My Favorite Liar (2008)

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/my-favorite-lia.html

by camtarn • 4 years ago

189 76 4 years ago

NickRandom• 4 years ago

An excellent article and an interesting method that struck a chord with me. I've been on both sides of the student/instructor podium and it seems genius level and would work well. His final move (no spoilers) instantly generated a 'what a dick move' response however. 9/10

Enginerrrd2• 4 years ago

This reminds me of a professor I had on numerical methods.

The guy was an absolute genius. He helped write some amount (a lot?) of the FORTRAN compiler for at least one of its variants. And... we used state of the art numerical methods. We had a textbook on numerical methods, sure, but this was always just a starting place for what we used. (To this day, I've got some numerical algorithms I coded in FORTRAN that can crush those from common libraries.) If you missed a lecture, there was no making it up by reading the book. You were SCREWED if you didn't get a really good copy of the notes.

Another thing: When lecturing, he barely glanced at his notes even in the middle of complicated derivations of error bounds and things like that.

But here's the real point of this discussion: He had a way of testing that produced similar results to what this article is talking about.

We wouldn't be tested on a general survey of the methods we covered in the class. No. We would be tested on just one or maybe two of the methods we had learned over the entire semester, and the exam questions would be a DEEP, DEEP dive into that method. (I had this guy for 3 semesters, always the same.) When asked what the exam would be on, he'd basically just say: "The numerical methods we've covered thus far". So you had no idea which method you'd need to learn to the maximum degree of depth. This forced you to simply study the shit out of them all. I mean, you had to know some really subtle things about the method if you wanted to get a reasonable grade on the exam.

I actually grew to appreciate this as a testing method. It was the first class I'd ever had where I actually really needed to study. And study I did. Every other class would involve at most a cursory review of a couple of example problems I thought I might run into. This class though was always a minimum of like 3 full days of complete and thorough review, in teams with the other students.

FredPret4• 4 years ago

Loved your post, but as an aside, this stood out to me:

It was the first class I'd ever had where I actually really needed to study

I wish we had a way of challenging every smart kid with proper material. When I got to university and suddenly had to try, it was quite a shock to my system. I could, in theory, have used the first 18 years of my life much more productively.

Enginerrrd2• 4 years ago

OMG, yes.

The real tragedy there is that how to handle being challenged is a super important skill. And many of our best and brightest don't get to practice it all until it's too late. You can't learn a skill without practice. That's just not how it works.

It makes no sense to me at all that children from all different backgrounds and abilities go through an identical curriculum at an identical rate. Like, have the people that set that up never met humans and human children before?

My sister has the luxury of home-schooling her kids. And so they all have workbooks they can go through at their own individualized pace. As a result, one of them, my 6 year old nephew is now at about a 7th or 8th grade level in mathematics. He just loves doing math. Can you imagine how long that kid would have had to wait to actually be challenged in math if he went through the public school system? ...And they're actively trying to get rid of advanced study paths for such kids.

aidenn06• 4 years ago

Aside from varying paces at which children learn, temperament makes a big difference too. I remember in elementary school, there was a subject I didn't like. Finally in 5th grade, I decided to try a different approach for one grading period. I did not participate in that subject. As in, when the teacher said to get out the materials, I instead got out a novel and read it. I turned in no work and did no homework.

When my report card came out, I was astonished to find I had a D (the lowest passing grade). My lesson for that quarter: it is impossible to fail at school (this lesson proved to generalize all the way through high school). At this point, I stopped putting any effort at school into something I didn't find personally gratifying. Most of my fellow cohort of "smart kids" were mystified by this; they would go through an existential crisis in the very rare event that they got a B+. Pretty much any of the straight-A students could have had almost-straight-As with 10% of the effort they put in to ensure they would never get a B+.

When I finally reached college, it became possible to fail, but still not particularly easy. I would skip evening exams to save myself the trouble of having to reschedule my weekly D&D session. I only studied when failing an exam would put me in danger of being kicked out of school (this happened maybe two or three times). I graduated with a C average.

I'm not sure what the moral of this story is other than to say that some kids will study no matter the difficulty of the material while other kids will not.

lazide7• 4 years ago

The difficulty of course, and the reason that doesn’t happen often, is it requires deep knowledge of a subject by the teacher and a keen and interested mind.

Hard material with someone who doesn’t understand it or isn’t interested in it just burns students out, or doesn’t go anywhere.

