In Lloyd's lecture, General Ignorance, he discusses that experts, specialist and institutions are so nervous about admitting ignorance because they hate to admit that they don't know since they are suppose to be the best in their field. But what they don't realize is that ignorance opens the door to a lot more opportunities to gain more insight. Lloyd then transitions into talking about beliefs and how we can get individuals to deal with ideas that may challenge what they believe. He says the best way to do that is to focus on how their beliefs and how they do have a validity and not to completely reject it in a way that isn't rude to what they believe. Since information is constantly changing throughout time it means that it is impossible for to know anything, every minute theres new scientific papers being written. In Firestein's Ted Talk he says the best way to get students to step outside the boundaries of facts is to have them evaluate them and ask more questions. He said that the best classrooms are the ones when the students asks the teacher a question and the teacher can't answer it. Students may be more timid and less willing to step outside the boundaries of facts because today students are more willing to accept the facts, learn them for an exam and then forget about it a short while after. Students don't have as much of an incentive to ask more questions and to become more ignorant. Today grades seem to be the only incentive, not knowledge. Some ways we can attempt to have students pursue ignorance is to get rid of the idea of weeding and start evaluating. Weeding is when we test students and let the ones who pass advance and weed out the ones who don't pass. While the better method of evaluating is to have students engage in conversations, collaborate ideas and ask questions. The more questions they ask the more knowledge they obtain and the more ignorant they will become.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Ignorance: Lloyd and Firestein
In the lecture given by John Lloyd and the TED Talk given by Stuart Firestein, both scientists come to the conclusion that knowledge generates ignorance. They speak about ignorance not with the usual connotation that it comes with, but ignorance in a sense that it generates more questions about the ideas we don't know. In the beginning of Lloyd's lecture he uses the example of children and how they ask questions contanstly until it comes to a point where theres no answer. Lloyd refers to these as "terminal why" questions. He also discusses that the more knowledge we get the more ignorant we should get and thus leave us to a chance of discovery. Firestein explains similar ideas in his Ted Talk, he says the purpose of knowing a lot of stuff is to generate more questions. He talks about how the education today has what his colleague refers to as the "bulimic method, what he means by this is that we beige information onto students, then have them throw it all up for an exam, leaving the student with no real knowledge or interest on the topic. Therefore, Firestein concluded his argument with a quote from William Yeats and says, "Education is not about filling buckets; its about lighting fires."
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