Note that the nearer side feeling colder than the farther side is be completely possible.
The key is that they didn’t check the temperatures of each side with a thermometer, butwith their hands. And your hands don’t feel temperature directly, they feel heat conduction. If you have a cake and a baking tin that are the same temperature, the metal will feel hotter because it is more conductive.
If I wanted to achieve the effect described here without flipping trickery, I might make the side near the radiator out of a very nonconductive plastic (painted to look like metal), and the side further away out of a very thermally conductive metal. It seems entirely plausible to me that once everything is in thermal equilibrium, the plastic would feel cooler than the metal, despite having a higher temperature. Of course, this would depend on the actual temperatures, conductivities, etc involved. But in principle it seems completely possible.
Suddenly the physics students don’t look so foolish. In fact, in this scenario, both the heat conduction guy and the “strange metals in the plate” guy are on the right track! (even the convective guy could have a point, if that’s the primary method of heating the far side). They are acknowledging their confusion, while trying to suggest avenues of exploration that might reveal an aspect of the problem they didn’t think of. In this scenario, the Rationalist who dismisses these answers is the real fool, acting as the curiosity stopper, just because they didn’t think of how hands feel heat. (of course, the ideal reasoner would think of both “different metal” and “flipped plate” as hypotheses).
....I’m a little mindblown by reading this, honestly, because I read ‘Fake Explanations’ when I was like eleven years old, and I really felt like it changed the way I thought and was extremely influential on me at that early point in my life, and I kept telling people this story, and also I never thought of this, and now I am strongly negatively updating against my own success at internalising the lessons here.
I guess the lesson from this is that the correct answer isn’t “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”, but “when you encounter confusing information, you should feel comfortable remaining confused until you have actually spent some time generating more hypotheses and learning more information”. The answer of “the plate was flipped around” is semi-obvious (it’s often the first hypothesis generated by smart people when I recount this story to them) and we all… stopped thinking at that point, and patted ourselves on the back for being so rational?
This feels a bit like it deserves to inspire a top-level post along the lines of “there is a second higher-level version of the Fake Explanations post, which points out that weird metals is a possible explanation, and if you laughed at the guy who was considering the possibility of the plate being made out of some sort of weird material and considered yourself superior for not being so stupid, then you should feel bad and go reread the stuff about motivated stopping”. Or something.
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.
Note that the nearer side feeling colder than the farther side is be completely possible.
The key is that they didn’t check the temperatures of each side with a thermometer, but with their hands. And your hands don’t feel temperature directly, they feel heat conduction. If you have a cake and a baking tin that are the same temperature, the metal will feel hotter because it is more conductive.
If I wanted to achieve the effect described here without flipping trickery, I might make the side near the radiator out of a very nonconductive plastic (painted to look like metal), and the side further away out of a very thermally conductive metal. It seems entirely plausible to me that once everything is in thermal equilibrium, the plastic would feel cooler than the metal, despite having a higher temperature. Of course, this would depend on the actual temperatures, conductivities, etc involved. But in principle it seems completely possible.
Suddenly the physics students don’t look so foolish. In fact, in this scenario, both the heat conduction guy and the “strange metals in the plate” guy are on the right track! (even the convective guy could have a point, if that’s the primary method of heating the far side). They are acknowledging their confusion, while trying to suggest avenues of exploration that might reveal an aspect of the problem they didn’t think of. In this scenario, the Rationalist who dismisses these answers is the real fool, acting as the curiosity stopper, just because they didn’t think of how hands feel heat. (of course, the ideal reasoner would think of both “different metal” and “flipped plate” as hypotheses).
This seems like a You Are Not Measuring What You Think Are Measuring moment. Link below:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kNxhKWvixtKW5anS/you-are-not-measuring-what-you-think-you-are-measuring
....I’m a little mindblown by reading this, honestly, because I read ‘Fake Explanations’ when I was like eleven years old, and I really felt like it changed the way I thought and was extremely influential on me at that early point in my life, and I kept telling people this story, and also I never thought of this, and now I am strongly negatively updating against my own success at internalising the lessons here.
I guess the lesson from this is that the correct answer isn’t “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”, but “when you encounter confusing information, you should feel comfortable remaining confused until you have actually spent some time generating more hypotheses and learning more information”. The answer of “the plate was flipped around” is semi-obvious (it’s often the first hypothesis generated by smart people when I recount this story to them) and we all… stopped thinking at that point, and patted ourselves on the back for being so rational?
This feels a bit like it deserves to inspire a top-level post along the lines of “there is a second higher-level version of the Fake Explanations post, which points out that weird metals is a possible explanation, and if you laughed at the guy who was considering the possibility of the plate being made out of some sort of weird material and considered yourself superior for not being so stupid, then you should feel bad and go reread the stuff about motivated stopping”. Or something.
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.