There aren’t a lot of people capable and interested in doing it for every subject, and even fewer interested in doing it for the amounts typically paid in school.

It is unfortunate.

barry-cotter4• 4 years ago

I wish we had a way of challenging every smart kid with proper material.

We do. It’s called acceleration. It’s not used because no one cares. The school system is not set up for learning. If it was students who were proficient at grade level could learn the material of the next grade up or two levels up.

https://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Nation_Deceived/ND_v1....

munificent2• 4 years ago

I'm familiar with this testing strategy. It has one major upside: It allows an exam to test the material in great depth without being enormously long.

But it also has one major downside: Students may not learn all of the material equally well. If the random point in the material space that the exam focuses on happens to be a point that the student didn't learn as well, the exam result will appear as if the student learned all of the material poorly.

In other words, the exam has higher random variance.

aidenn06• 4 years ago

This happened to me in my computer graphics class. The first exam had a multi-part problem where the first part involved quaternions. I was familiar with quaternions from my time as a physics major, but did not remember the professor introducing them. I reviewed my notes afterwards and found that he did in fact mention them in passing in a lecture two weeks previous to the exam, but did not call particular attention to them nor did he assign any homework involving them.

shard• 4 years ago

Going the opposite way, here's a story of an electrical engineering class I had in college. The class subject was a slightly off-the-main-path course, taught by a visiting professor from overseas. It involved deep analysis of electrical circuits with some heavy math. At the final exam, the first thing I noticed was how thin the exam packet was. It was a harrowing experience when I opened the exam -- it consisted of exactly one question. As it turned out, it required using nearly everything we learned during the course to solve that one question, which I thought was a fascinating if scary way to test students, as forgetting one of the methods taught could block progress.

MontagFTB2• 4 years ago

UCLA used to have a tour for incoming students during summer orientation. At the beginning of the tour, the guide would inform the students that they were about to hear some pretty wild stories about the campus, but that only one of the claims was a lie. Over the hour-long tour, some pretty wild claims were floated (this building had to be rotated to reduce sunset glare hitting the 405, or that fountain was sabotaged during its design to look like a toilet, or that sculpture is entirely made of ear wax.) At the end of the tour the lie was finally revealed: that they were all lies, and the original claim itself was false.

cortesoft• 4 years ago

Oh man, I still remember that from my tour 21 years ago. That whole orientation was such a magical moment in my life.

MontagFTB2• 4 years ago

I was a fourth year in 2001- glad to hear they were giving the same tour then!

JKCalhoun2• 4 years ago

My problem with find the lie, like the NPR game show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me", is that the lies are often more interesting than the truth and can be the thing that sticks with you.

That does not sound like it would promote good teaching.

elliottkember• 4 years ago

Well, adding interesting things to your lesson would make the whole lecture more interesting, no matter whether they are lies. The other information gets in, because you're listening intently for the next outlandish thing.

_moof• 4 years ago

As tempting as this method sounds I'd be reluctant to employ it for the simple fact that the things you learn first (in this case the lies) are more likely to stick than the corrections. That's not the only factor in learning, obviously, and boy can I appreciate frustration around motivating people to engage with material more actively. Still, the principle of primacy gives me pause.

I wonder how much of the effect is due merely to increased attention from the novelty. What I mean is, could a similar effect be achieved by some other method that grabs attention in some other way without introducing incorrect material?

gumby• 4 years ago

This is a classic parenting technique: kid asks about something; you give an obviously wrong or even absurd answer; kid object and says why (“but cats don’t float!”) and you can have a fun little Socratic dialogue.

For a true expert level example of this process, read the novel The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (no it is not science fiction and no, do not spoil it by reading Wikipedia)

jasonpeacock• 4 years ago

Random trivia: The author always uses "Iain Banks" for non-fiction and "Iain M. Banks" for science-fiction.

tonypace• 4 years ago

Good lord, do not hold up Frank's dad as a role model. [but you should definitely read the Wasp Factory. Wild energy beats skill, i think, and this is brimming with that]

SeanLuke• 4 years ago

True story. I live in the US. A [famous] colleague of mine was invited to give a lecture at a major German university in front of a professor's class. At the end of his lecture, the professor picked a random student out of the class, and the student came down and gave a perfect 1-minute summary of the lecture.

