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.
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.