school is tested in the workplace, and it is quickly discovered whether a particular school churns out worthless graduates.

Uh, Eliezer, when you were 9, had you seen a wave? Did you have a sense that a wave was different in several ways from other kinds of things, even from other kinds of fluid behaviors -- different from a current, say?

Now, when you were 9, had you seen an arglebargle? Did you have a sense of how arglebargles differed from other things? (If so, how?)

And are there ways in which the characteristics you did recognize in waves, when you were 9, also do in fact apply to light? On the other hand, are there ways in which the characteristics you recognize in arglebargles apply to light?

I would venture to say that you did learn something meaningful by repeating your teacher's explanation that light is "made of waves". You are overly discounting what counts as experimental evidence of the real-world phenomena which words refer to. You had a lot of experimental evidence of waves at age 9. You'd seen them, for a start. When your teacher told you that light is made of waves, he was helping you to understand something about light by explaining it in terms of something you had real-world experience of.

Similarly, when my 3-year-old asks whether stars are burning but planets are not, I don't tell him that actually stars aren't "burning" as such. I say yes, and what he said counts as learning, not "guessing my passwords" -- even though he doesn't fully understand yet what I would understand by the word "burning".

Disagreeing with the original post is a bit like disagreeing with the statement that there's too much crime. What I find remarkable, though, is how useful password knowledge is. I mean you might think it would have zero use, but it doesn't. For instance, all knowledge of geography is password knowledge, unless you have actually been to the place. Yet, most people will argue that knowledge of geography is a good thing because it makes you form little mental boxes that are useful for organizing future knowledge (e.g. there are some people from a place called China, and they're probably very different from people from a place called Botswana).

When you are presented with a new concept, the first step is to "mechanically" learn it. At that point, you are able to solve only questions that closely match what you were taught.

The next step is to really understand the meaning of the concept, in a deeper sence. In school, this is usually achieved by providing excercises that are progressively harder and harder. Harder in this case means that the questions diverges more from the learnt material and more and more requires deeper understanding of the concept.

If you only go so far as learning the "mechanical" part of the concept, you usually will forget about it rather quickly. If you, on the other hand, really understand the meaning behind the concept, the knowledge will stick much longer. And not only that, it is okey to forget about the mechanical steps and only keep the basic understanding as you can quickly and easily look up the mechanical part when you recognize a problem.

I think this is all a normal learning process, practised everyday in school.

Some of this is becuase school is more about testing than about teaching. It is easier to test for the words.

"Imagine a bike riding course in which children are taught the theory of bike riding but not actually placed on a bike until the end of the semester. In fact, to ensure that at least some students will pass the test, even the final exam cannot place them on a bike, but will instead need to be a form where they regurgitate the bike riding theory they learned."

You think that passage is a joke, but it's an exact description of my high school's driver's education unit.

For example, what is intelligence, and what is conscience?

Um, do you mean "consciousness"?

Great essay! As someone who has taught physics off and on for decades, I couldn't agree more!

See the discussion of Cognitive Instruction, Math Modeling at the ASU Modeling Physics Instruction site, http://modeling.asu.edu/CIMM.html, for an approach to math teaching founded on this insight. Verbal behavior and symbol construction, which is nearly all of what is taught in mathematics classes after 4th grade (excepting Geometry) do not represent conceptual understanding, and indeed aren't really mathematics. No wonder students hate it and most can't really learn it!

But, brooksfoe. When you say "Yes", you could then expand, refine and add new information to your child.

You could say, "Yes, but it's a very special kind of burning. It's called fusion. It's what happens when lots of pressure makes a gas called hydrogen turn into another gas called helium, giving off lots of heat and light!"

I remember discovering this secret through a few related events. The one that comes forefront is my brother and I laughing at a magazine advert showing a sumo wrestler ski jumping. I made the comment, "Ha, he's going to fall like a rock!" My father was there and asked why? Didn't I know that the weight of the object doesn't determine its falling speed? Apparently, whenever that concept was taught to me it didn't stick and so I wasn't using it to make predictions. But based on the tone of his voice I knew I was supposed to know this and, even though I had no clue what he was talking about, I immediately responded by saying, "Because of drag!"

This was stupid of me. It got my dad off my back and so I had correctly guessed the teacher's password and the rest of the day I tried to figure out why the weight of an object wouldn't make it fall faster. It wasn't until years later that I saw proof in a science museum experiment and I accepted the theory as fact.

