In Which Your Obedient Serpent Defends the "Students"

[athelind]

There's been a bit of a kerfluffle about a recent study about students who fell for a hoax website about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

Frankly, the article linked above is a shoddy piece of science journalism. As eggshellhammer pointed out, it doesn't link to the original study. Even worse, in Your Obedient Serpent's eyes: it didn't specify the age level

Comments

[pyat]

Well-written, sir, and well deconstructed.

[jirris_midvale]

Yes. Very yes.

The first place I heard about this was on some cranky old furry artist on FA's journal. It was him basically going 'HAW HAW THIS GENERATION IS SO STUPID' firmly cementing himself in the club of bitter old men who wear brushed denim pants up around their sternums.

I replied with this:
I think you missed the second half that talked about the continuing lack of schools being able to teach critical thinking skills. This isn't a problem with just young people. I've met many people throughout my life of all age groups who never even got the basic primer on that particular skillset. They never question their assumptions or look for fallacies in their own thought patterns and mental constructs. This lack of critical thinking leads to not questioning the sources of information and stereotyping entire groups of people based on limited experience with them. You're as likely to meet an old dude who watches nothing but golf and a news network who is convinced of utter bullshit as you are a 13 year old who assumes we've always

[pseudomanitou]

Deconstructing any article I post is fair game -- so long as the topic doesn't become a game of blaming the messenger or uncritically dismissing the information via way of the messenger.

Again, for me, I think even kids at the age of 12 should be learning how to call bullshit. I was getting just that kind of an education from a public school system in Indiana, and I thank the gods I did get it.

In an age of information -- where information shapes so much democracy and value -- teaching critical thinking is more vital than math or English.

[siege]

Which is why I agree that we should also be teaching statistics and system design as soon as possible. Critical thinking is meaningless if you can't take apart the stuff you're given.

[siege]

I find that the best way to learn system design is to design systems -- and I have a pretty broad definition of "system". Most people see this area as a business-oriented thing; but games are systems, and we speak much of the "political system", "economic system", "educational system" and so on. There is more than one design for these things, and I would suggest that to complete your understanding of system design, compare the systems in your daily life, describe their patterns, and see what makes them tick.

Not everyone can build a better system, but knowing how these systems are built, how they're supposed to work, and how they do work, gives a much better idea of what's currently right and wrong with the world at large. It also allows for a better grasp on how to make things better.

Proving the website is false would be tricky

[ab3nd]

The assertions that it makes seem to mostly be that the tree octopus exists, and that it is in danger of going extinct

Re: Proving the website is false would be tricky

[siege]

The Tree Octopus is also claimed to live in a certain region and behave in a certain manner. Thus you could more easily search only that region (provided it is accessible to you) and discover whether any such creature exists there. Also note the photograph, which displays a conifer.. do conifers exist in that region? Thus a corollary test may be performed.

One way of searching for "all the things" is to use available references, especially those which are exhaustive (meaning they say they list All The Things, as Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia do). If there is no tree octopus in those references, which may be more or less exhaustive, then one may safely assume that the tree octopus is either a newly-found species or is not an Earthly creature (one cannot say that a tree octopus does not exist elsewhere, but then, one cannot also yet say that life does or does not exist elsewhere using current scientific knowledge

Re: Proving the website is false would be tricky

[ab3nd]

I am a bit of a nerd, so while I generally use "proof" the way most people use it (that is to mean "evidence sufficient to convince me"), in cases involving science or math, I tend to stick to the more formal use (that is, "a formal series of statements demonstrating a logical progression from accepted axioms to a conclusion

Re: Proving the website is false would be tricky

[athelind]

Let's back away from the certainty implied by the verb "prove", and amend that to "provide evidence that suggests the site is false."

One thing that jumped out at me was the passage that listed reasons for the low populations of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus-and included among those reasons ... booming populations of its natural predators, including the bald eagle.

That's an assertion about a species that is well-known to be itself endangered, not a booming population. If I were taken in by the rest of the site, missed the "Greenpeas" reference, and wasn't sure about the veracity of the sasquatch links, that would have gotten my attention. It is also an assertion that is quickly and easily testable with just a quick Google search.

Of course, that same "quick Google search" on "Pacific Tree Octopus" or "Octopus paxarbolis" will immediately yield several sites asserting that the original site is a hoax, but that's so simple it's cheating.