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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5050134" data-attributes="member: 4720">No offense taken.  My perspective here is jaded, I'll admit.Reductionism is a great way to start, but it's a terrible way to finish.  Out of the gate, it allows people to get their heads around the edges of the concept.  But it also ends conversations.  At the end of they day, Reductionism is the death of understanding.  (Spock) Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.(/Spock)Look at the world right now.  Every person with an opinion firmly believes that opinion is equivalent to an expert's opinion.  We tell people simplistic versions of the truth in high school and undergrad and let them believe they understand how the world works.  The bulk of them act on that assumption for the remainder of their lives, rejecting new information that contradicts strongly held beliefs that they understand the world.The result is we can't even have a conversation about facts anymore.  Facts are negotiable.  All opinions are given equal weight.  In terms of media attention and societal respect, the opinion of some guy who got a bachelor's degree before we had particle accelerators (and majored in beer drinking at that) is equivalent to the consensus thousands of physicists on what's likely to happen at the LHC, for example.People need to be a lot more realistic about the bounds of their knowledge, and the limits of their understanding of the way the world works.I've had tremendous success as a teacher by breaking concepts down to simpler components and building them back up over the course of a lecture or lectures.  But I never let people think it's as simple as it looks at the beginning, and I don't stop adding layers back in until I've hit the boundaries of the course (which I am careful to point out) or I hit the limits of current knowledge.  I actually find that to be the most interesting part, because engaged students start to ask a lot of good questions at that point.Letting people think they understand ends their thought on the subject.  My experience is that they promptly ossify their opinions at that point and many get dogmatic.  Ending with the open questions is both intellectually honest and invites more questions.EDIT:Finally came up with the right summation of this.  Claiming that we understand a world we demonstrably do not is comforting, but it's an illusion.  Comforting illusions lead to complacency.  Questions lead to thought and action.  I would rather encourage thought and action.</blockquote>

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