The event caused me to notice, however, that I had switched theories to try explaining my prediction. I made a bad prediction, but instead of saying oops I started desperately grabbing for evidence that backed up my result. How evil of my younger self. But now that I noticed I was doing this I was able to stop it. It also caused me to start seeing this happen in others. I am still surprised at how often people do this and never think that they could be doing something wrong.

"If you aren't using the diffusion equation - putting in numbers and getting out results that control your anticipation of particular experiences - then the connection between map and territory is severed as though by a knife. What remains is not a belief, but a verbal behavior."

I'm surprised noone's commented on this before, but I think this is overly restrictive. If I'm familiar with the process of diffusion, I intuitively know what's going to happen, without actually plugging in numbers. I don't need to do math to reach the right conclusion, I can just sort of visualize what's happening. I think you progress from mechanically plugging in numbers to generalizing the behavior into a pattern that you can apply, like people can catch a ball in the air without actually calculating a parabola. That doesn't mean that there is no connection between map and territory. Of course, you have to take some care to make sure you're applying the right pattern, but that's no different than knowing to apply the right equation.

It seems to me that passwords and placeholders occupy about the same space, and probably look fairly similar when they're first being taught. Knowing that light, sound, and matter are all waves tells me they have something in common. It means once I learn what a wave is, I ought to be able to predict some behaviors of all three based on this new information. If I also know that some things are not waves, I'll have a decent foundation for when to apply the wave equation, once I learn it.

Indeed, "password" itself seems to be a password for the concept of a placeholder. Now that I've puzzled that out, though, the new question arises: is it actually useful to learn a placeholder, or should we teach the wave equation first, and then go in to "light is a wave, and here is why", "sound is a wave and here is why"?

Certainly, being up-front about it when we're using a placeholder or an approximation would be wise. I must have had an odd experience in school, since there was generally at least one other student that would ask "what does 'wave' MEAN?" and then we'd all either learn what it meant, or that it was a placeholder to be learned about later.

When I was a kid I had this book called "Thinking Physics", which was basically a book of multiple choice physics questions (such as "an elephant and a feather are falling, which one experiences more air resistance ?", or "Kepler and Galileo made telescopes around the same time and Kepler's was adopted widely, why ?") aimed to point out where our natural instincts or presuppositions go against how physics actually work, and explaining, well, how physics actually work.

Really, the simple idea that physics are a habit of thought that have to be worked on because our defaults are incorrect (or, as I realized much later, are correct only in the special case of the everyday life of a social hominid) has been helpful to me ever since, and too few people have it or realize it's important.

I think it gets to what you're saying : one shouldn't learn physics (or anything for that matter) as a list of facts or methods to apply in the classroom, one should work to integrate them into one's mental model of the world. Which is not as easy as it sounds.

Although this is an old article I came to it from the Theory of Knowledge article (link below). I'm commenting because this crystallizes my objections to a repeated theme at LW: that irrationality comes from unquestioned cached thoughts, and that modern education systems exacerbate this tendency. In other words, I'm questioning whether password-guessing and memorization in education are actually avoidable, even at the highest levels of optimization, and whether this isn't in fact the result of the expansion of knowledge and the limits of human cognition.

I'm not even going to argue whether those are true statements and whether they are bad. But my own background has raised questions about what the solution might be. My idealistic assumptions about how people should learn used to track the predominant ones on LW much more closely. I'm currently in a technical graduate program for a profession that is different from most other types of graduate programs because in this field, the first few years are spent memorizing huge reams of information and taking multiple choice tests (have a guess as to what I'm studying?) My fellow students and I would genuinely love to really understand from a critical perspective all the information that is getting shoveled into our brains. But doing that, rather than memorizing lists of word correspondences, takes time that we just don't have. Therefore in reality our tests are really just exercises in figuring out which bar to press so we get the food pellet. (I like that analogy better than "guessing passwords".) And perhaps most scandalous, once we're "in the system", we students recognize the need for it to be this way even though it's frustrating.

Scandal! Unethical? Stupid? Cynical, at least? Maybe yes to all. But the pragmatic reality is that there's a trade-off. There's such a massive amount of material that no human who ever lived would be able to critically digest it all unless the training lasted far longer than it does, and while the system is certainly not optimized, the body of knowledge itself is so rife with detail not predictable from first principles that until the limits on cognition fundamentally change, this will continue to be the case.

So, regarding the strategy students can adopt, the two ends of the spectrum are: 1) You can just memorize details long enough to regurgitate them in the lever-pressing experiments, and understand nothing critically; or 2) You can insist on trying to critically understand everything, and you will certainly fall behind and fail. You. Yes, you, reading this, because you're human, and this applies to all humans. ("Not me! I'm special! I still care about my fellow man, the human spirit, etc." Sorry, can you tell I've had this conversation before?)

