Re: Baby talk and prejudices about absolute time and determinism
mmeron_at_cars3.uchicago.edu
Date: 03/23/05
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Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 20:56:12 GMT
In article <1111598933.246583.117520@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>, "PD" <pdraper@yahoo.com> writes:
>Uncle Al wrote:
>> PD wrote:
>> >
>> > This morning on the radio there was an interesting news item about
>> > researchers who are exploring how children learn language so
>quickly.
>>
>> The blind debating the deaf about jukeboxes.
>>
>> > (In two years, they become quite efficient communicators, starting
>from
>> > ground zero.) One of the key questions is how a child learns to
>> > distinguish whole words from the homogenous stream of syllables
>that
>> > occurs in fluent speech.
>>
>> It is called "parsing."
>
>Which explains nothing about how that skill is learned, or what methods
>can be used to facilitate the training, does it?
>
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> > Learning how the universe really works may be fun, but it may not
>be
>> > particularly useful for survival of the species!
>>
>> Psychology has only passing correspondenece to physical reality. It
>> is a soft science of convenience shouting "ANOVA!" and muttering
>> "heteroskedasticity."
>>
>> If you think designing a working flush toilet is irrelevant to
>> "survival of the species," try using a low volume flush Envirowhiner
>> atrocity. Improving freshman German 101 will not happen. There is
>no
>> reason to make it facile or relevant to student needs. Quite the
>> contrary - there is strong motivation to make it elegant and
>> inefficient, to create artificial perceived value through
>> inaccessibility.
>
>In response to the previous two paragraphs, I think it's worth opining
>that physics is the easiest of the sciences to learn, precisely because
>it requires so little memorization and flat capture of detail. (It
>*does* however require facility with a larger skill toolbox and also
>some willingness to battle intuition which may be faulty.) I think it's
>worth emphasizing to students this about physics, and I worry that too
>many teachers do indeed "create artificial perceived value through
>inaccessibility."
>
>The fact that psychology is a softer science should not be a
>value-judgement but an indicator of how messy it is. The problem with
>psychology is the inability to control a large number of unconstrained
>variables. This is also pertinent to why it is hard to empirically
>distinguish between one psychological theory and a competing one. The
>only place where psychologists will get firmly into trouble is by
>claiming more certainty about their model than they can really claim.
>
>I'm of the opinion that physics is appealing because it IS easier and
>cleaner than most other sciences. That doesn't make it a "better"
>science.
>
Yep.
Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
meron@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"
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