How to help learners develop the subconscious knowledge that is the substance of our understanding

This post is a preliminary attempt to express some ideas about how to teach knowledge.

I imagine these ideas wouldn't always be applicable. To apply them you'd probably need to have a very good grasp on the material you want to teach, and you don't always have that (especially for difficult topics). It also seems like it'd be much more difficult to apply for more abstract knowledge.

Even though this post is itself an attempt to convey some knowledge, it doesn't follow its own dictates, for the two reasons given above.

We can distinguish between subconscious and conscious parts of our knowledge. The conscious parts of our knowledge are the parts you can consciously access. You can interrogate them with introspection, and they're what you can verbalise. There's also the subconscious knowledge that underlies those consciously-accessible details.

Think about what that knowledge enables a person to do. It may let them think about certain topics, draw certain conclusions, solve certain problems and so on. What we can verbally articulate of that knowledge is likely to be a pale shadow what is actually there in our brains that enable us to do all those things. There's a lot of subconscious knowledge that we can't consciously interrogate or articulate.

This subconscious knowledge is a big part of why AI and robotics is so difficult. Sophisticated AI or robotic systems would need to embody such knowledge, but we don't have a good enough grasp on such knowledge to be able to embody it (or much of it) in such systems.

The conscious knowledge, which we can verbalise, seems to "sit on top of" the subconscious knowledge, which is the foundation and main substance of our knowledge.

The subconscious knowledge seems to be what we primarily use when we actually apply the knowledge. When we're applying knowledge we're usually not explicitly thinking it through in verbal terms, and we couldn't verbalise those details if we wanted to.

Our understanding of the conscious knowledge (the knowledge we can verbalise) is grounded in the subconscious knowledge. We can create verbal definitions of concepts that are in our conscious knowledge, but our understanding of those concepts is primarily a matter of our subconscious knowledge. It is notoriously difficult to articulate your understanding of the meaning of concepts.

Despite this, it's easy to think that our knowledge equates to our conscious knowledge. For that's the knowledge that we can access. When we consider our conscious knowledge (for something we understand well), there's no obvious deficits to it. We can define the concepts that form it in terms of other concepts, and these in terms of other concepts, and so on. In this way, we can break down verbal descriptions of the knowledge into simpler and simpler elements. Once we've described the simplest concepts related to the top-level concepts for this bit of knowledge, we seem to have completed the task. Those simplest concepts seem to ground that task of describing the concepts.

But actually, as described above, there is subconscious knowledge underlying our understanding of all of those concepts in that hierarchy. It is because we have that subconscious knowledge that we can look at that description of the hierarchy of concepts in conscious knowledge and understand them. It's because of that subconscious knowledge that there doesn't appear to be anything missing when we describe the conscious knowledge.

Typically, when knowledge is presented in material like lectures, lecture notes, and textbooks, the focus is on communicating the conscious (verbalisable) knowledge. The overarching structure is to define the concepts. Within this structure there may be illustrations (examples) and exercises.

This is a problem because the subconscious knowledge is the substance of understanding. That's what we really want people to learn. Teaching them in a way that's focused around defining concepts is not a good way to get them to develop that subconscious knowledge.

While the person doing the teaching will already have the subconscious knowledge to understand those definitions, the learners will not. That makes it difficult for the learners to learn the conscious knowledge. And it's not what they should be learning in the first place -- the learning should be focused on them developing the subconscious knowledge.

This limitation of the teaching material won't be apparent to the teacher, because they already have the subconscious knowledge that makes the definitions understandable to them. (The distinction between conscious and subconscious knowledge, by the way, explains a lot of "the curse of knowledge", in which someone who understands some material is poor at communicating it because they can't see what it's like for someone who doesn't already understand the material).

But there's an obvious question here. What other option do we have but to try to communicate our conscious knowledge as best we can? By definition, we can't access our subconscious knowledge.

(We can't access it via introspection, nor do have knowledge of it from fields like neuroscience. We don't understand enough about how our brains work. If we were to eventually obtain such knowledge in an area like neuroscience, that might help in developing learning strategies, but it's not like if we could give someone a description of the subconscious knowledge they could learn it by reading that description.)

What I'm suggesting is not that we could or should try to directly communicate the subconscious knowledge. It is that the aim of the teaching should be, first and foremost, to present material to the learners that will best help them develop the subconscious knowledge. And this is not to present them the verbalisable conscious knowledge (definitions of concepts).

