We all know confidently incorrect people. People displaying dunning-kruger. The majority of those people have low education and without someone giving them objectively true feedback on their opinions through their developmental years, they start to believe everything they think is true even without evidence.
Memorizing facts, dates, and formulas aren’t what necessarily makes someone intelligent. It’s the ability to second guess yourself and have an appropriate amount of confidence relative to your knowledge that is a sign of intelligence.
I could be wrong though.
Memorizing data doesn’t make one smarter… but learning concepts absolutely does.
The classic, “we’ll never need this in adult life” is math like Pythagoras’ theorem, or factoring binomial equations (remember FOIL?). We don’t learn that math because it’s practical for adult life… we learn that math so that grown ass adults don’t think someone using algebra is performing black magic.
Seems silly… but it’s just like how many folks never learned past middle school biology and now think XX&XY are the only chromosomal possibilities.
How about we meet in the middle and say “learning the concept that you might be wrong will help your intelligence”?
My mother who “allegedly” graduated high school has more confidence than anyone I know and will say things like “you can’t divide a small number by a bigger number” or “temperatures don’t have decimals, only full numbers”. Then as you stare at her blankly trying to figure out if she’s joking or not, she’ll tell you you’re clearly not very smart if you don’t know that
IMO you’re just describing a closed mind versus an open mind. Learning the concept that you might be wrong is fundamental to having an open mind.
And it’s difficult if not impossible to be more intelligent with a closed mind no?
(not the op) but yeah, I agree with that.
That said, with the example of your mom, it sounds like it could be insecurity as much as it could be a closed mind. Some people really struggle with the idea that others might think they’re dumb, especially their children. So they assert things as fact, because they want to maintain the image that they have all the answers. Especially when kids are bright, some parents will fight tooth and nail to maintain an air of intellectual superiority, to assert intellectual dominance.
It may seem sad, but it’s pretty understandable, relatable even. - Humans be like that.
remember FOIL?
A lot of adults don’t, then proceed to argue about order of operations, having forgotten that Brackets have to be all expanded out before doing anything else at all.
We don’t learn that math because it’s practical for adult life
Yes we do. I use Maths every day, quite separate to the fact I teach it.
We don’t learn that math because it [isn’t] practical for adult life
I love this argument because it’s like a guy who catches and eats raw fish saying that we don’t need fire. Like, man, you’re not even trying to use it, though.
I love this argument because it’s like a guy who catches and eats raw fish saying that we don’t need fire
and in fact had forgotten all about the fact that he cooked it over a fire as a treat for last Christmas 😂
I think you missed that the next portion of their statement was connected to the part you (inappropriately) added the missing word to.
They’re saying, essentially, that it’s important to learn math just for a rounded education, even if it lacks application. They’re saying closer to “even if we’re eating sushi, we still need fire”.
I’m aware the quoted person agrees with me. I’m responding to a common public sentiment.
Ah, alright. :) sometimes these things are hard to tell in text.
Haha, no problem, friend. :p
I mean Pythagoras is useful but what are you foiling?(garden fertilizer?) Or are you misconstruing “that math” for “all math”?
Or are you misconstruing “that math” for “all math”?
I wasn’t even commenting on that, hence why I quoted “remember FOIL?” and not the rest.
deleted by creator
Funny enough, it was an agricultural class where the utility of the quadratic equation hit me. Professor didn’t even call it that, but we used it to calculate maximum efficiency in fertilizer spread.
o shit. Im gonna be expanding my garden next year. Didn’t know Id need my math text book haha
Students asking “why do we need to learn this” or worse graduates who proudly proclaim “Day 19,337 of never using the quadratic equation” are a symptom of teachers who haven’t read their Thorndike.
Learning is an active process. It takes effort to do. People do not like being made to waste effort. Students will be much more effective learners when they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. “You never know when this will come in handy” is not good enough. This is Thorndike’s principle of readiness. And especially high school teachers are bad at satisfying it.
Math teachers get it very often, because for some reason we approach teaching math to a nation full of hormonal teenagers as if they all want to grow up to be mathematicians. Starting in about the 7th grade they stop giving practical examples and teach math as a series of rules to be applied to contextless problems, and to the student it feels like years of pointless busywork.