Unfortunately, given the pace the material is presented and tested, you'll end up much closer to #1 than #2. Even if you disagree with my assessment that a body of knowledge can be such that large amounts of memorization are necessary, this still raises the omnipresent problem of how to maximize whatever it is you want to maximize while surrounded by irrational humans (who are running the schools, and who believe that memorization is necessary). If you want to do the thing you're being trained for, you need the piece of paper. To get that paper, you have to pass the tests. To pass the tests you need to just memorize and not think. I guess I could just declare the whole enterprise unethical and forget about this profession and move out in the woods somewhere. So if you can tell me how to maximize career satisfaction and income out in a nice forest away from everyone instead of memorizing reams of B.S., I'm all ears. Seriously.

As knowledge accumulates, this problem is only going to get worse, and extend to more fields. Certainly education has not yet been optimized but all fields are not math and physics, and there's enough unpredictable detail in the world that as knowledge accumulates, so will the memorization required to learn that knowledge. And if we can't always use critical thinking at every step - which we can't - then password-guessing is better than nothing.

Post I came in from: http://lesswrong.com/lw/70d/theory_of_knowledge_rationality_outreach/

"But concise is not always precise, and without precision, concision is just vague at best, and misleading at worst. Several years ago, a student wanted to contest the scoring of one of his test answers in my introductory psychology course. The test question was something to the effect of “What is the primary advantage of an experimental study over a correlational study?” and an example sufficient answer would have been, “Causal conclusions may be drawn from an experiment, but not from a correlational study.”

The student’s answer was, “In an experiment, you actually test something” (the word ‘test’ was underlined twice). When he questioned why his answer earned no points, I explained that it failed to distinguish the two study types at all, as both correlational and experimental studies “test something” (i.e., in introductory terms, a relationship between variables and cause-and-effect, respectively). He looked at me earnestly and rebutted, “But you said some of the questions could be answered in one sentence, and I underlined ‘test’ twice.”

After a moment of silence (to contain my disbelief at his statement), I asked him what it would have meant if he had only underlined “test” once, or not at all, and how was I to know those distinctions in meaning. He had no answer."

--"Precision First", L. Kimberly Epting

I've just bumped into a fun link about guessing the teachers password. It is only 184 words so here it is:

I do a game called k9 nosework with my corgi. You take a qtip dipped in certain scents and hide it in boxes in the beginning then progressing to furniture and outside areas. The game is for the dog to find the qtip and identify; there's even a contest / sport. If you decide to do the sport, the handler has to read the dog and decide if the dog is identifying a given bit of car or whatever as the location of the goal scent or if the dog is just sniffing. The point of this rambling is even the plain trainers that do k9 nosework know that the handler has to go blind and can't know where the scent is or the dog will learn to read the handler instead of learning to use its nose to find the scent. The idea that the police are unaware of this is ludicrous, since this sport grew out of nose training for police dogs, and it's a major training obstacle.

The meat of the comment is "the handler has to go blind". It took me a while to work out what is being said here. My understanding:

You take up the sport. You hide the scented qtip yourself. You train your dog to sniff it out. Your dog does good. You go to the competition. The judge hides the scented qtip and you don't know where. Your dog does bad. Explanation: Your dog never learned to sniff out the scented qtip, he learned to read you and the tells you gave away when he sniffed near where you knew the qtip to be.

Why is this fun? Well, John Holt's book How Children Fail has a lovely story about guessing the teachers password

... since it was clear to me from the way the children were talking and acting that they hadn't a notion of what Nouns, Adjectives, and Verbs were. Finally one child said, 'Miss ---, you shouldn't point to the answer each time.' The teacher was surprised, and asked what she meant. The child said, 'Well, you don't exactly point, but you kind of stand next to the answer.' This was no clearer, since the teacher had been standing still. But after a while, as the class went on, I thought I saw what the girl meant. Since the teacher wrote each word down in its proper column, she was, in a way, getting herself ready to write, pointing herself at the place where she would soon be writing. From the angle of her body to the blackboard the children picked up a subtle cue to the correct answer.

Dogs do this too!

The relation of my comment to Eliezer's point is delicate. It is not correct to decenter and imagine yourself as the teacher; Eliezer is not writing pedagogy. You have to decenter and imagine yourself as the sniffer dog. You train hard, winning lots of praise and treats from your owner. You wag your tail happily. Then you go to the competition and discover that you haven't learned the skill that you were supposed to learn, at all!