Here's how I think we can help people develop the subconscious knowledge.

The key is to recognise that knowledge is a problem-solving tool.

I mean "problem" and "problem solving" in very broad terms. I don't mean just things we'd usually label as problems or problem-solving. I mean that knowledge is there to help us do things. To figure things out, to achieve goals, to understand some issue, to draw conclusions, and so on.

Under the view that knowledge is a problem-solving tool, the bulk of our knowledge, which is the subconscious knowledge, is there for solving problems.

That means, to help learners develop the subconscious knowledge, we need to convey to them what the problems being solved are, and how the knowledge solves those problems.

The problem provides the motivation for the particular bit of knowledge. It lets the learner understand what that knowledge is there to enable. And we can show them how that knowledge solves the problem.

So we should always start with a motivating problem, and then present the relevant concept(s) for solving that problem. We should never introduce a concept without having first presented a motivating problem.

We should start with the most core of the problems and concepts. To do this, we can examine dependencies between the problems (and thus between their corresponding concepts). Those that don't depend on others are core ones. Ones that depend on others are not core ones. There may be multiple levels of non-core concepts.

And, we want to start with the simplest version of each problem/concept, and then progressively add wrinkles (special cases, or exception to the general rules) to those.

We should convey those details through concrete example scenarios that demonstrate the relevant issues we want to communicate (the problem and the means to solve it). And we should use a use a variety of situations to flesh out the learner's picture of them.

After we've demonstrated the problem and solution to the learner, such they have a concrete understanding, we can provide the names for the relevant concepts in that understanding. We should not provide their names until this point. 

It's less of a mental burden on the learner to do it this way. If you present the concept names up-front, the learners need to remember a name for something they don't yet understand.

The goal is to help the learner develop an understanding of the material. Teaching that's focused on concept definitions isn't communicating the bulk of an understanding (the subconscious knowledge). That sort of teaching puts more of a burden on the students' memories. The 'learning' becomes more of a matter of memorising and regurgitating information. The more extreme version of this is the "information dump". And not only is this the way students are taught material, but this broken picture of learning is built-into how students tend to be assessed, as well. So much assessment is oriented around recall of the conscious (verbal) knowledge. Like being able to remember facts and definitions.

If you can teach in a way that focuses on developing the student's understanding, it should put much less of a burden on their memory. Understanding will fix the relevant subconscious details in their heads.

The approach just outlined may seem inferior to the usual approach of describing the verbalisable knowledge (defining concepts).

Compared to presenting concrete problem scenarios first, as motivations for concepts, the usual approach of defining concepts may feel far more orderly, pure, objective and precise. Our approach may seem messier, less objective, and getting less at the heart of the knowledge.

I believe this is an illusion, that primarily comes from equating knowledge with the consciously-accessible, verbalisable knowledge. If you think knowledge equates to defining concepts, then defining concepts will appear to be how we should teach knowledge. But if you think that knowledge is primarily the subconscious knowledge, then we see the task differently.

Here's a brief example outlining how these ideas could be applied. It's not an example of the actual teaching material we'd present, but a high-level description of what such teaching material would contain.

This example concerns teaching people about relational databases. Unfortunately, if you're not familiar with relational databases, the following might not make a lot of sense. I chose them as a topic because they're something I have a bit of familiarity with, with respect to teaching about them.

The first thing we'd do is determine how 'core' each of the problems (and associated concepts) are. We'll use this information to determine what order to introduce them to the learners. We want to start first with the most core of the problems.

The most core problem that databases address is storing information. There's retrieving information, but first of all you need to store the information. And the most core problem to do with storing information that relational databases are designed to address is to do with unambiguous identification of information and the associated issue of redundancy of information. 

So we would start with some example scenarios that concretely demonstrate these problems. I'll go into some details of this in a moment.

After those problems associated with storing information, the next most core problem is that of retrieving information. Like of wanting to get different sorts of 'answers' about what is there in the stored information.

Retrieving information is less core than the first problem of dealing with redundancy, as the first problem has to do with storing the information, which needs to be done before we can retrieve information.

Perhaps the next most central problem is the need to be able to design a database to fit some situation. The sorts of situations we might face, and how we want to develop a design that avoids the redundancy potentially present in the information there.