And while I can’t claim to have ever factored a polynomial in my daily life since leaving school, I did recently come up against the order of operations. I calculated the width of some cabinet doors, and I factored in the gaps between them wrong. 3 doors, 4 gaps between the doors. I did door_width = opening_width / 3 - 4 * gap_width. When I needed to do door_width = (opening_width - 4 * gap_width) / 3. In the first case, you end up subtracting all 4 gap widths from each door. I would be better at math today if you’d explained it to me like that when I was 12.
we approach teaching math to a nation full of hormonal teenagers as if they all want to grow up to be mathematicians
No we don’t.
Starting in about the 7th grade they stop giving practical examples
No we don’t. Just check out some final exams to see plenty of them still included.
if you’d explained it to me like that when I was 12
Most teachers do, but some aren’t very good, especially in the U.S. where it’s not even required to have Maths qualifications to be a Maths teacher.
No we don’t.
I mean, go ahead and lie about how I spent 6 years of my own life to my face. Memorizing proofs and working endless assignments of just…equations. Here is an equation. Do thing to it. Solve it, simplify it, factor it, graph it. I plugged and chugged so many numbers into the quadratic equation, I don’t think I was ever told what that’s for. Some chapters had token word problems.
A lot of the math I actually know I learned in physics class, where you’d do unit math. That 25 meters traveled in 5 seconds means a velocity of 5 meters/second. Science class math comes with sniff tests that math class math doesn’t.
The way I was introduced to order of operations was, the teacher wrote a long expression on the board, this plus that divided by such minus thus times such plus this times that. Spend a second solving this. Okay, who got 7? Who got -23? If you got -23, you’re right.
That is FUCKGARBAGE teaching. It may be the flight instructor in me, that my classroom is an actual airplane that we fly over actual people and their homes, but few things piss me off as deeply as setting up your students to fail. Because introducing the subject this way separates your class into two groups: Those that already have a functioning understanding of the topic whose time is being wasted, and those who don’t already understand it and need you to teach them this skill, who now feel tricked, confused and frustrated.
This teacher went on to explain Order of Operations as a series of rules you follow because following rules is what you do. “You do parenthesis before exponents before multiplication/division before addition/subtraction.” PEMDAS, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. This was taught with the same “This is how nature is” attitude as the planets of the solar system or how ionic bonds work, except algebraic notation is artificial. It’s manmade, like the English language. It’s a method of communicating ideas, except it was taught as a series of rules and procedures that you were supposed to memorize how to do without understanding the goal, and fuck your life if you lacked the vocabulary to describe what about it you didn’t understand.
I mean, go ahead and lie
I’m not lying. It’s there in the textbooks. There are many available for free online these days.
Memorizing proofs
No students are required to memorise proofs, only how to do proofs to begin with.
Some chapters had token word problems
They’re not token problems - learning how to do word problems is a central core of Maths. They’re thrown in often.
Science class math comes with sniff tests that math class math doesn’t
Not really. v=d/t, s=ut+½at², and similar equations are used often in teaching Maths (such as in non-linear graphs).
because following rules is what you do
That’s right. We teach that if you follow all the rules you will always get the correct answer. Now witness adults on social media arguing about the answer to an order of operations question because they’ve forgotten the rules but refuse to admit that’s even possible, and yet the rules are still there to be found in Maths textbooks now, same as they were then, still the same rules (despite some of them claiming the rules have been changed).
algebraic notation is artificial.
No it isn’t.
It’s manmade,
The notation is, the Maths isn’t.
like the English language.
It’s not at all like language, any language.
It’s a method of communicating ideas
No, it’s a method of calculating things, like rocket trajectories, etc. Got nothing to do with communication at all.
except it was taught as a series of rules and procedures that you were supposed to memorize how to do without understanding the goal
I can’t help it if you yourself had a bad teacher, but look in the textbooks and that isn’t how it’s taught at all.
I LOOKED IN THE TEXTBOOKS FOR YEARS. AS A STUDENT. YOU USELESS TWAT!
I LOOKED IN THE TEXTBOOKS FOR YEARS. AS A STUDENT.
Apparently not carefully enough. Go look again. As I said there are plenty available online now.
