There used to be a set of Walter Lewin’s physics 101 lectures on MIT opencourseware; they’re probably still floating around on youtube somewhere. The very first lecture, he explained that his grandmother used to argue people were taller lying down that standing up—y’know, because there’s less weight compacting them when lying down. And of course this is completely ridiculous, but he does the experiment anyway: carefully measures the height of a student lying down, then standing up. On the surface, he’s using this to illustrate the importance of tracking measurement uncertainty, but the ultimate message is epistemic: turns out people are a bit shorter standing up.
He talks about this as an example of why we need to carefully quantify uncertainty, but it’s a great example for epistemological hygiene more generally. It sounds like something ridiculous and low-status to believe, a “crazy old people” sort of thing, but it’s not really that implausible on its own merits—and it turns out to be true.
Anyway, besides that one example, I’d say it’s generally easy to make people believe something quickly just by insinuating that the alternative hypothesis is somehow low-status, something which only weird people believe. Heck, whole scientific fields have fallen for that sort of trick for decades at a time—behaviorism, frequentism, Copenhagen interpretation… Students will likely be even more prone to it, since they’re trained to tie epistemics to status: “truth” in school is whatever gets you a gold star when you repeat it back to the teacher.
There used to be a set of Walter Lewin’s physics 101 lectures on MIT opencourseware; they’re probably still floating around on youtube somewhere. The very first lecture, he explained that his grandmother used to argue people were taller lying down that standing up—y’know, because there’s less weight compacting them when lying down. And of course this is completely ridiculous, but he does the experiment anyway: carefully measures the height of a student lying down, then standing up. On the surface, he’s using this to illustrate the importance of tracking measurement uncertainty, but the ultimate message is epistemic: turns out people are a bit shorter standing up.
He talks about this as an example of why we need to carefully quantify uncertainty, but it’s a great example for epistemological hygiene more generally. It sounds like something ridiculous and low-status to believe, a “crazy old people” sort of thing, but it’s not really that implausible on its own merits—and it turns out to be true.
Anyway, besides that one example, I’d say it’s generally easy to make people believe something quickly just by insinuating that the alternative hypothesis is somehow low-status, something which only weird people believe. Heck, whole scientific fields have fallen for that sort of trick for decades at a time—behaviorism, frequentism, Copenhagen interpretation… Students will likely be even more prone to it, since they’re trained to tie epistemics to status: “truth” in school is whatever gets you a gold star when you repeat it back to the teacher.