No, it isn't obvious at all and your example doesn't even correspond to the paper in any way. [1]
With GPS, it's easy to simply not pay attention. And if you're not even paying equal attention, then you're not even trying to learn. But that's not even what the study's about.
The study is about people actively trying to learn, first of all. It's about the rates of people who are trying to solve something from trial and error, not people trying to memorize a route they research or look up or are told.
But the study is specifically about discovering that choice confirmation bias appears to lead to higher learning rates, which is entirely non-obvious. In layman's terms, why would "assuming I'm right" lead to better learning outcomes? Traditionally, common sense tells us that prejudice or bias leads to worse learning outcomes.
So this is actually a quite interesting, non-obvious result.
I’m equally irritated when people label an idea invalid until it’s been scientifically confirmed and peer reviewed. Science is often about confirmation, not about creation. Many people are likely to have realized something long before a team of scientists got funded, figured out how to test the idea, analyzed results, wrote papers, published, and officially confirmed it.
The danger here is if we find data that goes against our common sense, we have to really consider that data, not reject it and rely on our common sense only. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. Having a study prove something by no means makes it definitive, but it does provide better evidence and lets us better know if our intuition aligns with reality.
Source: the work of Dan Ariely. His Ted talk is a good introduction.
The higher rated their comment is, the more other people likely intuited the same.
It’s almost a decent measure of how obvious the thing being proven actually was — assuming you could baseline it and compare it to others in a meaningful way.
Some people who started validating their intuitions with real measurements gave us steel ships, cantilever bridges and moon rockets.
These achievements were not a result of majority of people having the same intuition.
Can you expand on that? Who are these many people? Any examples? Lay people who have nothing to do with the field, simply intuiting results without doing the work to carefully rule out external factors? Or people without scientific training performing science without realizing that what they're doing is science ?
Thank you crazygringo2 for saying this.
"Obvious" is my most disliked word. Its reserved for 'expert' people (gatekeepers) who forgot what its like to be a beginner.
"People aren't dumb, its just that the world is a complicated place." -Professor Richard Thaler, thought leader of Behavioral Economics, 2017 Nobel Prize winner
As you can imagine, sometimes this ends up declaring the obviousness of things that are untrue.
For instance, it's obvious to anyone who has walked in a stiff breeze that it is impossible to sail faster than the wind :)
And the GPS analogy also suggested itself to me.
In fact, when the GPS gives me bad advice and I turn the wrong way, I seemed to have learned more from that too...
Personally, I don't get too wound up on people's opinions on psychological studies. They're fun little conversation filler, but psychology isn't a science.[1]
Plus, you make assumptions about what I'm saying is obvious and what the study actually showed. At first when I got a GPS, I even noticed the effect of not knowing where I was, so I even tried to pay attention in case I didn't want to use the GPS later. I noticed that even paying attention, trying to learn, you just don't engage the full set of neurons that you do when you're struggling to do something yourself. I still felt lost in situations where prior to a GPS I would have felt confident in my ability to navigate.
How could the study show that people were trying to learn when they were being told what to do? You can't control for that or see into their heads to see if they're making the same efforts in the same ways.
This study makes the same mistake of tons of psychological studies. It attempts to simplify mental processes or abstract them and then pretend that the simplification or abstraction stands in for some other mental process result.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/27/6422183...
I'm sure folks mean well but it stems from this thinking that science is some kind of truth generator. It simply isn't, its a method of investigating the natural world. Only when enough people independently verify your result, will you get _closer_ to what could be defined as objectively true. And even after verification, there could still be huge gaps in our understanding of a natural phenomenon. There is no guarantee that one group of researchers is going to present a complete picture. It may take many researchers studying the same topic over many decades to reach a scientific consensus. Until then, its simply an idea/ideas - which could be interesting to think about by itself - but its not incontrovertible truth.
And you lack the visceral experience why it’s the right choice.
A kid that grabs a hot stove will never try again. A kid who listens to their mom will.
If you ask for help, you're using someone else's systems, and whether they're right or wrong carries very little weight about how you should be approaching things. You're not producing a system, you're adding an item to a lookup table that you might someday use to build a coherent approach.
'Fire is hot' is a good entry for a lookup table, but you also need to develop a general model of where potential dangers are and that you should approach them with caution. There is no number of entries that equal that system.
I've always had a very, very poor sense of direction. Even if I I've been down a road countless times, if I approach it from a different direction I can easily become lost and turned around, so I've just relied on my gps to get me anywhere.
This is something I always figured must be due to something with how my brain is structured. Just a reality of how I've developed.
Then one day I travelled to cuba on a whim. Spent a week there with no phone service. Within just a few days, I had most of Havana memorized and could easily navigate it without a map, even intuit where I was by the position of the sun. It's like I unlocked a new super power I never had.
