Knowledge

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. – The opening lines of Hard Times, Charles Dickens.

Intelligence alone doesn’t guarantee rational thinking—plenty of highly intelligent people fall into cognitive traps, dogma, and motivated reasoning. Children want to learn, and it is our responsibility (the entire village) to help nurture the process of discovery, to make it enjoyable and stimulating for them.

The real key is reasoning ability and fostering a mindset that embraces learning as a lifelong process rather than just a means to an end. If this is done correctly children will develop:

1. Intellectual Curiosity – Asking better questions instead of just seeking prepackaged answers.
2. Resilience in Learning – Embracing mistakes as part of the process rather than fearing failure.
3. Pattern Recognition & Synthesis – Seeing connections between ideas rather than just isolated facts.
4. Intrinsic Motivation – Learning because it’s rewarding in itself, not just to pass a test.

Teaching kids what to think just turns them into passive recipients of information, while teaching them how to think gives them the ability to navigate reality on their own.

The key skills should be:

1. Critical Thinking – Questioning assumptions, recognizing biases, and weighing evidence.
2. Fallacy Recognition – Spotting errors in reasoning, from false dichotomies to appeals to authority.
3. Bayesian Thinking – Understanding probability and updating beliefs based on new information.
4. Feynman Method – If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t truly understand it.
5. Epistemic Humility – Accepting that knowledge is provisional and can always be refined.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

I have more to add but decided to start  with this. Let’s see how it develops.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

I think that’s brilliant Reg.  I’m not sure about Bayesian thinking though – it seems to repackage “what’s possible” as “based on what’s already the case” – not allowing in new ideas.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Thanks Simon, Bayesian thinking is all about checking out new ideas. We don’t want kids to hold beliefs, we want them to have “understandings”. Then when a new idea (information) comes along, they will have the skills to reason through it and adapt their understanding accordingly.

Bayesian reasoning, logic, and fallacy recognition would do more for critical thinking than half the subjects currently taught. Instead, kids are left to stumble through cognitive biases, emotional reasoning, and social influence without a toolkit to recognize when they’re being manipulated.

Bayesian theory gets a bad reputation because of the math, but at its core, it’s just a framework for updating beliefs based on new evidence. If kids were taught that certainty is a spectrum, not a binary state (wait can we say that now!!), they’d be far less susceptible to ideological traps.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

I thought that Bayesian reasoning was about extrapolating “what is” to “what might be”, thereby limiting new ideas.

[UnseenParticipant]

I don’t know where to fit this in, but…

Christopher Columbus did not actually discover America because he maintained until his death that he had reached some portion of Asia. Doubts were emerging but it was Amerigo Vespucci who fully realized that the Americas were truly something else, calling them a “new world.”

The point: You can only claim a discovery if you actually know what you’ve discovered.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

How humans learn and properly reason is a matter of fact. So it’s not that Gradgrind was wrong, It just that how to learn and reason should be the first fact he teaches

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@ Unseen – The point you make about Columbus can be used as a basic example of Bayes Theory.  If he had being given new objective information about the location then he could have updated his understanding of what he had discovered. It would have changed his reality.  That is the essence of how Bayes works. It is not “shattering a belief”. It is deepening our understanding by improving our knowledge.

I think I am using the word ‘Fact’ as you would – Knowledge that has been justified.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

Just a few practical addendum for teaching these skills in learning and reasoning:

* Put the lessons in any and all possible media, electronic and hard copy.
* Insist that anyone who teaches the lessons equally be able to exercise the lessons and they must not have any guarantee of tenure or sinecure.
*. Don’t make the lessons compulsory; make them lessons that students would line up to join in.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendum

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Here is a more detailed explanation of Bayes Theory. Don’t be put off by the Math as the concept is more important if you are new to it.

I guess I should allow for the word “belief” and not just “understanding” as I think we all know the I don’t mean religious belief, i.e. belief that is not open to revision.

Another example:

Think of Bayes’ Theorem as a smart way to update what you believe based on new evidence.

You’re in your house, and you hear a strange noise in the middle of the night. Your brain instantly starts asking: “Is it a burglar, or just my cat knocking things over?”

Before hearing the noise, you already have some general beliefs:

Burglars are rare (it doesn’t happen often).
Your cat is clumsy (it knocks things over all the time).
Now, you hear the noise—new evidence! You need to update your belief.

If it was a burglar, you’d expect certain things: footsteps, doors creaking, maybe a window breaking.
If it was your cat, you’d expect a crash, a meow, and maybe some scrambling.
Your brain automatically weighs these possibilities using something like Bayes’ Theorem:

If the noise was loud but had a “cat-like” quality, you lean toward “probably the cat” because that’s the most likely explanation.
If you also hear footsteps, you might start shifting toward “maybe an intruder” because now there’s stronger evidence for that possibility.
Bayes’ Theorem helps you adjust your belief as new evidence comes in. It doesn’t give a final answer—just better probabilities based on what you knew before and what you’ve just learned.

In brief:

Your initial belief (before evidence) + new evidence = updated belief.

That’s Bayes’ Theorem in a nutshell—a logical way to update what we believe based on new information.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Introduction to formal and informal fallacies.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Wordle 1,346 3/6*

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⬛⬛⬛🟨🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Bayes in action!!

[UnseenParticipant]

“When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.) / It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.” — Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sec. 141-42

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Your initial belief (before evidence) + new evidence = updated belief.

That sounds very reasonable.

Unseen wrote:

It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.” — Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sec. 141-42

That’s good too.  If there is a system, people can learn the system from all kinds of angles and come up with their own knowledge about it.

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