So the big question here is, why are zetetic explanations good? Why do we need or want them when civilization will happily supply us with finished bread, or industrial yeast, or rote instructions for how to make sourdough from scratch? The paragraph beginning “Zetetic explanations are empowering” starts to answer, but a little bit vaguely for my tastes. Here’s my list of possible answers:
1) Subjective reasons. They’re fun or aesthetically pleasing. This feels like a throwaway reason, and doesn’t get listed explicitly in the OP unless ‘empowering’ unpacks to ‘subjectively pleasing’, but I wouldn’t throw it away so fast—if enough people find them fun, that alone could justify a campaign to put more zetetic explanations in the world.
2) They let you test what you’re told. This is one of the reasons given in OP. Unfortunately, not every subject is amenable to zetetic explanation, and as long as I have to make up my mind about lots of science without zetetic understanding, I don’t see zetetic explanation being an important part of my fake science filter.
3) They let you discover new things, whereas following rote instructions will only let you do what’s been done before. This is true, but I think it usually takes a large base of zetetic understanding to do new useful things. If I tried to create new fermented foods based solely on having read this post, I probably wouldn’t achieve anything useful. But if I did want to create novel fermented foods, I’d want to load up on lots more zetetic knowledge.
4) General increased wisdom? Maybe a zetetic understanding of bread ripples through your knowledge, leading you to a slightly better understanding of biology, the process of innovation, nutrition, and a variety of related fields, and if you keep amassing zetetic understandings of things it’ll add up and you’ll be smarter about everything. It’s a nice story, but I’m not convinced it’s true.
I think your list is roughly correct. But, put another way that feels oriented better to me:
It might or might not be that zetetic explanations are good. But what are the problems that Benquo is trying to solve here and how can we tell if they got solved?
People often learn bits of knowledge as isolated facts that that don’t fit together into a cohesive world-model. This is a problem when:
people are confronted with problems that they have the knowledge to solve, but aren’t aware that they do
people are confronted with situations they don’t even realize are problems, or worth considering as problems, because they were so disconnected from how their world fits together that they didn’t see it as gears.
a stronger claim may be that there exists a longterm, high level payoff for having a highly developed ability to integrate knowledge. (Partly because you have a whole lot of accumulated knowledge that fits together usefully, but moreover, because you have the ability to reflexively form theories and test them and use them effectively, which is built out of several subskills. (See Sunset at Noon middle sections for my take on that)
So the hypothesis here is that:
Most people’s pedagogy has room for improvement, in the domain of helping people to connect facts into an integrated world-model, and to build the skill of doing so.
Explanations that include cross domains, historical content, and connecting a concept to anchors that a person can clearly see and understand are a good way to improve pedagogy in this way
I’d perhaps add that that style of pedagogy may be good for the teacher as well as the student.
So the big question here is, why are zetetic explanations good? Why do we need or want them when civilization will happily supply us with finished bread, or industrial yeast, or rote instructions for how to make sourdough from scratch? The paragraph beginning “Zetetic explanations are empowering” starts to answer, but a little bit vaguely for my tastes. Here’s my list of possible answers:
1) Subjective reasons. They’re fun or aesthetically pleasing. This feels like a throwaway reason, and doesn’t get listed explicitly in the OP unless ‘empowering’ unpacks to ‘subjectively pleasing’, but I wouldn’t throw it away so fast—if enough people find them fun, that alone could justify a campaign to put more zetetic explanations in the world.
2) They let you test what you’re told. This is one of the reasons given in OP. Unfortunately, not every subject is amenable to zetetic explanation, and as long as I have to make up my mind about lots of science without zetetic understanding, I don’t see zetetic explanation being an important part of my fake science filter.
3) They let you discover new things, whereas following rote instructions will only let you do what’s been done before. This is true, but I think it usually takes a large base of zetetic understanding to do new useful things. If I tried to create new fermented foods based solely on having read this post, I probably wouldn’t achieve anything useful. But if I did want to create novel fermented foods, I’d want to load up on lots more zetetic knowledge.
4) General increased wisdom? Maybe a zetetic understanding of bread ripples through your knowledge, leading you to a slightly better understanding of biology, the process of innovation, nutrition, and a variety of related fields, and if you keep amassing zetetic understandings of things it’ll add up and you’ll be smarter about everything. It’s a nice story, but I’m not convinced it’s true.
I think your list is roughly correct. But, put another way that feels oriented better to me:
It might or might not be that zetetic explanations are good. But what are the problems that Benquo is trying to solve here and how can we tell if they got solved?
People often learn bits of knowledge as isolated facts that that don’t fit together into a cohesive world-model. This is a problem when:
people are confronted with problems that they have the knowledge to solve, but aren’t aware that they do
people are confronted with situations they don’t even realize are problems, or worth considering as problems, because they were so disconnected from how their world fits together that they didn’t see it as gears.
a stronger claim may be that there exists a longterm, high level payoff for having a highly developed ability to integrate knowledge. (Partly because you have a whole lot of accumulated knowledge that fits together usefully, but moreover, because you have the ability to reflexively form theories and test them and use them effectively, which is built out of several subskills. (See Sunset at Noon middle sections for my take on that)
So the hypothesis here is that:
Most people’s pedagogy has room for improvement, in the domain of helping people to connect facts into an integrated world-model, and to build the skill of doing so.
Explanations that include cross domains, historical content, and connecting a concept to anchors that a person can clearly see and understand are a good way to improve pedagogy in this way
I’d perhaps add that that style of pedagogy may be good for the teacher as well as the student.