OK, this is the terrible terrible failure mode which I think we are both agreeing on (emphasis mine)
the perceived standard of “you have to think about all of this critically and by your own, and you will probably arrive to similar conclusions than others in this field”
By ‘a sceptical approach’ I basically mean ‘the thing where we don’t do that’. Because there is not enough epistemic credit in the field, yet, to expect that all (tentative, not-consensus-yet) conclusions to be definitely right.
In traditional/undergraduate mathematics, it’s different—almost always when you don’t understand or agree with the professor, she is simply right and you are simply wrong or confused! This is a justifiable perspective based on the enormous epistemic weight of all the existing work on mathematics.
I’m very glad you call out the distinction between performing skepticism and actually doing it.
Yeah, I think we agree on this, I think I want to write out more later on what communication strategies might help people actually voice scepticsm/concerns even if they are afraid of meeting some standards on elaborateness.
My mathematics example actually tried to be about this: in my university, the teachers tried to make us forget the teachers are more likely to be right, so that we would have to think about things on our own and voice scepticism even if we were objectively likely to be wrong. I remember another lecturer telling us: “if you finish an excercise and notice you did not use all the assuptions in your proof, you either did something wrong or you came up with a very important discovery”. I liked how she stated that it was indeed possible that a person from our freshman group could make a novel discovery, however unlikely that was.
The point is that my lecturers tried to teach that there is not a certain level you have to acquire before your opinions start to matter: you might be right even if you are a total beginner and the person you disagree with has a lot of experience.
This is something I would like to emphasize when doing EA community building myself, but it is not very easy. I’ve seen this when I’ve taught programming to kids. If a kid asks me if their program is “done” or “good”, I’d say “you are the programmer, do you think your program does what it is supposed to do”, but usually the kids think it is a trick question and I’m just withholding the correct answer for fun. Adults, too, do not always trust that I actually value their opinion.
OK, this is the terrible terrible failure mode which I think we are both agreeing on (emphasis mine)
By ‘a sceptical approach’ I basically mean ‘the thing where we don’t do that’. Because there is not enough epistemic credit in the field, yet, to expect that all (tentative, not-consensus-yet) conclusions to be definitely right.
In traditional/undergraduate mathematics, it’s different—almost always when you don’t understand or agree with the professor, she is simply right and you are simply wrong or confused! This is a justifiable perspective based on the enormous epistemic weight of all the existing work on mathematics.
I’m very glad you call out the distinction between performing skepticism and actually doing it.
Yeah, I think we agree on this, I think I want to write out more later on what communication strategies might help people actually voice scepticsm/concerns even if they are afraid of meeting some standards on elaborateness.
My mathematics example actually tried to be about this: in my university, the teachers tried to make us forget the teachers are more likely to be right, so that we would have to think about things on our own and voice scepticism even if we were objectively likely to be wrong. I remember another lecturer telling us: “if you finish an excercise and notice you did not use all the assuptions in your proof, you either did something wrong or you came up with a very important discovery”. I liked how she stated that it was indeed possible that a person from our freshman group could make a novel discovery, however unlikely that was.
The point is that my lecturers tried to teach that there is not a certain level you have to acquire before your opinions start to matter: you might be right even if you are a total beginner and the person you disagree with has a lot of experience.
This is something I would like to emphasize when doing EA community building myself, but it is not very easy. I’ve seen this when I’ve taught programming to kids. If a kid asks me if their program is “done” or “good”, I’d say “you are the programmer, do you think your program does what it is supposed to do”, but usually the kids think it is a trick question and I’m just withholding the correct answer for fun. Adults, too, do not always trust that I actually value their opinion.