Then it hit me... the reason my sense of direction has always been so poor is because I offload that part of my brain onto machines.
If I go by myself even once, I will always remember how to get there.
This phenomen is quite common and pretty straightforward if you think about it.
My dad drove a cab in grad school to pay the bills, and even now his sense of direction (which should be relatively close since we share genetics) is relatively absurd; stuff like “I drove past this place 7 years ago I remembered it was a left turn here”.
So we might be slightly off track with the GPS example.
I think a lot of people attribute to "natural ability" what is often learned because many times it isn't obvious how those skills were learned. It's obvious everyone went to school to learn to read and write, it's not obvious a child learned navigation because their favorite game growing up was hide and seek.
London cab drivers are famed for "The Knowledge". You can see the physical change in the hippocampus from the MRIs. However, the physical changes also seems to negatively impact some of their cognitive skills, so there's tradeoff.
This research, whether they pass or not, results in marked growth in temporal and visuo-spatial parts of the brain.
It's one of my favorite subjects being a bit of a geography geek myself.
I think they also studied former cab drivers and found the structures to have shrunken compared to current cab drivers but still more pronounced vs non can drivers. I can't seem to find the source but I seem to recall this from a Stan Dehaene book
This does mean you have headspace to perhaps enjoy the scenery, or learn about other subjects via audiobook. IMO it winds up being a trade-off instead of a net loss.
When you rely on something to make choices for you, you don't learn but you are never lost.
I'm not disagreeing, just wondering which outcome people prefer.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS
* https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/12/another_apple_maps_me...
Following the GPS will not get you lost in the vast majority of situations, unless you then lose signal or your GPS encounters a technical problem. However if it does get you lost, you will be substantially more lost than if you had not relied on it.
N.B. I'm only objecting to the finality of the statement, I don't think you're going to get lost in most cases with a GPS.
Unless of course suddenly whatever you're relying on turns out to be unreliable.
For the GPS example, it's completely possible depending on the system to drift into an area without data access or precached maps. Your device you're reliant on could break. Addresses could be correct or mapping could be incorrect. Your device could lose power. You followed the directions from the decision and its "not your fault" but you are none-the-less, lost. Often in our society, when the decision maker is at fault, its those executing the decision who still takes responsibility and ultimately have to fix or deal with the decision, regardless of the quality of the decision.
I conclude, it's far better to be part of the decision making process, even if you're just executing the result. Not only do you often have more context to better inform the decision making process, as the one executing the decision, you also have some say in the direction of your future.
Of course, many people use GPS when they don't care about learning how to get somewhere, they just wanna get there, thus the use case is different.
I'm going to assume not based on your response since you'd likely learn the route after 1 or occasionally 2 times of doing that.
I say that because I work in an area where GPS directions are usually useless and often have to find my way to a new location based on directions, or by planning my route ahead of time. It works really well.
I lived in Bombay for 10 years and I know the nook and corners, all the way from the sub-urban to the tip of the city. I'm super comfortable at anywhere in that city and know my bearing, stores, etc.
Unfortunately, even thought I have been in Bangalore for an equal amount of time, I'm lost beyond my periphery. Even in places I know, I rely on the GPS just so I don't have to take judgement on the better route.
Particularly the device isn't something you bought, but instead built a "device internally", whether that's a fast-lookup or a turn by turn reckoning.
> When you rely on something to make choices for you, you don't learn.
My entire history with Calculus is basically "Here's a bunch of random formulae to memorize" and I could do that very very efficiently.
The goal was speed of solving a problem when learning Mathematics, but then you get to Physics classes full of problems without actual equations provided and then your memory just gives up throwing possibilities.
But once a crutch works, it works again. Unfortunately, the crutch only takes you to the bottom of the hill, no more.
And then suddenly, you're in a crowd of people who have made mistakes, recognize mistakes made and correct mistakes instead without an instructor. Sort of like swimming out to the ocean with water wings on and suddenly they start to deflate.
That's when this starts to look like a fatal error rather than an easily recoverable one & even if you survive it, you're stuck with a permanent impostor syndrome.
Are they dumber because they don't learn how to navigate by the seat of their pants? Maybe, but it's kind of like asking if they're dumber because they don't learn how to saddle their horse. The skillset is semi-obsolete in the modern world. They can save that space in their brain for something novel to the modern era, like which Roblox maps are the best or something.
But when I bike or walk somewhere it makes so much more sense, I can actually navigate in real time and think about shortcuts or plan a route without having done it before. It's one of many, many reasons why I hate driving.
When you engage in the decision-making process, you learn. When you rely on something to make choices for you, you don't learn.