Bravo, pretty much all I have to say...

This is no doubt a good way to control the problem, but I'm not grasping whether or not de-emphasizing the use of "passwords" would be the ideal thing to do. After all, language was invented so that people could effectively and easily communicate their understanding with others. It hardly helps to NOT drill in the common language to students, otherwise we'd be dealing with people using long, complicated circumlocution to describe what should be a very simple concept.

But this article is correct. Technical knowledge: asking HOW something works, and solidifying critical thinking skills is paramount to good education... but that's no reason to be overtly strict, and doing away with verbal behavior. It's been used and has worked for centuries, which doesn't necessarily mean that it's useless.

In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems. Then he discovered that his success as a teacher “was a complete illusion, a house of cards.”

The epiphany came via an article in the American Journal of Physics by Arizona State professor David Hestenes. He had devised a very simple test, couched in everyday language, to check students’ understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts of physics—force—and had administered it to thousands of undergraduates in the southwestern United States. Astonishingly, the test showed that their introductory courses had taught them “next to nothing,” says Mazur: “After a semester of physics, they still held the same misconceptions as they had at the beginning of the term.”

The students had improved at handling equations and formulas, he explains, but when it came to understanding “what the real meanings of these things are, they basically reverted to Aristotelian logic—thousands of years back.” For example, they could recite Newton’s Third Law and apply it to numerical problems, but when asked about a real-world event like a collision between a heavy truck and a light car, many firmly declared that the heavy truck exerts a larger force. (Actually, an object’s weight is irrelevant to the force exerted.)

Mazur tried the test on his own students. Right at the start, a warning flag went up when one student raised her hand and asked, “How should I answer these questions—according to what you taught me, or how I usually think about these things?” To Mazur’s consternation, the simple test of conceptual understanding showed that his students had not grasped the basic ideas of his physics course: two-thirds of them were modern Aristotelians. “The students did well on textbook-style problems,” he explains. “They had a bag of tricks, formulas to apply. But that was solving problems by rote. They floundered on the simple word problems, which demanded a real understanding of the concepts behind the formulas.”

http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture

Eliezer, thank goodness you exist.

This is kind of like in the (fantastic) (children's) book The Myserious Benedict Society. In the book, a bad person invents a machine that uses TV and radio broadcasts to control people's minds. They project words into every broadcast, so that people are subliminally affected. The good guy builds a machine that allows him to hear the words directly. He gets gibberish. Things like, "poison apples, poison worms." He sends in a group of four children to investigate. They are to go to the school set up by the bad person and attempt to gather more knowledge about the machine. While at the school, they excel at their studies through, um, various means, because they heard that the best students get hooked up to the machine. While they are being hooked up to the machine, the bad guy asks them what they think of when he says the phrase, "Poison apples, poison worms." Immediately, the lesson on how corrupt the govournment was, the lesson that was entitled "Poison apples, poison worms" comes back to them. And it's like this that the bad guy can control peoples' minds with gibberish, the words mean something to the children that he uses. What counts is what's going on inside the children's minds, not the actual broadcasted words at all.

I should give me two cents in here, but know that I am new here, and may not be completely accurate as of now. I read this over, and a few comments, and took into consideration most of your views

To me this is a relevent piece. Me being in class I am paying attention to the Educator before me and wondering why Xe Just gives out the meaning. Then it hit me. The teacher was not going into detail about [why] its relevent. Im currently in Geometry, and she was talking about major, and minor arks; however Xe was not going into what could be used in the situation that would need arks. Xe is implanting the password to everyone as we speak, and its not Xir fault, but the Education Xe is required to give. Xe has no decision in doing this. Xe has to, its Xir job to tell us the answers and for us to Repeat.

An interesting little demonstration is to pose the "How old is the shepherd?" word problem / riddle to kids at school: http://robertkaplinsky.com/how-old-is-the-shepherd/

I notice that I am confused by this post.

Is the claim that this is a school thing or a life thing? I can see how this behavior might happen if a student is more interested in getting good grades than in actual learning. In such a situation "learning the teachers password" might be a short cut to get to your actual goals.

If the claim is that this is a life thing, could some one give me some more non-classroom example? Organized religion counts as classroom.

When I fist heard that light is a wave, then I interpreted that sentence in my brain an gave it meaning. I can't say for sure that I gave it the correct meaning. But I defiantly know that I did not just save a way the sound pattern, as truth. Because I don't think that way, and I can't even imagine thinking that way.

