I both disagree and agree with your high-school self.
Learning to recognize common failure modes, and developing a common language for talking about them with each other, is a relatively cost-effective way to improve the average validity of my arguments, in much the same way that reducing infant mortality is a relatively cost-effective way to increase average lifespan.
It doesn’t do anything to improve the validity of my most valid arguments, though. Depending on how reliably I reach that maximum and how high that maximum is, that might be OK. Or it might not, and an entirely different approach (like teaching what valid arguments are) might work better.
And the relationship between learning-to-X and teaching-X-in-high-school is of course a whole different problem.
All of that said, I’m curious: how would you go about teaching what a valid argument is, to a degree that “don’t trust anything else” is actually good advice to follow?
I do not know. To be honest, my high school self had a strong tendency to overestimate the rationality and learning potential of the general population.
Do you have any sense of how you learned it? For my own part, I feel like I learned what a valid argument is, to the extent that I have learned it, almost entirely by a series of negative examples. For that matter, I’m not sure I can articulate what a valid argument is in non-question-begging terms… though to be fair, I haven’t sat down and tried for five minutes.
I do not know how I learned how to argue, but I do not think it has anything to do with negative examples.
For me, it seems similar to understanding what is a valid mathematical proof (one which in theory could be expanded to following the logical rules at each step) but where you are allowed to make observations and probabilistic reasoning, all of which came naturally to me. I do not feel like I ever had any inclination to use logical fallacies, and I feel like I am quick to recognize when arguments do not make sense.
This is in contrast with cognitive biases. I feel like I am very dependent on parts of our brain that have biases, I will not be able to get past them easily, and can learn to mitigate them by being aware of them.
I both disagree and agree with your high-school self.
Learning to recognize common failure modes, and developing a common language for talking about them with each other, is a relatively cost-effective way to improve the average validity of my arguments, in much the same way that reducing infant mortality is a relatively cost-effective way to increase average lifespan.
It doesn’t do anything to improve the validity of my most valid arguments, though. Depending on how reliably I reach that maximum and how high that maximum is, that might be OK. Or it might not, and an entirely different approach (like teaching what valid arguments are) might work better.
And the relationship between learning-to-X and teaching-X-in-high-school is of course a whole different problem.
All of that said, I’m curious: how would you go about teaching what a valid argument is, to a degree that “don’t trust anything else” is actually good advice to follow?
I do not know. To be honest, my high school self had a strong tendency to overestimate the rationality and learning potential of the general population.
That’s a very fair answer.
Do you have any sense of how you learned it? For my own part, I feel like I learned what a valid argument is, to the extent that I have learned it, almost entirely by a series of negative examples. For that matter, I’m not sure I can articulate what a valid argument is in non-question-begging terms… though to be fair, I haven’t sat down and tried for five minutes.
I do not know how I learned how to argue, but I do not think it has anything to do with negative examples.
For me, it seems similar to understanding what is a valid mathematical proof (one which in theory could be expanded to following the logical rules at each step) but where you are allowed to make observations and probabilistic reasoning, all of which came naturally to me. I do not feel like I ever had any inclination to use logical fallacies, and I feel like I am quick to recognize when arguments do not make sense.
This is in contrast with cognitive biases. I feel like I am very dependent on parts of our brain that have biases, I will not be able to get past them easily, and can learn to mitigate them by being aware of them.