Most teachers do, but some aren’t very good, especially in the U.S. where it’s not even required to have Maths qualifications to be a Maths teacher.
there’s more of the country than florida
there’s more of the country than florida
And there’s more of the country falling behind the rest of the world in Maths than just Florida. It was all over the news, again, just a few weeks ago.
i have an idea, look up credentialing standards before you comment on them
i have an idea, look up credentialing standards before you comment on them
says person who clearly didn’t. You know they’ve changed them recently, right?
credentialing standards are set state by state. you know that, right?
I am a flight instructor. I had to study the fundamentals of instruction to earn that title, so I believe I can speak with some authority on this subject.
When discussing facts, figures and such, we consider four levels of learning. The easiest, fastest and most useless is rote memorization. Rote memorization is the ability to simply parrot a learned phrase. This is fast and easy to achieve, and fast and easy to test for, so it’s what schools are highly geared toward doing.
An example from flight school: A small child, a parrot, and some Barbie dolls could be taught that “convective” means thunderstorms. When a meteorologist says the word “convective” it’s basically a euphemism for thunderstorms. You’ve probably already memorized this by rote. You would correctly answer this question on the knowledge test:
Which weather phenomenon is a result of convective activity?
A. Upslope Fog
B. Thunderstorms
C. Stratus Clouds
Okay, what should a pilot do about thunderstorms? Are they bad? What about a thunderstorm is bad? A student who can answer those questions, who can explain that thunderstorms contain strong turbulence and winds that can break the airplane or throw it out of control have reached the Understanding level.
Problem: Sitting in the classroom talking about something is NOT flying a plane. I’ve had students who can explain why thunderstorms are dangerous fly right toward an anvil-shaped cloud without a care in the world, because they didn’t recognize a thunderstorm when they saw one. Living in a forest, people around here don’t get a good look at them from the side; the sky just turns grey and it rains a lot and there’s bright flashes and booming noises. If you can get a good look at one, it’s a tremendously tall cloud that flattens out way up high and tends to have a bit that sticks out like the horn on an anvil. Even in the clear air under that horn you’ll get severe turbulence. A student that can identify a thunderstorm and steers to avoid it can Apply their knowledge, and have thus reached the Application level.
It’s a sign that you’re ready for your checkride if, upon getting a weather briefing that includes convective activity, the student makes wise command decisions to either reschedule the flight for a day of safer weather, or for isolated storms plots a route that steers to the safe side of the weather and plans for contingencies such as turning back or diverting to alternates. A student that alters his navigational choices based on weather forecasts has reached the correlation level.
It’s difficult to go beyond the understanding level in a classroom with textbooks and paper tests, which is too much of what K-12 and college is like.
I agree, and hopefully this will help put things into perspective.
Theory is not a substitute for experience.
Ok, but you never finished the example with the child, parrot and barbie dolls. What is the punchline there?
Children can be taught to repeat something even if they don’t understand it. So can many species of parrot, they famously mimic sounds they hear including human speech without understanding the meaning behind the sounds. And I seem to remember a model of Barbie doll that had a little sound recorder built in so she can “really talk.” These things can repeat something they’ve "learned’ without any deeper understanding.
I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making the data available to your brain for pattern recognition. Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.
So, yeah—education reminds you that you might be wrong, while memorizing things gives you a tool to prove yourself wrong.
Education, done correctly, doesn’t teach you what to think but how to think.
Expanding on this, it shows you some basic options/pathways on how to think.
For me it was more like learning how other people think. Like, I took an accounting class as an elective and while it didn’t make me an accountant but it helped me understand accountants.
A healthy level of skepticism, both of other people’s ideas and of one’s own, is a sign of great intelligence.
Unfortunately this also gets abused by some people who believe they have a healthy level of skepticism, but actually are way off the deep end. Like anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, and other anti-science people.
So “healthy” in this context shouldn’t be defined by the individual.
Skepticism doesn’t necessarily entail outright rejection of something. Like, I could be skeptical about vaccines and their side effects, but still get the vaccine because it is the best option available to me right now.
It’s good to be skeptical about vaccines or a round earth. Then you investigate and find out that vaccines work and the earth is a pseudosphere.
Skeptical doesn’t have to mean that you straight up deny everything. It only means that you do not blindly believe it. That’s how science is actually suppose to mean. The best way to prove a scientific theory is trying to disprove it as hard as you can.