I can, on the other hand, imagine thinking: "If I write 'because of heat conduction' on a test, I have a chance of getting points." This is not how I went though school, because I was interested in accusal learning, but I can model a student who thinks this way.

"If I write 'because of heat conduction' on a test, I have a chance of getting points." is an anticipation controller.

my summary:

• For abstract concepts we need to drill down to relate them to empirical testing

• We shouldn’t be satisfied with just saying the keywords, but seek to genuinly understand what’s going on.

• The human brains tends to value what it gives social approval than which it matches physical reality.

• Test as much as possible.

One thing I have noticed relating to this in school is that on tests sometimes I put down an answer on a quiz that I know is wrong because the teacher will give me points if I put that. For example, on a Physical Education quiz the teacher briefly talked about how sugar affects the human body. One of the questions was multiple choice and it said "Sugar is a..." and I selected carbohydrate even though I knew it was wrong because that is what we were taught.

Here's what you actually wanted to link to for "looking back"

I was fortunate enough throughout my K-12 schooling to be very gifted within my classes and to always have the opportunity to try to understand concepts, rather than just guess passwords. However, I've become increasingly disenchanted with being stuck in a system that rewards things like password guessing. I've found a huge problem at my own university to be the related "password list rote memorization." The examination system very strongly rewards remembering things only for 4-ish weeks at a time (the approximate length of time between exams) and then immediately forgetting them. It's incredibly frustrating and it feels like my courses are wasting years of my life completely unnecessarily. I attempt to cram as much knowledge into my head as I can in a time period that's too short for me to retain anything, achieve the reward of the exam grade, and then forget the material and never look at it again.

Eliezer's articles have been some of the most thought-provoking pieces I've ever read, and they challenge me to actually figure out ways to use my learning to improve my life and create changes in my environment, rather than just getting gold stars on arbitrary goals, like exams, that are artificially created by someone else, but aren't practically benefiting anyone. But as someone finishing undergrad soon, I'm at a loss as to how I might move forward without spending most of my time playing more password games (i.e. going to grad school). 

Does anyone have any suggestions for alternative things I might devote myself to? I actually do have an uncommonly good memory when I can learn things properly the first time, and with strategically spaced repetitions I can effectively retain complex knowledge (usually biology, I'm a biology major) for years. I just don't see a space in the system where that particular skill is especially useful or consistently rewarded. But at the same time, I'm sick of playing the password games.

I read this when I was at high school (or early university) and now a decade or more later I dug up for it to read it again because of this stupid course I am taking at work and I wanted to make sure I stay sane.

I'd like to suggest an alternative learning model view, one less concerned with getting immediately an intimate and "true" understanding of the reality, and more focused on with progress through stages.

The first stage is awareness. When we are exposed to light theories, particle theory, wave theory, and later quantum theory, we clearly don't know what a light particle is, so we attach verbal labels to ideas. This is not perfect, but allows us to learn the concepts and start thinking about it. Part of this process is "guessing the teacher password". When we guess right routinely, that is we associate the right visual stimuli with the right verbal label, we are ready to go to the next stage.

The next stage is making some calculus and some predictions. Here we are deepening our understanding and our model of reality by adding some equations. Again, a process of learning at the end of which we clearly do not have a perfect or true understanding, but its better than the first stage as it allows us to do more.

The following stages are about refining our models and making them more accurate, better predictor and more useful for surviving (or getting a Nobel prize).

In the end, our thinking will always be constrained by our models we will probably never have a perfectly true understanding of light. But going throuhg school put us on the path on building progressively more elaborate and/or useful models to operate in the world.

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) posts on Twitter about applying Guessing the Teacher's Password: 

It occurs to me that I have explicitly explained to my children that teachers respond well to guessing their password and that a rule of the game is you aren’t supposed to explicitly say that is what you are doing.

“Remember this is just game, not all games have the same rules.” [emphasis mine]

Parenting in the Internet age. 

I certainly did not grow up thinking “Ahh yes, core expectations for a dad imparting culture on early elementary schools include the Bible, Greek gods, and some of the LessWrong buzzwords that are instrumentally useful.”

Today’s actual problem set which caused us to have another password guessing talk: 

“Here are three shapes. Draw a shape using them.” 

L just concatenated all three on top of each other.

“Absolutely a shape! That is no less a shape than any other shape! But some shapes have names that we expect kids your age to know, and when a teacher says a shape, she wants one of the ones you can name. It’s a password. Can you make one whose name you know?” 

“Oh triangle easy”

It goes on a bit.