Comment by jozvolskyef | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jozvolskyef | Hacker News Reader

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This reminds me of a comment that I read years ago and still think of every now and then:

> A few months ago a person of the ones you mention in your first paragraph posted on FB, as a blow against religion, that religion was so unreasonable that parents had to train their kids since youth in order to believe. And I remember thinking at the time about all the years of training needed to get any non-superficial commanding of science.

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/29763

Edit: I should add that I believe the title is justified in this case. The study[1] identifies overwork as a cause for developing deadly diseases. Without overwork, the given number of people wouldn't have died of these diseases. Unhealthy diet and other factors are counted as a consequence of overwork. It could be phrased as '3.6% of stroke deaths and y% of ischemic heart disease deaths could have been avoided by working less'.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

> get any non-superficial commanding of science.

Oh you mean like everyone on Social Media who think they understand Science but never actually practiced it once in their lives?

"Science" gets thrown around a ton to refer to about 5 billion different things. There's the scientific philosophy; the results of an experiment; the consensus of a peergroup; the entirety of all disciplines that require consistently, repeatable evidence before thinking of making a claim; the entirety of all disciplines that think one-off but repeatable in theory evidence is a-ok; baking soda volcanoes...

Some other really weird ones: engineering, design, art, math

And my favorite: programming

I generally find conflating any two of these different things to be problematic enough that "science" is a useless word.

Your statement really resonate with me as a scientist (phd) and a father. I want my kid to learn science at an early age (not baking soda volcano).

But more how would you go about testing an hypothesis (design of experiments) how do you know if the result are statistically significant? if it’s statistically significant is it enough to say it’s true (light can behave like a particule and like a wave so is it both or neither ...)

You want your kids to learn the scientific method [1], not "science" ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

exactly! I think most teacher just teach random fact about plants weather molecule ... and think they did a great job.

But they rarely teach the scientific method.

Don't knock the baking soda volcano. I made one with my son when he was about 7 or 8. There's a little engineering that goes into constructing the paper mache structure. A little art in painting it to look realistic. Some chemistry in understanding the release of carbon dioxide from acid-base reactions. Then there's the filming/presentation of the project, for a little media savvy.

+1 if you can get your hands on some ammonium dichromate for an even more impressive, but more dangerous demonstration.

These types of "experiments" are less about teaching science, and more about impassioning a love and interest for science.

"chemistry in understanding the release of carbon dioxide from acid-base reactions." This is exactly the part I think is less important.

My goal is not for my kid to learn a subset of chemistry theory from the explanation in a book or some fun experiment.

Instead my goal is for them to understand why the human race now have this knowledge. How did the first chemist came up with the theory, how did they verify the theory was correct ... why do we now believe this is how atoms work.

The meaning of the word has changed substantially, a long time ago science was "what is known" or "knowledge acquired by study". [1] There was a shift in the English language in the 19th century, when the Scientific Method was formalized, and science communities grew and became influential. The meaning of science was narrowed down to "these studies that use the scientific method", with philosophy, maths and others being left out more and more. This isn't true in other languages/science traditions though. In German for example, all fields share the word "Wissenschaft", which literally translates to science.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/science

Funny story about this. When I was a kid we had the whole "design a science experiment" in our science class. My dad was an electrical engineer, so I did an experiment with connecting up a clock through resistors to drain batteries more quickly than normal to test which batteries lasted longest (IIRC, I think the Walgreens brand ended up being best).

When I went to my teacher with the experiment, she laughed at me and told me it was absurd, because batteries wouldn't drain that quickly; she was really quite rude and aggressive about it. I'm still not sure what she was thinking; I had to contradict her multiple times and say that my Dad was an electrical engineer several times; she was still skeptical.

I learned while young that people in positions of authority, even when nominally "credentialed" in science, are often completely incompetent, not curious, not open-minded, and are instead arrogant and patronizing. She thought she knew what the answer was and she hadn't seen it before, so she just ridiculed me. This was in one of the best school systems in the country, in one of the best schools in that district.

> When I went to my teacher with the experiment, she laughed at me and told me it was absurd, because batteries wouldn't drain that quickly; she was really quite rude and aggressive about it. I'm still not sure what she was thinking; I had to contradict her multiple times and say that my Dad was an electrical engineer several times; she was still skeptical.

This would only be surprising if your teacher was a Physics teacher. If you want to be extra charitable a Science teacher. Most people don’t care about it understand the scientific method and it’s a profoundly unnatural way of thinking, much like doing formal logic.

> This would only be surprising if your teacher was a Physics teacher.

I'm not sure. Physics teachers often have to deal with absolute laws of physics, e.g. "you can't make a perpetual motion machine".

You can't ever demonstrate that something doesn't exist (philosophy of the black swan/inviting disproof by counter-example), so it's challenging for teachers to communicate this as a fact to curious students: the result is sometimes teachers appearing scornful.

One slightly-misunderstood law of conservation and you're suddenly a physics teacher who is scorning the truth.

I learnt a similar lesson about teachers early on at school and extended it to all classes of authorities through life. See also Are Experts Real?[1]

[1]: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/01/11/are-experts-real...

> people in positions of authority, even when nominally "credentialed" in science, are often completely incompetent

That's genuinely a baffling lesson to take from that incident. I mean, your father was the credentialed one, with an engineering degree, and the teacher was the unqualified one who was just a science teacher. Surely the lesson should be the exact opposite?

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