Recently, I heard an interesting thing from an entrepreneur. He was telling me about how his company generates new ideas. They watch the market, and get an idea about which products might be successful.
And that those ideas are mostly wrong.
Sounds like a recipe for failure. But they're not. Very much the opposite, actually. The trick is, they have a lot of ideas. And they test them all. From the testing comes data, and from the data comes a decision about which products aren't wrong. A small fraction of them are right. (Roughly 10%, he told me.)
When they find one that's right, they go all in.
This is what we mean when we say we're teaching kids to think scientifically. Because in a complex world, our brains actually aren't that good at determining what's true. We're good at figuring out if that shadow in the woods is a tiger, or recognizing a face, even if that person has a new haircut. But it doesn't take much abstraction before we lose our edge. Smoking is bad for you? Washing hands decreases the spread of disease? More standardized testing will save education? These are things about which our "conventional wisdom" were wrong. But luckily, science was able to give us truth.
To generate truth, we need to look at data. And to generate the right data, we need to be good at designing investigations.
Kids will need this kind of thinking for the rest of their lives. They'll need to figure out how to eat. How to study. What kind of company to start. These are answers that cannot be googled. And "conventional wisdom" in these areas is constantly proven wrong. Have we taught them how to design an investigation to generate the data they'll need to answer those questions?
Without those investigations, they'll never have the benefit of this incredible thing science offers us: that's it's okay to be mostly wrong.
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