Teaching Goal Hypocrisis
FleetingI try hard to be explicit whether I make unsure claims for the sake of the social bond or confident claims for the sake of teaching.
I always feel uncomfortable when I see situation where one pretends to be a teacher and makes stupid claims. To me, this is intellectually dishonest and in very similar to manipulation.
In that situations, I try to nudge people to make explicit the fact that this situation is more about social binding than increasing knowledge.
This is very difficult when the learner is one of my kids and the teacher has an authority, like one adult or an educative toy or book.
For example, when an adult tells my kids that the sun is a gigantic orange ball of fire, it tends to disturb me a lot. Trying to reason with the adult is in general worthless because per ends feeling cognitive dissonance (I’m an adult, hence I know what I am saying) and rationalizing with the straw man vulgarisation fallacy. We cannot teach them everything in every details, right? To me, this is no excuse to teach them stupid obviously false stuff.
Hence, I try very hard to teach my kids to challenge any form of authority and decide what they want to believe.
Unfortunately, challenging those authorities in front of them tend to make me look like the one that did not understand the authority in the first place and does not influence them into not believing blindly the authority.