Dragaera

Sex, Lies and Textbooks (was: Favorite NON-fiction)

Mon Jan 27 14:22:39 PST 2003

> > What I want is a book explosing all the lies in math and
> > science texts.  I was really, really annoyed when I learned
> > the truth about pendulums....

This line makes me chuckle because I can see someone writing a
Lovecraftian short story on The Hideous Truth About Pendulums.

>Hmm... I'd be interested in that type of book as well.  Let
>me know if you find one.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with science education isn't the
propogation of "lies", so much (although there are a number of common
errors that school texts tend to propogate) but that science classes
don't really tend to teach the methodology of science so much as a
series of disconnected facts. [1]

As a consequence, most people tend to think of science as being a huge
catalog of facts about this or that without really appreciating that it
is actually a process and that one of the by-products of that process
is the production of information about the world.

-- Andrew Lias

[1] At least not until you get into more advanced course-work which many 
students never get exposed to.

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