I agree that “it’s really obvious that the instructor flipped the plate around and the students should have realised this as soon as they Noticed They Were Confused” is not the correct answer. However, I think that your suggested lesson isn’t quite right either—namely, the “until…” clause is superfluous.
Now, I can’t speak for physics students, at whatever level of physics education the students in the story were at… but for myself, I don’t think I could’ve generated the hypothesis outlined in the grandparent. (Or, perhaps more precisely, maybe I could’ve generated at least approximately that hypothesis—but only alongside a number of other hypotheses which would be physically implausible/inapplicable/etc.)
In other words: there is no way I could’ve solved the puzzle (without first learning much more physics, which presumably is outside the scope of the problem).
And this, in my experience, happens often. There is some phenomenon, and you don’t know the explanation for it; there is some mystery, and you don’t know the solution to it. And the rational conclusion is that you aren’t going to figure out the answer. You just don’t know. You can spend some large amount of time or effort learning and developing expertise in the relevant domain, certainly! But you’re not going to figure out the right answer by thinking about it, because the space of possibilities for what the answer could be includes any number of unknown unknowns: things that you aren’t aware of, and that you don’t know you’re not aware of.
Thus the rational response is to follow the wisdom of Homer [edit: actually it was Bart] Simpson: can’t win, don’t try. You don’t know, and you can’t figure it out, and that’s all there is to it. Either invest the considerable effort needed to research the subject matter in general and the problem in particular, or simply stop at “I don’t know”.
I’m not a physics student, but I absolutely feel I should have been able to generate more than one hypothesis here! I have definitely enjoyed watching science videos that talk about really cool ceramics that get used in building spacecraft, which can be glowing red-hot and nevertheless safe to touch because of how non-conductive they are. So it’s not like I wasn’t aware of the possibility that some materials have weird properties here. It’s just that I generated a single hypothesis—the instructor flipped the plate around—and was super-satisfied with being correct.
And maybe I get Bayes points for being correct, since “the instructor flipped the plate around” is the right answer (assuming it’s a real story) and “the instructor went to all the trouble of constructing a two-sided plate out of really weird materials purely in order to fuck with his physics students” is a wrong answer. But where I think I went wrong is feeling derisive towards the silly incorrect physics students who say things like “maybe something weird is happening with heat conduction?” and feeling superior to them because they were just guessing the teacher’s password. When, actually, “something weird is going on relating to conduction” is a thought which could have led to me generating and considering more than one hypothesis.
I agree that “it’s really obvious that the instructor flipped the plate around and the students should have realised this as soon as they Noticed They Were Confused” is not the correct answer. However, I think that your suggested lesson isn’t quite right either—namely, the “until…” clause is superfluous.
Now, I can’t speak for physics students, at whatever level of physics education the students in the story were at… but for myself, I don’t think I could’ve generated the hypothesis outlined in the grandparent. (Or, perhaps more precisely, maybe I could’ve generated at least approximately that hypothesis—but only alongside a number of other hypotheses which would be physically implausible/inapplicable/etc.)
In other words: there is no way I could’ve solved the puzzle (without first learning much more physics, which presumably is outside the scope of the problem).
And this, in my experience, happens often. There is some phenomenon, and you don’t know the explanation for it; there is some mystery, and you don’t know the solution to it. And the rational conclusion is that you aren’t going to figure out the answer. You just don’t know. You can spend some large amount of time or effort learning and developing expertise in the relevant domain, certainly! But you’re not going to figure out the right answer by thinking about it, because the space of possibilities for what the answer could be includes any number of unknown unknowns: things that you aren’t aware of, and that you don’t know you’re not aware of.
Thus the rational response is to follow the wisdom of
Homer[edit: actually it was Bart] Simpson: can’t win, don’t try. You don’t know, and you can’t figure it out, and that’s all there is to it. Either invest the considerable effort needed to research the subject matter in general and the problem in particular, or simply stop at “I don’t know”.I’m not a physics student, but I absolutely feel I should have been able to generate more than one hypothesis here! I have definitely enjoyed watching science videos that talk about really cool ceramics that get used in building spacecraft, which can be glowing red-hot and nevertheless safe to touch because of how non-conductive they are. So it’s not like I wasn’t aware of the possibility that some materials have weird properties here. It’s just that I generated a single hypothesis—the instructor flipped the plate around—and was super-satisfied with being correct.
And maybe I get Bayes points for being correct, since “the instructor flipped the plate around” is the right answer (assuming it’s a real story) and “the instructor went to all the trouble of constructing a two-sided plate out of really weird materials purely in order to fuck with his physics students” is a wrong answer. But where I think I went wrong is feeling derisive towards the silly incorrect physics students who say things like “maybe something weird is happening with heat conduction?” and feeling superior to them because they were just guessing the teacher’s password. When, actually, “something weird is going on relating to conduction” is a thought which could have led to me generating and considering more than one hypothesis.