My colleague asked how the students could be so disciplined. The professor said it was simple: they knew he would pick one at random, so they all had pre-prepared summaries of the lecture based on studying my colleague's submitted lecture notes the day before.

thih92• 4 years ago

I wouldn’t want to participate in a course like this. I’d say it’s the lecturer’s job to explain a topic well enough so that the students can summarize it.

If students have to memorize a summary before the lecture then something feels wrong. Good for the lecturer, I guess.

arkitaip• 4 years ago

The purpose of great lectures isn't to regurgitate what is readily available in the literature or slides but to give students an opportunity to Q&A the parts which they don't understand.

thih92• 4 years ago

Funny but also disrespectful and manipulative. In general I’d prefer to decide on my own how much time I should spend on a particular class.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

This is not that uncommon of an approach. I had a calculus teacher once who pointed out that we, the students, were not being presented with the mathematical proofs that underlie calculus, and so had no real way of determining whether what we were being taught was reliable or not, and this was the case for the vast majority of applied mathematics courses. The point was that 'real mathematics' is all a series of theorems and proofs of theorems.

The same is true for physics, but there it's the experiments that are mostly taken on faith; who has actually seen particles rebound from the dense inner cores of atoms? Yet we all believe in the structure of the atom as presented in intro physics/chemistry courses.

As far as economics, that's more like theological studies than math and physics, so the true / false determination probably just amounts to looking up the relevant passage in the appropriate holy text.

OkayPhysicist• 4 years ago

A physics undergrad definitely includes most of the most damning experiments in physics. Muon capture for verifying Special Relativity, the photovoltaic and single-photon double slit experiment for Quantum, the spinning mirror thing for measuring the speed of light.

You definitely see enough that you don't need to take the models on faith.

lazide7• 4 years ago

There is still a lot taken on faith for quite awhile, as the knowledge to judge the accuracy/meaning of each of those is also built on a lot of theories and prior experiments which are not usually personally tested. But Physics as noted is much less so than most everything else.

barry-cotter4• 4 years ago

As far as economics, that's more like theological studies than math and physics, so the true / false determination probably just amounts to looking up the relevant passage in the appropriate holy text.

If your math is adequate to the task (basic calculus) I suggest you check out an intermediate microeconomics textbook like Varian’s or McCloskey’s[1]. Macroeconomics is less firmly anchored but it too is very far from theology.

[1] Full text of The Applied Theory of Price

http://deirdremccloskey.org/docs/price.pdf

RegBarclay• 4 years ago

One of my kids' high school teachers does something similar - not limited to a single falsehood per class period and bonus points given on the spot for students piping up and correcting. High schoolers aren't always very forthcoming with details about their classroom experiences, so this one teacher does stand out simply because they get talked about positively at home, so I'd say mission accomplished on student engagement.

hgomersall• 4 years ago

"And it turns out the first lecture was the only one with a single lie about there only being one lie per lecture. In fact, this being economics, most of your course is a lie. So long suckers."

bsedlm• 4 years ago

a exceptionally dry and boring subject matter, encumbered by complex mathematic models and obscure economic theory.

by this point, considering the amount of technical understanding around narrative, storytelling, and enganging media production, the fact that these matters are so dry, complex, and such a slog to work through, feels like a choice not to make them any more accessible.

munificent2• 4 years ago

Making deeply technical material requires someone who has both mastery of an uncommon challenging field and expertise at narrative, storytelling, etc.

For any given obscure field, the set of people who have mastered it is small. The intersection of that with the set of people who are great explainers is very small.

sandworm1014• 4 years ago

> to focus our attention – by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements,

I did this with some lectures (law, but to undergrad forensics class) and ran into a cultural limitation. A large subset of my students were Asian, kids of Asian immigrants. They had significant issues with speaking up when they disagreed with the obvious lies I told. They internalized the conflict and assumed that they were misunderstanding the lesson. Or they thought that I was making a mistake and didn't want to embarrass me by pointing it out. Then when someone else was brave enough to challenge me by pointing out the absurdity, these students felt left out. I really noticed this cultural limitation while talking about a historical US supreme court case. I said that the judges were wrong, that they were showing an improper bias. Then one kid challenged me saying basically "who are you to criticize a Judge!" He was genuinely offended and more than a little scared that I would so casually "disrespect" a legal authority. It had taken him a while to build up the courage to say what he did. That is when I realized teaching techniques reliant upon students challenging authority might not be the best idea for all students.

