The aetiopathogenesis of fatigue: unpredictable, complex and persistent

[JaimeS]

distracted by vague issues of metaphysics and mathematical equations (not to mention quotes about quantum mechanics)

My impression, too. Experience was needed to guide the direction of this paper in order to make it more coherent and cohesive.

And, without beating a dead horse, to axe some bits of it entirely.

-J

 

[alex3619]

As a teacher, I was always horrified when I discovered that what was in my students' textbook was simply wrong, wrong, wrong.

I discovered an error in Lehningers Biochemistry, a standard text. I told the lecturer about it. His reaction ... I must be wrong, don't worry about it. The error was blatant but was outside his field of expertise. Blind acceptance of what is in classic texts is a real problem in science.

(The error was a claim that all prostaglandins are made from arachidonic acid. This is incorrect. It is however fair to say that most prostaglandings (abundance but maybe not variety) in a typical person or animal are made from arachidonic acid. )

 

[JaimeS]

I say 'always' because part of middle-school science was seriously debunking what their elementary teachers and textbooks had told them. Things like, "the earth is closer to the sun in the summer", "the atom is the smallest particle", just... 100% objectively incorrect pieces of information they had been taught to memorize. Four years of students told me that mass is "the amount of space something takes up" because one of their elementary school teachers either hadn't understood the idea of mass very well, or had straight-up mixed it up with volume.

An individual teacher's error is more understandable. However, numerous times I'd read a line from their textbook and say well, that isn't quite true... and often, well, that's just wrong. Oddly, the students always seemed to believe me when I would explain not to 'listen' to this or that part of the text, but they were very exasperated by this.

Students don't learn good science from the get-go, and sometimes it's really hard to banish their misconceptions. According to one of the other teachers, some held on to the incorrect idea of mass-as-volume in their 11-th grade chem class... and refused to believe their instructor that year was telling the truth.

"I'll just continue to think of it that way, though," they said when she explained the difference, even though they could do research on their phones in five seconds that would objectively demonstrate that they were incorrect.

...this is beginning to sound familiar.

-J

 

[TiredSam]

When I was 15 my physics teacher tried to explain Einstein's special theory of relativity to our class, but he didn't understand it himself. When I pointed out an inconsistency in his argument, he said "I don't know, here's the book, you read it". I downed my pen and refused to write for the rest of the lesson in protest. For a few years afterwards I was under the impression that I had disproved Einstein's special relativity theory. Turns out I had just disproved my physics teacher's incorrect explanation of it.

 

[anciendaze]

Many years ago I had a summer job assisting my physics adviser in teaching a class of teachers who had gone back to school to get their physics certificates. The first time he taught this course he had said "These people don't intend to be physicists, so I'll start with something simple." The simple concept he chose was density. This revealed multiple misunderstandings about mass and volume, so he went on to explain volume in detail. "This year I'm going to spend time explaining area."

Added: to remove one misunderstanding which turns up when I tell this story, I must say that all these teachers had passed non-specialist physics courses when they got their original degrees. The purpose of the course was supposed to be to enable them to teach a subject in high school they had already studied at college level.

I have another great anecdote concerning a very prestigious university studying misconceptions in high school students understanding of physics. They prepared a series of questions with diagrams that would be easy to understand even if you had poor language skills. The goal was to choose the picture which would result in real life experiments with the apparatus in the first picture.

Just to see how well their test worked they gave it to students at this university, said to be in the top 5% of all high-school graduates at the time they entered. A surprising number of university students gave answers that were consistent with Aristotle's physics or the physics of medieval philosophers. My favorite was a ball shot out of a curved tube which kept curving afterward. This is something you can actually test, and I recall members of a high-school band doing so using instruments with curved tubes and available round candy.

One person who heard this story told me that curved barrels of guns did make things curve like a baseball curve ball. This is caused by a round ball spinning, and the behavior is significantly different from that described. This gets us into an account of a late medieval or Renaissance experiment to see if rifles used tiny demons to guide projectiles. One set of bullets was made of lead, which demons were known to like, another was made of silver marked with crosses and blessed by a priest. The silver bullets were less accurate, proving the influence of demons.

Very scientific.

 

[JaimeS]

When I was 15 my physics teacher tried to explain Einstein's special theory of relativity to our class...

I'm okay with a high school physics teacher not being able to clearly explain the Theory of Relativity. It's not typically taught in (American) sophomore-level science, and it might have been a long time since his college-level physics class that mentioned it that one time. I'm not okay with the teacher doing that 'I guess I get this bit, I'll fill in the rest'. If he wasn't sure, he ought to have said so from the beginning.

At the same time, anybody is allowed to have a bad day. Perhaps he had a fundamental misunderstanding, or perhaps he misspoke. Students presume that teachers are somehow inhuman beings incapable of having a brain fog moment or having a fight with their significant other the evening before. Can I describe the shock when students saw me out of the classroom? They seemed to think I was locked up with the chemicals all night, and the custodians released me to roam the halls every morning... They do not think of teachers outside of purely teacherly context, as being humans capable of error.

@anciendaze -- my favorite of these is a camera crew going around to college students at very prestigious colleges and asking where most of the mass of a tree comes from. The answer is 'the air'. The carbon dioxide in the air later makes up much of the mass of the cellulose, sugars, carbs, etc of which plants are composed. But invariably, most said "the soil" and some said "water", and some said "both". Because air is like, too light and stuff.

These were graduating seniors by the way, some of whom had earned degrees in the sciences from places like Princeton, Yale.... The point was that these students, while 'well-educated', still had trouble with assumptions and did not think logically. Everything they needed to know to answer that question was taught in their middle-school science classes, and multiple times since then.

I wish we would work to help form a more educated public, but I worry that we mystify science too much, casting it in this light as though a normal human would have no hope of ever understanding it. And, at least here in the States, there's a definite anti-intellectual vibe, though I notice less and less of that of late.

-J

 

[anciendaze]

@JaimeS

You missed the video made at a Harvard graduation which asked future American leaders the reason for the changing seasons. The "closer to the Sun in summer" view dominated, which is a problem when Earth's perihelion occurs on January 2. Now, if this had been done in Australia...

Perhaps that offers a convenient solution. Rather than the really difficult task of educating political leaders we could send them where their misconceptions would be closer to true.

 

[JaimeS]

we could send them where their misconceptions would be closer to true.

To the land of...

 

[JaimeS]

This one has stuck with me:

"...how far back into the elementary school curriculum do we have to go to get someone on the house committee on science, space, and technology caught up? Do we have to break out the papier mache and baking soda,,,?"

-Jon Stewart

From the bit where the U.S. House of Representatives didn't understand how ice melts. (The fun starts at about 3:00).

Seriously, we could probably do this forever, but perhaps we've gone off the original topic a bit. If anyone would like to make a thread on "stupid non-science", I think that would be a hoot, and if they do so, I hope they'll link here.

-J

 

[keenly]

Anyone promoting CBT is a quack. The NHS is ran by drug companies, and docs are taught by drug companies. Most could not find their backsides in a well lit room.