They tried to teach my baby science…
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Confirmation bias
All of you religious nutters out there probably believe you’ve known this for some time, but I’m discovering that atheist/agnostic students can be just as unreasonable, pig-headed, irrational, rude, lazy and just plain stoopid as any given believer. As a regular participant in a atheist/agnostic discussion forum at my university, infantile debates are raging on vegetarianism and evolution, and some parties to these debates seem to have decided that - once they give up on god, Santa and the Tooth Fairy - their logical fortress can no longer be breached and they no longer have any obligation to even try to present coherent arguments. It’s all very sad and tawdry.
Am I an idiot?
This was the question I heard a student ask me 10 minutes before his supplementary exam, a week or two ago. Supplementary exam’s, for those not familiar with them, are a second-chance offered to students who end the semester with a final mark of 45%-49%. Seeing as a pass is 50%, the thinking is that they may simply have had an off-day during the initial examination, and deserve a second chance.
Seeing as he would have to repeat the entire semester course if he failed this supplementary exam, and seeing as he knew me as an honest person, and also as one not afraid of speaking the truth about idiocy, it was peculiar that he wanted to hear my answer to that particular time, where you’d presume his state of mind to be somewhat fragile. But the question was asked. Continue reading ›
Put a contract out on yourself
It will be interesting to track the success (or lack thereof) of this idea: stickK.com:
On stickK, you draw up an official commitment contract that binds you to achieving a personal goal, be it big or small. By agreeing to this contract, you publicly state your goal and commit to achieving it. Or, if grand public pronouncements aren’t your style, you can tell only people you select. Either way, you’ve committed to a goal and people know about it – so now it’s your reputation at stake!
To make you accountable as you work toward your goal, you file weekly reports on your success. (And don’t even think about lying — because you appoint someone you know as a “referee” to verify the accuracy of your reporting!) You also enlist as many Supporters as you’d like to encourage you, via the website, every step of the way.
If humans functioned as rational economic agents, it should be a roaring success, and lead many of us to find the motivation required to finish those Ph.D’s, stop smoking, eat less spam, or whatever. But as Herbert Simon (and common sense) tell us, while we’re certainly economic agents, we’re also very infrequently rational - often through little fault of our own. StickK provides an interesting thought-experiment, though, in that the first impulse that comes to mind (in my case, at least) is that - if I wanted to - I could quit smoking. But we’re often willing to leave that commitment in the hypothetical realm, and StickK offers a cheap, yet still incentivising, way to put your money where your mouth is. The key economic question that remains, however, is whether self-deception has a larger payoff than achieving one’s goals. For many of us, self-deception is so ingrained that we see little or no alternative to keep taking that payoff, no matter if it’s less than alternate rewards available. So again, we’re left with the essential prerequisite of escaping the circularity of our definitions of self. And this, fellow humans, requires a significant infusion of courage, as well as friends who are willing to tell you the truth.
25 years later…
I came across the last of these 3 images today, and was struck by the fact that I could remember the entire narrative of the Christian tract it came from - and also that I could still recall, more than 2 decades later, how afraid I was at the time. Today, it all seems so much more simple: if a lesson is worth teaching, would you really need to frighten children into taking it seriously?
