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A comment on Do "interesting details" really hurt learning?.

Re:Do "interesting details" really hurt learning? by russell on Saturday January 03, 2009 @01:36PM (#418540)
Hard to tell if there is anything meaningful in the study. Like most psychological studies it used students as subjects. I am not surprised that the only thing they could remember was the remark about sex. Quite likely the "meat" wasn't anything of particular interest. Contrast that with a lecture to professional programmers on Hadoop. An OT story or remark would be just an ice breaker and not the main take-away.

Take-away here: psychological studies on students tell you something about students, not necessarily about the rest of us.

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Re:Do "interesting details" really hurt learning? by rp on Saturday January 03, 2009 @04:41PM (#418704)
The counter-argument is as follows: what better subject group for a study about learning than a group immersed in learning activity (i.e., students)?
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Re:Do "interesting details" really hurt learning? by ahoyhere on Saturday January 03, 2009 @05:20PM (#418725)
rp, in theory, that makes sense. But I think there's a category error possibly at work. Hung out with many average (read: normal) college kids lately? :)
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Re:Do "interesting details" really hurt learning? by ahoyhere on Saturday January 03, 2009 @03:08PM (#418624)
Agreed.

The same exact issue you cite is a major reason why I - as a usability professional - am always warning people against believing what Jakob Nielsen & others preach as a result of their usability studies.

I love the Overcoming Bias blog, so I was a little taken aback at how quickly they took this study at face value, & how nobody in the comments questioned the lack of connection between the main topic & the details, etc etc. That's not the kind of rigorous thinking I've come to expect from the blog dedicatd to dissecting biases!

FWIW, I wrote this blog post - but I sure as hell didn't expect to find it here on HN. It was simply the result of a moment of pique.

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