(I did explain that cases at the supreme court only gets there because someone openly disagreed with the decisions of lower courts. The western legal system is based on constantly challenging authority.)

phkahler• 4 years ago

> teaching techniques reliant upon students challenging authority might not be the best idea for all students.

That depends. Do you just want to teach the material? For some people the cultural thing is so strong they won't ask questions because it may imply that you're a bad teacher and offend you. You have to at least address it that much or you're not going to be able to teach the material effectively.

SilasX3• 4 years ago

I don't feel like that's a show-stopper. With some work, preferably in the first two lectures, you could train them out of the habit, perhaps by reframing it in a way that doesn't offend their habits e.g. ask them to say, "I have solved your challenge" rather than "this is wrong/a lie" which they have a revulsion to.

fartcannon2• 4 years ago

I really hope you didn't stop teaching them about lies and to challeng authority. That's extremely valuable, especially to people from countries with dictators.

sandworm1014• 4 years ago

Actually, I did stop. This was a lecture series about law taught within a forensics program, which is not the place for political grandstanding. When teaching law you always have to be very careful else every lecture devolve into debates re big/small government and freedoms of the people. Iirc the case I was discussing dealt with the search and seizure of laptops at airports. We needed to cover jurisdiction and encryption issues, not the rights of a democratic people to be free from tyranny.

jancsika2• 4 years ago

Are you saying you implemented the exact same game of telling a single lie per lecture and explicitly described the game ahead of time to the students?

sandworm1014• 4 years ago

I wouldn't say explicitly, but that is basically how most law lectures happen. You generally start with a basic rule such as the definition of a crime. Then you proceed to discussions of case law that explain nuances behind that rule. Rule: murder is killing people. Nuances: All these cases where killing people isn't murder. By starting with a simple rule, then proving that the rule is not simple, every lecture revolves around a single lie. That perspective on how every simple rule can in practice be expansive and difficult is probably the biggest and most useful takeaway of law school.

SilasX3• 4 years ago

(article tldr: You warn them there's one lie per lecture, and that focuses their attention on figuring it out, which necessarily requires a deep understanding of the material.)

The thing is, this rests on the (far more important) teaching skill of "presenting an actual, consistent, interrogable worldmodel to the students, rather than a list of isolated factoids to memorize".

If you don't have that -- if you're doing the latter -- you're just imposing a huge, tedious workload that doesn't translate into a persistent understanding.

projektfu• 4 years ago

Not necessarily. Imagine doing this in Chemistry... you could present a compound that acts according to the consistent world-model however the compound is intentionally described wrong, and as a result would not be acting that way and the students would have to figure out how the real compound act.

throw7• 4 years ago

Hmmm... on the first lecture we're not told if there was identified a "Lie of the Day". I presume there wasn't (which is cool), but if there was then that's kinda shitty.

scrapheap• 4 years ago

One of our lecturers used to ask the audience a question, but rather than ask if anybody knew the answer there was a paper airplane that he would throw into the class. The rule was whoever it landed closest to got asked a question. When he wanted to ask another question that person got to throw the paper airplane to see who would have to answer that one.

It hadn't landed near me until the last lecture and the lecturer said "Is this the first time that it's landed near you?". I replied with "Yes", to which he responded with "Damn, that was I question I asked! Throw the plane"

JKCalhoun2• 4 years ago

Reminds me of the "Arabian Nights Entertainments" tale of the slave that was a hard worker and honest – but for one day a year when he would lie. "Not bad," thought the slaveholder and bought him on the spot. Hilarity ensues.

pvg• 4 years ago

Recent thread from a couple of months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833984

Not so recent one from 12 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=959550

dang• 4 years ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

My favorite liar (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833984 - Jan 2022 (33 comments)

My Favorite Liar (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680424 - May 2014 (1 comment)

One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=959550 - Nov 2009 (58 comments)

* My Favorite Liar (Econ prof's lectures include a lie that students must find)* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124386 - Feb 2008 (2 comments)

spanktheuser• 4 years ago

I used this technique to teach my children about politics, business and governance. Essentially any domain characterized by imperfect information, imperiled by cognitive bias, or containing incentive for deceit. The larger lesson I hoped to convey was a healthy skepticism of purported statements of truth, including mine. But much as in the article, the greatest value lay in the boost to engagement and interaction with the material. My kids loved finding the lie almost as much as I loved planning them.

My Favorite Liar (2008)

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