Then there are many less core problems, associated with various more advanced or specific details that could be gone into after those.

(As an example of more specific details, in relation to database design there is the point that the abundance of Nulls in a table often indicates poor design. For the motivation for this we would provide an example demonstrating the issue. There's also issues like efficiency, accessing database information from within programs, security, and so on).

Now that we've determined how core each of the problems (and their associated concepts are), we know what order to present them to the learners, and we can figure out the details of how to present them. In the following, I'll go into more detail about how we could teach the knowledge associated with that first set of core problems, to do with storing the information. I won't go into similar detail for the other problems.

We could start by giving some example scenarios of information that may be stored. I.e. we would write down some of the information that might be stored. One of these might be information that a shop keeps about customers' purchase histories.

Then we would introduce the relevant concept names, like 'entity', 'field', 'table', and 'columns'.

We could give a couple more illustrations to help reinforce the concept names.

Then we could give some example scenarios that demonstrate the problem of being able to determine which real-world entity some information is about.

There could be an example of where there's customer information and where there's issues of determining which actual person the customer information is about.

For example, there are entries about customers and their purchases, which have the following customer names:

- Edward Henderson

- Ed Henderson

- E Henderson

it could be that the one employee added all of these bits of information, and they remember who these entries refer to (perhaps they all refer to the same person). But maybe they will forget these details in a few months. Or maybe a different employee is looking at the data and trying to figure out who each of those entries refers to. Is it the same person, or different people?

Being able to determine which person the information is about is important for being able to find all the information about a particular person. That may be just to see that information, or it may be for if we need to change that information (e.g. if that person decides to change their name, and we want to change all occurrences of their name that we've stored) or something associated with it.

Then we can give example scenarios demonstrating that, by ensuring that all entities have a unique identity, these problems are avoided. We can illustrate some of the different ways entities can have unique identity (e.g. a combination of existing fields they might have, or giving them a new field like an identification number).

Then we can illustrate why it is that information about the same entity may occur multiple times in the information we've stored.

In our example we can see it's because the one customer may make multiple purchases (on different days). So we record information about that customer for each of those purchases.

We can give other examples to show that each time an entity occurs multiple times, it's because it is related in some way to multiple instances of some other kind of entity (e.g. if a library tracks all the book borrowings of a person, that person will occur once for each borrowing).

After having illustrated this concept, we can introduce the name 'one-to-many relationship' for it.

We can present scenarios that demonstrate that where there's one-to-many relationships and there's duplication of data (like if for each purchase we stored the customers first and last names and postcode) we run into problems similar to the ones we mentioned at the start where the person's name was entered multiple times and potentially spelled in multiple different ways. Difficulties in finding all the cases you want, and in updating them, and where errors can be introduced.

Then we can show examples illustrating how this problem can be addressed by having a separate table for the 'one' entities (like customer), where all the information about the 'one' entities is stored. We've established that each entity should have unique identifier (say that each customer is given a 5 digit identifier). Thus we can just include this identifier in the 'many' table (purchases) and not have to include any other information about the customer in the purchases table.

So the only customer information that gets duplicated is its identity. The identity is something that shouldn't change, so we don't have the issues of needing to make changes to all occurrences of that same information (but even still, since it is unique, we can have the software easily find all instances of it and thus change them if we needed to).

Once we have a table that's just for the 'one' entities (in one-to-many relationships), the computer software can do things automatically for us

• check that each entity has a unique identity (and not let us add one that doesn't have a unique identity)
• check that a reference to an identity (in a 'many' table) is to one that actually exists (actually, and also that it's of the right type of entity, as we'll get to).
• we can also set up the software to automatically create a unique identity (like an ID number) for new entities 

(Having a separate table for the 'one' entity in a 'one-to-many relationship' creates issue of having to cross reference the customer table if we're looking at a purchase and want to find out details about the customer (like their postcode), which adds some complexity, but later we'll see how the software can automate this).

After having illustrated these details about identities, and referencing identities where there's one-to-many relationships, we can introduce the following names for the concepts

- primary keys (what uniquely identities entities)

- foreign keys (the references to these entities)

To reinforce the understanding of these concepts we've just named, we would then further illustrate them with examples.

