I don’t think that the point with the plate example is that they should have guessed that the teacher cheated, but rather that if “convection” or whatever doesn’t actually predict what you saw, then it’s better to say “I don’t know” than to try and guess the password.
You’re right that that was the point, but the setup is still isomorphic to a deception-based magic trick, in that students were told that the correct way to explain a phenomenon is to simply search for the matching password, which they did. And like in a magic trick, their lie-grounded expectations were easily frustrated.
I don’t think that the point with the plate example is that they should have guessed that the teacher cheated, but rather that if “convection” or whatever doesn’t actually predict what you saw, then it’s better to say “I don’t know” than to try and guess the password.
You’re right that that was the point, but the setup is still isomorphic to a deception-based magic trick, in that students were told that the correct way to explain a phenomenon is to simply search for the matching password, which they did. And like in a magic trick, their lie-grounded expectations were easily frustrated.
You’re right that’s the main point of the story, but that doesn’t mean I can’t adapt the story to also serve my purposes.