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On 07/08/2012 06:06 AM, Jeff Bigler wrote:
Perhaps my engineering bias is showing, but why not explicitly teach
students about making assumptions:
2. What assumptions are usually good in the "real-life" situations most
of us encounter on a day-to-day basis?
3. Which additional assumptions are we making in order to simplify the
problem, even if they make the problem no longer representative of what
happens in most "real-life" situations?
from the student point of view, the situation is not nearly
so cut-and-dried. It's necessary but not sufficient for students to
hear what needs to be done. The hard part is learning /how/ to do it.
There is a problem with item (2) in the list above. The problem is
that there are infinitely many assumptions that we make on a day-to-day
basis. It takes experience and judgment to determine which assumptions
are worth questioning, or even worth mentioning.
I emphasize that many of these assumptions are utterly nontrivial.
This is related to one of the fundamental rules for how to make decisions (in
science, in business, et cetera). The rule is to consider all the /plausible/
hypotheses. You cannot possibly consider all hypotheses without restriction.
Alas it takes judgment, intuition, and common sense to decide what's plausible
and what's not.
It's necessary but not sufficient to tell students this needs to be done.
The hard part is teaching them /how/ to do it.