[ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 78, Issue 2

[Spencer Campbell]

Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>:
> Will Steinberg <steinberg.will at gmail.com>:
>> b) To these topics, reply even if you aren't confident in totality of theory
>> or if you think your ideas are half-formed.
>
> If you don't understand a post on these topics *ask questions.*  Don't
> just assert your ignorance with dogmatic statements.

Oh, sweet irony. I love it so.

There are many, many things wrong with the standard methods used in
formal education today, but we can categorize a great many of them
under one heading: unidirectional learning. For the most part,
teachers teach and students learn. It is a rare classroom indeed where
the students also teach and the teacher also learns; generally, if
you've worked as a teacher for at least two years, you are already
about as good at your job as you will ever be.

A few underlying assumptions have supported unidirectional learning as
the leading paradigm at least as far back the industrial revolution,
probably reaching back to around 1770, and "ignorance is best kept out
of sight" is one of them. Yet, somehow, most teachers today have a
strong tendency to ask leading questions; an excellent tactic for
making your students look, and feel, ignorant of the subject matter.

The reason it's important for people with a poor grasp on a concept to
speak freely about that concept is simple: if you don't know enough to
articulate it properly, you probably don't know enough to figure out
what questions you could ask to improve your understanding. I think
teachers ask leading questions mainly in an attempt to show what a
Good Question looks like, so that hopefully their students will follow
suit.

It almost works. The class starts engineering its questions so that
they sound insightful, in a mostly-unconscious ploy to display falsely
keen understanding and thus earn better grades. These sorts of
questions compete for time with questions born out of genuine
curiosity, it should be noted.

Notice I have not cited any of my sources. Further irony! Ah, what fun.


Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>:
> To take this discussion up to a meta level, why to people read and
> post on mailing list at all?
>
> The reason is rooted in stone age evolution, particularly in
> reproductive success.  Can anyone clearly state the logic?

At first your hint seemed off-puttingly specific, but then I realized:
yes, of course, you can say the same of just about all uniquely human
behavior.

It seems to me that we can only clearly trace the history of mailing
lists as far back as the agricultural revolution, when people were apt
to gather around and suss out why things don't always grow when you
plant them (thus setting the stage for astronomy), but you seem to
have a definite correct answer in mind. Do tell.


Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>:
> Will Steinberg <steinberg.will at gmail.com>:
>> Am I wrong in assuming this?  What makes coherence possible for plants that
>> would not apply to brains?
>
> Coherence doesn't apply to either.  The scale is wrong.  What goes on
> in brains is many orders of magnitude away from where quantum effects
> show up.

"This theory requires long-lived quantum coherence at room
temperature, which never has been observed in FMO. Here we present the
first evidence that quantum coherence survives in FMO at physiological
temperature for at least 300 fs, long enough to perform a rudimentary
quantum computational operation. This data proves that the wave-like
energy transfer process discovered at 77 K is directly relevant to
biological function."

http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.5108

So, barring the potential invalidation of that research, coherence
certainly applies to at least one. Try again.