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Related: Being able to explicitly reason about a concept is a skill. That post argues that learning how to reason about a concept is learning a skill, which means it requires practice. That relates to the present post in that when you provide the concrete scenarios presenting the problems and how the concepts can be used to solve them, you want to present multiple varied scenarios such that the learner can practice seeing things in these terms. And you'd want to give them exercises to do along the way, and feedback, as well.

News media present a misleading view of what arguments and knowledge are

An argument is meant to be a way to arrive as close to the truth as we can. It's a way of arriving at knowledge.

If parties disagree on some topic, and we want to evaluate their arguments, we need to consider questions like:

• for this topic, what are the relevant considerations for evaluating an argument?
• what is the evidence at hand?
• how do each of the parties' claims stand up to reason and evidence?

But when media outlets present disagreements, they generally do so in a "he said, she said" fashion. They just present the claims, without evaluating them. They don't ask questions to dig deeper, to try to get at the truth.

This lets parties game the system. If a politician knows that their arguments will be uncritically presented, then they won't treat the disagreement as an argument, but as a PR game.

The way the media presents arguments involves an implicitly relativist view of arguments and knowledge. In this view, there isn't objective truth or knowledge. The most fundamental details presented are just what different people say. There is no evaluating those claims, because there's no notion of truth implicit in this view of arguments.

The media is a major source of the arguments that people see. The view of arguments and knowledge that it presents informs people's model of the nature of arguments and knowledge.

The "he said, she said" view makes arguments and knowledge appear relativist, and as things that don't involve reason and evidence.

Considering broader details than specific cases in isolation

So many people are only able to consider specific cases (like something controversial that a person said) in terms of the details of that case, and that considered in isolation. But for so many topics, it's essential to be able to consider broader details that apply to the specific case (like free-speech). There are many many examples of this, across all sorts of different domains.

In part, this post is for me to clarify my understanding of this topic and to improve my ability to express my thoughts on it. It could be refined a lot, but my main priority at the moment is to just get something out there that's a starting point.

There are cases where someone has said something that some people agree with and think is good, while other people disagree with it and think it's bad (and perhaps even harmful enough that they think the person shouldn't be allowed to say such things).  Some people can only consider such cases  in terms of the specific details of the case.

They might see that utterance as wrong, and something that shouldn't be said. And they can't go beyond this to broader principles, that might take precedence here, such as free-speech.

Not only that, but for many people they can only see the particular cases in terms of their own point of view of those cases. They take their point of view on it for granted, as if it was a basic fact about that case. So say that they disagree with what was said. They believe that the case should be handled from the standpoint that what was said was wrong.

Many broader principles can't take a stance on whether particular views are right or wrong. They're above that level. Like free speech. Because if topics are disputed, who gets to simply declare what is the correct position? Whoever could do that would have far too much power. 

But these people can not get past their perception that the view in this particular case is wrong (or right). To them there's the issue of free speech shouldn't even come into consideration in this case, because the speech was wrong.

Because many people only view things in terms of the particular cases, they interpret recourse to principles in those terms as well. So say that in a particular case there is dispute about which position is right and which is wrong. They see that case in such terms, and they are taking a particular side. If someone tries to invoke a principle, like free speech or the rule of law, as being applicable in this situation, then who this person sees as the guilty party may, for example, be allowed to say the bad thing. Thus, invoking the principle is interpreted as taking a particular side in this particular case. Anyone who has tried to invoke such principles will likely be familiar with this sort of response.

Because they can only see it in terms of this particular case, if this case seems unimportant or trivial to them, but you're making a fuss relating a principle like free speech or the principles of fair argumentation, it'll seem to them that you're making a fuss over nothing. They won't get that it's about principles, that need to be defended in general. An analogy: if someone drops a chip packet on the ground and a nearby police officer calls them out, that person might respond that it's no big deal, it's just one chip packet and that's not going to make a difference. But they're focusing on that specific situation. Any one case considered in isolation doesn't seem a big deal. If every person dropped their "just one chip packet" on the ground, these broader details of dropping chip packets in general are a big deal. The police officer can't consider every case in isolation, they have to think about the general principle.

Other examples of such broader principles include due process, the rule of law, and principles of fair dealing people and of fair argumentation.