You and I are on the same page. My only point was that there are unfortunately many people out there now who believe they have a “healthy” level of skepticism, but are actually misled, misinformed, and not educated enough to distinguish reality. And I named specific groups who frequently fit this pattern.
When skepticism is truly healthy, it’s great. But there are many people who are unable to identify what “healthy” means here. No where did I say or mean to imply that some skepticism is a bad thing.
Memorization have importance. We, as a species, are as intelligent as primitive cavemen. Our brains haven’t changed that much since those times.
What allows us to be different, to have a prosper civilization, is the information we have stored. Much of that information is stored in our brains.
Critical thinking is of great importance. Of course. But let’s not dismiss the ability to store that critical information.
Memory is often used as a facade to demonstrate intelligence that lacks thinking, though.
If we define intelligence by the development of the brain’s abilities, memorization is one of those abilities. Then, great memorization would be, per se, a feat of intelligence.
That seems somewhat circular to me. Sure, if you define it that narrowly.
So here’s how I liken education. I’ve been an instructor at the Naval Engineering School so have a bit of experience in the subject.
First thing to learn is “facts” by rote memorization and then parrot it back. If you can do that you have learned something which is not unimportant and is an important base for the next step.
Then you learn how to apply those facts to help you in a specific set of situations. This is a very small hop above the previous step, but an important one, as now you know how to solve a narrow set of problems in a specific set of circumstances.
Unfortunately, this is where a lot of education ends because this is the easiest level to test. To go beyond this, you as an instructor must inspire the students.
The third level is when you take the facts you know and the situations to apply them and start modifying them to fit new novel situations. This now requires active thinking on the part of the student and will likely result in a lot of mistakes and suffering but this is where the instructor can gently guide them along and nurture their curiosity and keep their spirits up when they fail.
Next level is an important one, when the student starts to ask, “why does this work this way in this situation and this way in this situation”? That is the start of true wisdom.
And the final level of education is when you go back and try to teach the subject. That is when you truly open yourself up to learning.
Intelligence is such an elusive concept, but here goes anyway…
Knowing stuff makes you knowledgeable. You’re either born intelligent, stupid or somewhere in between. No amount of studying will ever change that, unless studying also involves copious amounts of alcohol. In that case, you’ll only get dumber.
Anyway, studying gives you information and tools, and what you’re talking about is a bit of both. If you go through a training system like that, you’ll be equipped to process and evaluate information, but none of that changes how intelligent you are. Sure, you can sound really smart to other people by using fancy terms and explaining complicated things. Those words alone don’t make you intelligent. Having the innate ability to understand that level of information does.
I’m sure there are really smart people living in rural parts of India where they don’t learn to read or even count very far, but they can do really clever stuff when hunting birds or weaving baskets. Even though they didn’t receive much education beyond what they learned from the local villagers they can still be intelligent. If they were born in a wealthy family in UK, these people would probably go to Oxford and graduate with a PhD in no time.
I’m not saying people without formal education don’t have the capacity for intelligence, I’m saying education increases intelligence through reevaluating your own thoughts.
From what I recall, it’s generally accepted that your potential for intelligence is based primarily on your genetic luck and environmental factors. Your genetic potential being how well your biological processes work, the hardware you’re given, and then environmental factors like injury, nutrition, and education that determine how much of your potential you reach or are hindered from.
If there were 2 clones, one born to a rich family with high IQ parents that understand how to nurture intelligence and one born to 2 mentally challenged parents who not only lack the ability to take care of their kid properly but require their kid to take on a caregiver role as a child. 99% of the time, one of them would reach their full potential while the other wouldn’t.
You’re right (but obviously not completely)
The most important skill anyone can have is information literacy. Schools don’t reach it at all.
I’d say it’s critical thinking, with information literacy being part of the critical thinking process.
There’s a lot of different things that get pumped into “intelligence”. There’s “reasoning ability”, “knowledge”, “wisdom”, and a whole host of others, some in the category of traditional intelligence, and others around things like emotional intelligence.
Raw knowledge is something that schools can teach through memorization. You have facts. Memorization isn’t the best way to do it, since context and such can often make information stick better, but some things you’re eventually going to memorize, intentionally or not (I don’t calculate 6*6=36 every time).
