Re: No Exit & Sartre

In article <11g6pfpmsplne9c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Pat Bowne <pbowne@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>When I analyzed my own method of solving clinical case studies, though,
>that's how I did it -- by coming up with hypotheses right away after
>reading the first sentence. Then the rest of the information given either
>supports or rules out some of them, and by the end you've narrowed it down
>to the right answer.

I do that to some extent when debugging; I work much better if I
have a hypothesis to pursue than if I'm just chasing around looking
for clues. The great thing is to be able to *recognize when your
hypothesis is wrong.* Also being able to come up with tests for it
is very helpful.

>What seems to distinguish experts from novices in the lit I've read on
>medical problem-solving is the *number* of hypotheses they come up with in
>the beginning. Perhaps if Mary's tutee had tried consciously to come up with
>multiple ways of approaching the question at the beginning, he would have
>been willing to give up the ones that appeared obviously unsuitable after
>he'd read the whole problem.

If I have another such student I'll try this. But it was always
extremely hard to get him to let go of anything.

I'm not sure he ever got to genetic hypotheses; I had the feeling he
was stuck on "I have a list of arbitrary formulae. One of them had
better fit." I noticed that he did better on purely numeric problems
than on ones with any words in them, because sometimes he could
get a formula to fit if the problem was already laid out that way.

My students also have great trouble giving up a
>hypothesis if it's the only one they have, probably on the grounds that
>error is more comfortable than confusion.

I think tolerance for confusion is a key attribute for success at
science. If you don't have it, you'll always oversimplify down to
something you can get your head around; and this is a useful step,
but not if you can't move past it.

The most distressing comment I ever got on my student evaluation forms
was "Why do you tell us about problems whose answers aren't known?
It's useless and wastes time." The evals are anonymous, luckily;
otherwise I would have been very tempted to write back "Please don't
go into genetics. In fact, I suggest you change fields completely."

I do remember the first time my students caught me out, quite
vividly. Not just a little mistake, but a big hole in my
knowledge. They said, "If the immune system works the way you
describe, how come people don't self-destruct at puberty because
of auto-immune reaction to the new hormones?" I know the answer
now, but that problem had never even occured to me at the time.
They seemed to react pretty well to my telling them that yes,
great insight, that must be a major problem; I don't know how it
works; let me try to find out. But the bottom dropped right out
of my stomach at the time.

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@xxxxxxxxxx
.

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