I mentioned earlier how people often can't get past their own particular beliefs about a matter, effectively treating them as something that everyone else should take for granted. This kind of thing happens in conversations and arguments as well. Where people can't past the belief that their view X is correct. They can't see things in terms of broader principles of fair argumentation. That you can't expect other people to accept the truth of your position on your say so (for that would require you do so for their position). That you have to argue why it is true. Too often people take the truth of their position as a starting point for how they think the argument should be conducted.

Being able to rise above particular cases means being able to handle more abstraction.

It's important because it's important for understanding systemic issues, and so many important societal issues are systemic issues.

At this point I can talk a bit about what broader details actually are, and what sorts of things are missed if you focus on specific cases.

If you just focus on specific cases, you're never seeing trends or patterns. You just see case one, then case two, then case three, and you never consider case one AND case two AND case three, and what that totality tells you. You don't see cumulative effects of all the cases. You don't see the effects over different time scales.

And it's not just the instances of these kinds of things over longer time frames, it's how the instances of these kinds of things play a role in larger systems over those timeframes. In the case of free-speech, it concerns how speech across a population interacts with political happenings and power structures. How entities will try to control speech to consolidate their power.

So far I've been talking about being able to look past specific cases to broader principles that apply. There's named principles, like free speech and the rule of law. But there are other kinds of broader details that aren't really principles (and don't have names) that you miss if you only focus on specific cases.

The broader details are important in technological development. If we look at technological development through the lens of specific cases of new technological developments we will greatly misunderstand the nature of technological development.

Any individual development can seem fairly trivial and unimportant. Say we consider some new development in video games. To many people that's just a development in video games. Just something in entertainment, and unrelated to "the real world".

But the broader details here include that technology tends to be fairly 'content neutral' and that technology builds on other technology. In terms of it being 'content neutral', something developed for a particular application can often be used or built on for other applications in other domains.

And technology builds on other technology. One small improvement in gaming might be something that can be built on in some other domain and used there.

And from a broader perspective, we don't just consider individual cases in isolation, but we look at those cases together. A number of "minor" developments over the years may together enable much larger and more significant developments.

There are other broader details, like that the greater the amount of computing hardware that is produced, the cheaper computing hardware will be in general. So things that increase the use of computing, like gaming, also contribute to making computing cheaper and more accessible in other areas.

Some kinds of technologies have an impact on several fields. Consider information technology. Information technology is a central part of most fields these days, so when we consider the impact of new developments in information technology, the broader details include the impact that will have within all of those other fields.

One thing to appreciate about information technology is that a lot of it is "content free". An operating system like Linux or Windows and their user-interface -- those aren't specific to any particular domain or particular use of computers. They can be used for pretty much any sort of use.

Algorithms and maths are "content free", in the sense that they aren't tied to any specific domains. Of course they need to be applied to the appropriate kinds of data, but usually this will not tie them to any specific domain area.

Pretty much all I've just said about technology applies to science and research as well.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post The value of basic research that argues that the value of basic research is usually considered by looking at specific cases of basic research in isolation ("what problems does this help solve?", and "this research is done to satisfy curiosity"), but should instead be considered in broader terms (like how we can't predict the value of individual stocks, but can trust the stock market as a whole to increase in value, so it is with research. And the value of basic research is less in what problems it solves, but in the longer term of what it helps enable). But note that when I wrote that post, I didn't have this specific/broader angle clear in my head, so that is not explicitly mentioned in the post.

Another case where we need to consider broader details to properly understand technological development is described in this post: The value of greater convenience at scale in technological developments. It argues that the value of technology "merely" adding greater convenience is greatly underestimated when cases of that technology are considered in isolation, and that they must be seen in broader terms to appreciate their true value. (Related to this is what I wrote in The intuition that vertical technologies are the way to meet goals in computing).

Government policies, like economic or social policies, need to be understood in broader terms, too.

Too often people only consider these in terms of specific cases, considered in isolation.

Minimum wage policy, for example. People consider minimum wages in terms of their impact on individual workers. They don't look beyond that to broader details of the impact of the minimum wage level. They don't consider the impact on companies who will be employing a number of people at whatever the minimum wages are, over an extended period of time. How will that affect the company's hiring? What sort of impact will different policies have on the economy over larger timescales?