Reasoning or analytical ability is much harder to teach, since you can’t really make someone more able to have insights and such.
Wisdom is something that can be trained I’d phrase it. I don’t think you can be taught it like you can a history lesson, but it needs to be trained like a sport. How to apply reason to a situation, how the knowledge you have relates to things and other bits of knowledge. Which things are important and which aren’t.
It sounds like you’re mostly taking what I’ve called wisdom, with a dash if introspection tossed in, which can play very well with wisdom. “How sure am I about this?” Is a question wisdom might make you ask , and you need to know yourself to know the answer.
Knowing how to question the right part of something, so that you’re not getting caught up in the little inconsistencies and missing the big one, or considering the wrong facts that are unimportant to a situation.
(A pet peeve of mine) Sometimes people will bring up statistics of race in relation to crime. People with perfectly good reasoning ability and knowledge will get caught up debating the veracity of the statistics, or the minutiae of the implications of how other statistics interplay to lead to those numbers, both in an attempt to deny the conclusion of the original argument.
The more wise thing to do is to question why this person is making the argument in the first place. Use your knowledge of society to know there are racists who want to convince others. Your reasoning to know that someone more interested in persuasion than truth can twist numbers how they want. Reject their position entirely, instead of accepting their position as valid and arguing their facts.Is the Dunning-Krugger effect mainly displayed by low education people?
In my own personal experience pretty much everybody displays that in areas outside their expertise, and I definitely include myself in this.
For example the phenomenon of people offering what basically amounts to Medical advice is incredibly common outside the Medical profession - pretty much every-fucking-body will offer you some suggestion if you say you’re feeling like you have a bit of a temperature or something generic like that.
It’s also my experience that highly educated people don’t have any greater introspection abilities than the rest (i.e. for self-analysis and self-criticism) or empathy (to spot when other people feel that you’re talking of your ass).
Maybe it’s the environment I grew in, or the degrees I learned and professional occupations I had (so, Physics, Electronics Engineering, Software Engineering) that are too limited to make a judgement, maybe it’s me showing my own Dunning-Kruger effect or maybe my observations are actually representative and reasonably correct: whichever way, my 2c is that learned people are no better at the adult mature skills (such as introspection and empathy) than the rest, something which also matches with my experience that the Education System (at least were I studied, Portugal of the 80s and 90s) doesn’t at all teach those personal skills.
So IMHO, your assumption that the majority of those people have low education is probably incorrect, unless you’re anchoring that on the statistic that most human beings on Planet Earth have low education, in which case they’re certainly the majority of the confidently incorrect even if they’re no more likely to be so than the rest simply because there’s more of them than of the rest.
PS: Also note that amongst highly educated people there are people from different areas which emphasize different modes of thinking. My impression is that whilst STEM areas tend to emphasize analytical thinking, objectivity, assumption validation and precision, other areas actually require people to in many ways have a different relationship with objective reality (basically anything in which you’re supposed to persuade others).
different relationship with objective reality
That’s a very diplomatic way to describe politicians and business professionals
I could be wrong though
Lol
I think it’s more nuanced than that, and it really depends on the level of education.
Making kids memorise things also teaches them the process of learning a thing. Testing them on facts, dates, and formulas has value because it tests whether they’re able to learn those facts, dates, and formulas.
In high school maths, I had to learn formulas. When I was applying to university, the admissions test came with a formula booklet. It was assumed I knew how to learn formulas, they were testing whether I’d learned how to look up the correct formula, and apply it. They weren’t just testing my mathematical ability, they were simultaneously testing my reference skills. I only really appreciated that when I was much older.
No, education gives you a good faith foundation so your neural connections are well groomed and not messy. Arguing in good faith is the basis for what we consider a fact is, and our sciences and legal systems. It’s the basis of progress. It also stops you from being bamboozled, even by yourself, and prevents delusional thinking.
And in terms of IQ, yes, remembering facts DOES make an IQ score go up significantly.
Curiosity and openmindedness are related to intelligence, along with resiliency.
I think that’s a good part of it, learning fundamentals of things you’ll need is also vital. I’ve grown to mostly appreciate learning how to learn. It’s a skill that’s implicit, but putting the building blocks in at an early stage regarding how to seek and learn knowledge sets you up so well for the rest of your existence.
