That’s teaching for you, the raw truth of the world can be both difficult to understand in the context of what you already ‘know’ (Religion → Evolution) or difficult to understand in its own right (Quantum physics).
This reminds me of “Lies to Humans” as Hex, the thinking machine of Discworld, where Hex tells the Wizards the ‘truth’ of something, coached in things they understand to basically shut them up, rather than to actually tell them what is really happening.
In general, a person cannot jump from any preconceived notion of how something is to the (possibly subjective!) truth. Instead, to teach you tell lesser and lesser lies, which in the best case, may simply be more and more accurate approximations of the truth. Throughout, you the teacher, have been as honest as to the learner as you can be.
But when someone has a notion of something that is wrong enough, I can see these steps as, in themselves, could contain falsehood which is not an approximation of the truth itself. Is this honest? To teach a flat-Earther the world is round, perhaps a step is to consider the world being convex, so as to explain the ‘ships over the horizon disappear’.
If your goal is to get someones understanding closer to the truth, it may be rational, but the steps you take, the things you teach, might not be honest.
To teach a flat-Earther the world is round, perhaps a step is to consider the world being convex, so as to explain the ‘ships over the horizon disappear’.
Only nitpicking, and I do like the example, but ‘the world is convex’ is actually less false than ‘the world is round’.
That’s teaching for you, the raw truth of the world can be both difficult to understand in the context of what you already ‘know’ (Religion → Evolution) or difficult to understand in its own right (Quantum physics).
This reminds me of “Lies to Humans” as Hex, the thinking machine of Discworld, where Hex tells the Wizards the ‘truth’ of something, coached in things they understand to basically shut them up, rather than to actually tell them what is really happening.
In general, a person cannot jump from any preconceived notion of how something is to the (possibly subjective!) truth. Instead, to teach you tell lesser and lesser lies, which in the best case, may simply be more and more accurate approximations of the truth. Throughout, you the teacher, have been as honest as to the learner as you can be.
But when someone has a notion of something that is wrong enough, I can see these steps as, in themselves, could contain falsehood which is not an approximation of the truth itself. Is this honest? To teach a flat-Earther the world is round, perhaps a step is to consider the world being convex, so as to explain the ‘ships over the horizon disappear’.
If your goal is to get someones understanding closer to the truth, it may be rational, but the steps you take, the things you teach, might not be honest.
Only nitpicking, and I do like the example, but ‘the world is convex’ is actually less false than ‘the world is round’.