The idea of “purposefully telling people incorrect information to make them learn even faster than by giving them correct information” feels like rationalization. I strongly doubt that people who claim to use this method actually bother measuring its efficiency. It is probably more like: “I gave them wrong information, some students came to the right conclusion anyway, which proves that I am a fantastic teacher, and other students came to a wrong conclusion, which proves that those students were stupid and unworthy of my time.” Congratulations, now the teacher can do nothing wrong!
The goal of abstruse writing (if done intentionally, as opposed to merely lacking the skill to write clearly) is to avoid falsification. If my belief is never stated explicitly, and I only give you vague hints, you can never prove me wrong. Even if you guess correctly that I believe X, and then you write an argument about why X is false, I still have an option to deny believing X, and can in turn accuse you of strawmaning me (and being too stupid to understand the true depths of my thinking). If my writing becomes popular, I can let other people steelman my ideas, and then wisely smile and say “yes, that was a part of the deep wisdom I wanted to convey, but it goes even deeper than that”, taking credit for their work and making them happy by doing so.
purposefully telling people incorrect information to make them learn even faster than by giving them correct information
For what it’s worth I think this is a poor characterization of the point (although I know it’s stated in so many words in the post). It’s not that you want to tell people things that you know are wrong so much as prod folks into engaging with their confusion, and a way to do that is to sometimes deliberately ask them to lean into that confusion by serving it up to them to be seen clearly. Done skillfully this doesn’t necessarily mean telling people things you believe to be incorrect (although making “mistakes” or telling folks there are deliberate inaccuracies in something to get them to look for it is a well-worn technique that can work well if done well), but it may mean doing things like working through the implications of what someone claims until you reach the point where it runs into trouble or asking them to do something that you know will force them to grapple with their misunderstanding because they wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise.
Yet it’s a fair point to call out that there’s a different between chaos and skillfully applied chaos to a purpose, and the former would look like what you seem to be concerned with while the latter is more the intention of the post as I read it.
The idea of “purposefully telling people incorrect information to make them learn even faster than by giving them correct information” feels like rationalization. I strongly doubt that people who claim to use this method actually bother measuring its efficiency. It is probably more like: “I gave them wrong information, some students came to the right conclusion anyway, which proves that I am a fantastic teacher, and other students came to a wrong conclusion, which proves that those students were stupid and unworthy of my time.” Congratulations, now the teacher can do nothing wrong!
The goal of abstruse writing (if done intentionally, as opposed to merely lacking the skill to write clearly) is to avoid falsification. If my belief is never stated explicitly, and I only give you vague hints, you can never prove me wrong. Even if you guess correctly that I believe X, and then you write an argument about why X is false, I still have an option to deny believing X, and can in turn accuse you of strawmaning me (and being too stupid to understand the true depths of my thinking). If my writing becomes popular, I can let other people steelman my ideas, and then wisely smile and say “yes, that was a part of the deep wisdom I wanted to convey, but it goes even deeper than that”, taking credit for their work and making them happy by doing so.
For what it’s worth I think this is a poor characterization of the point (although I know it’s stated in so many words in the post). It’s not that you want to tell people things that you know are wrong so much as prod folks into engaging with their confusion, and a way to do that is to sometimes deliberately ask them to lean into that confusion by serving it up to them to be seen clearly. Done skillfully this doesn’t necessarily mean telling people things you believe to be incorrect (although making “mistakes” or telling folks there are deliberate inaccuracies in something to get them to look for it is a well-worn technique that can work well if done well), but it may mean doing things like working through the implications of what someone claims until you reach the point where it runs into trouble or asking them to do something that you know will force them to grapple with their misunderstanding because they wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise.
Yet it’s a fair point to call out that there’s a different between chaos and skillfully applied chaos to a purpose, and the former would look like what you seem to be concerned with while the latter is more the intention of the post as I read it.