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drdan82408a t1_iuoto4j wrote

Science absolutely needs history and history absolutely needs science. One is how I make my living, the other is a hobby, but both are about understanding how and why things are the way they are.

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ProfessorFunky t1_iuoxkiu wrote

Good grief yes. Already stuff from 30 years ago is being forgotten in my line of work and the same mistakes are consequently being made.

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[deleted] t1_iuqsqxa wrote

If science from 30 years ago is being forgotten, is that really a lack of 'history'? Or simply bad science? Part of being a good scientist is knowing the work done in your field, but that is not in my mind the same as a comprehensive history of it.

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the_skine t1_iurfm3o wrote

A big problem is intuition, and the inability for people to accept that what seems obvious isn't always true.

Learning styles is a great example of this. The idea is that people in general, and students in particular, have different ways of learning.

Some people are visual learners (graphs, charts, diagrams), auditory learners (listening to information being presented), kinesthetic learners (learn through physical activity or handling objects), textual learners (reading and writing information), social learners (work best in teams/groups of peers), solitary learners (prefer independent, self-directed work), nature learners (learn best in natural environments or when lessons are tied to nature/natural phenomenon), logical learners (focus on patterns, relationships, cause/effect), and many other labels that add other attributes or group these learning styles together.

The problem is that teaching according to learning styles doesn't work.

That is, if you go through the trouble of determining students' learning styles, separating the students into different classrooms, and have each classroom teach the same material based on that learning style, then, in the more favorable studies, the students will average about 1-3 points of improvement out of 100 in 1-2 subjects. So a solid C student studying six subjects will get a C+ in two subjects, making them a C student overall.

This isn't talking about one or two studies, but hundreds of studies done over the last 70 years.

But still, learning styles is something you will hear about all the time if you or someone you know is involved in education. Teachers love to incorporate it into their curriculum, and talk about how they're "reaching more students" by presenting information using several different methods.

The most probable explanation seems to be that people don't have learning styles. They've just had a positive experience that they extrapolate into self-identity, based on assumptions about the reason for that positive experience.

But it's intuitive, so people will keep studying and incorporate learning styles into classrooms, trying to find a way to force reality to comply.

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[deleted] t1_iurrpd9 wrote

It took me a minute to realize that you are talking about 'education science', not education.

If I understand correctly, your point is that there is a hypothesis that kids respond to a particular teaching style because they have preferred learning styles.

Then this hypothesis was tested and shown to be false. Kids don't perform significantly better in response to teaching styles tailored to their supposed learning style.

But, because people are unaware of the history and want to push the narrative to suit their assumptions and intuition, they insist that learning styles must be incorporated into teaching, ignoring the science that was done.

This is very interesting and is to me is more like willful ignorance of a body of research than history of science per se. It reminds of how they tried to get rid of Phonics in Oakland schools because it was supposedly racist and then realized that the new political way of teaching reading resulted in delayed reading comprehension compared to Phonics. Phonics worked well for me and the kids I went to school with.

But all good science depends on high quality review articles in scientific journals to keep the field up to date. This is part of science itself. When people start publishing reviews that are incomplete and inaccurate, the science inevitably suffers.

So in that sense, each field has a history that must be maintained for progress to occur. I see this as separate from history of science written for general consumption. But it's a great point.

It's also true that science is subjective at first, and people try things based on hunches and intuition. But good science is always tested and assessed dispassionately before it enters the textbooks. So it is set apart from other things that way.

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ultranothing t1_iupbnfw wrote

>Science absolutely needs history and history absolutely needs science.

It's such an obvious question to answer that I can't imagine the discussion being anything more than a three-second clip of the lady going "uh, duh?"

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drdan82408a t1_iupbw7v wrote

I read the article. It was more academical than that, but that was the upshot.

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OtterProper t1_iuq6zry wrote

I believe you mean "academic" as the -ic does the work of the -al already, and has yet to reach the level of common parlance like redundancies such as "mythical", et al.

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EpsomHorse t1_iuqcdat wrote

> It's such an obvious question to answer that I can't imagine the discussion being anything more than a three-second clip of the lady going "uh, duh?"

And yet watch the protests and groans when you tell a science major he needs to take three or four history classes. And witness the shrieks of terror when you tell a history major he needs to take three or four science classes.

So I'd say it ain't obvious at all.

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GLnoG t1_iupfc7q wrote

You could argue science is a part of history. It was developed, and that process is registered in books; that process of development of scientific knowledge is history in itself.

Newton creating calculus is a part of maths history. Einstein coming up with relativity is a part of physics history, to name some examples.

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Pendu_uM t1_iupt9ok wrote

I thought it more like this, in science, induction or single data points happen and then is part of the past and is analysed, and through getting an understanding of past events, you can start to try and predict future data points. History in this sense can be seen as instances of specific events that can be used to substantiate a claim or theory.

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[deleted] t1_iuqszoi wrote

You got your history a little off. Both Newton and Leibniz are credited with inventing calculus.

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joef_3 t1_iurrnd2 wrote

Science without history degrades into eugenics so often and so quickly that it should almost be a legal requirement that every science-focused group have at least one humanities expert on their leadership team.

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rubberseatbelt t1_ivo2f2q wrote

I'm going back for my physics PhD, hopefully, but it's been decades since I studied physics. You know how I'm going to catch up? The history of physics. If you go through major experiments and realize that the technology and the times influence the thinking, in any discipline, it becomes a cohesive whole.

I think it was Richard Feynman who said that the universe doesn't see biology, physics, psychology, or anything as separate. They're all a continuum of the universe expressing itself, so to speak. It's only man that categorizes and compartmentalizes.

The idea that no man is an island goes even further. Nothing happens in the universe unless it is influenced by something else. It's all momentum.

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