|
|
Re: The monkey-sense is more important than you think.
Posted:
Oct 25, 2013 11:50 AM
|
|
On Thu, 24 Oct 2013 17:21:08 -0600, Bob Hansen <bob@rsccore.com> wrote:
> I think you are confusing ulterior with bad or non righteous. Science is
> perverted whenever the goal is something other than science, regardless
> of the its righteousness. In this case, the goal isn't to understand why
> some students are smart and some are not. It isn't even to understand
> what smart even means. It is to make yet another argument that we can
> teach children to be smart.
By your argument, drugs research is bad science if there's you suspect
that the motive is to improve patient care. That's just silly.
You also seem to take it for granted that we can't teach children to be
smart. That's controversial; there's evidence to the contrary---that IQ
is malleable.
And consider this: All of today's "good science" is rooted in the "bad
science" of older times. I've suggested a number of times that education
"science" today is a good bit like, say,the science underlying electricity
in the time of Faraday. In those days, there was little anyone could do
with electricity but continue to gather data, because no one had a
reasonable, generally accepted, model of what was going on.
Alchemy was certainly not science; but it laid the foundation for today's
chemistry.
> You give these articles and papers a pass on any real scrutiny because
> of what they promise not because of the quality of the science (which
> like most education research is extremely poor). As I pointed out, smart
> kids are going to do things better, faster and sooner regardless. A much
> better conclusion at this point, especially with the virtual infinite
> amount of data we have, is that these kids do these primitive tasks
> better because they are smarter. If this paper had a shred of scientific
> purpose, that detail would have been pointed out in bold print.
Regardless of motive, the study's conclusions are what they are. Better
"monkey sense" is involved in better mathematical ability. There isn't
enough information for us to tell what the relationship is---only that
it's there, and that seems to be a fact that disturbs you. Why?
Rejecting data because you don't like them, or question the motives that
led to them, isn't good science, either.
--Louis A. Talman
Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Metropolitan State University of Denver
<http://rowdy.msudenver.edu/~talmanl>
|
|