Probabilities (statistics) also need to be thought of in broader terms. Say there's a million-to-one odds of something happening to an individual. Perhaps the odds are of them having a certain medical condition. When we consider such odds and focus on a specific case like this person, it seems almost impossible that it could apply to them. I believe that most people tend to treat such low odds as equivalent to "impossible", for this reason. But this is the wrong way to look at such odds. We need to look at this issue in broader terms, and realise that probabilities apply to a "population". There may be one-in-a-million odds that a person has this condition, but there are almost 8 billion people on Earth, so there would likely be around 8000 people with the condition. Could this individual we're considering be one of those 8000? Of course that's possible, so we can't rule it out. 

Another example involving probabilities. Say that, again, there's a million-to-one odds of something happening to an individual. Like having a dream about an old acquaintance they haven't seen in decades and then the very next day running into them on the street. Lets imagine that the odds of this are a million-to-one. Many people, if such a thing happened to them, would consider it an amazing occurrence. It would almost seem like magic or evidence of the divine. But it only seems that way if you're considering the odds in terms of this specific case of this happening to you. If you take a broader 'population-level' perspective, there's nothing remarkable about it at all. Say there's 100 000 people (out of everyone on earth) each night have dreams about acquaintances they haven't seen in decades. And say that those people each walk past 100 other people each day. And that all this applies every day of every year. Given those numbers we'd expect 10 people, every single day, to have one of these one-in-a-million occurrences.  Of course the numbers I've used are all completely contrived, but I hope the point is clear.

Evolution is another phenomena that is seen in terms of a specific case considered in isolation, rather than in broader terms. When a lot of people think of evolution, they think of the concept of evolution. This is the 'specific case' when it comes to evolution. And they think of how that concept is defined (in terms of variation, heritability and selection). But the picture of evolution in terms of this definition is very different to the picture of it in broader terms, in terms of the kinds of concrete processes that occur in practice, that can span very long periods of time. To appreciate the broader view of it, we need to appreciate the huge scale it can operate on, the gradual nature of the changes, and things like the specific sorts of structure that can apply to the evolutionary processes, like evolutionarily stable strategies, kin selection, and sexual selection. It is only by being able to appreciate it in these broader terms that we can have good intuitions about evolution. I wrote a post about this here (though didn't put the matter in terms of specific-case vs broader details).

How can people get better at looking beyond specific cases? I think probably by learning about systemic things. By learning about evolution and economics, for example. I think learning mathematics and programming are useful too. They force you to think beyond specific cases to the general case. And there's simply making a conscious effort to take a broader perspective in all situations.

I think this ability should be taught in the education system. It's very important. It has such broad importance for thinking about so many different important topics. Rather than just teaching topics that help you think in this way, like evolution and economics, it should teach the specific principle of always considering the broader details, regardless of what the topic is.

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Related: Chris Anderson's post The Probabilistic Age.

An authoritative source of current scientific opinion would be useful

[update: I've written a newer post that contextualises the kind of idea outlined here, as a way of helping truth spread in our 'information ecosystem']

I was talking to someone the other day who believed that Quantum Mechanics (QM) basically equated to the Copenhagen interpretation of it -- you know, the one where an observation collapses the quantum wave.

As far as I know, this interpretation is not very popular among working physicists. But I can't recall anymore where I got this detail from. No doubt it was from books I've read or things I've read in discussion forums, but I just can't remember.

I would have liked to have been able to point the person towards something online that showed that in fact most physicists don't believe the Copenhagen interpretation, but it's just not easy to find something that will tell you the current scientific opinion on a particular topic.

And if I can't reference some sort of reputable source, the person I'm talking to has no particular reason to believe what I'm saying.

Being able to easily find out, and link to, the current scientific opinion on topics would make it easier to address common misconceptions. A better informed public can on-the-whole only be a good thing, and surely this would also be helpful for matters of public policy where scientific opinion is relevant.

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I'll explain what I mean by a source outlining current scientific opinion.

Imagine that a high status journal like Nature did a biannual survey of working scientists to gather their opinions about various topics, such as which interpretation of QM they believe. They could survey scientists in different fields, asking them about topics specific to their field. For example, Cosmologists could be asked whether they believe the big bang theory is true. Biologists could be asked whether they believe evolution is true. And so on.

Obviously a lot of thought would have to go into the questions they asked. Since the results of the survey would be for the general public, the media and the government to use, you'd want it to cover the sorts of questions these people might have a use for.

They could put the survey results up on a web-site that you could search and find answers such as (to make up a statistic) "99% of surveyed biologists believe in evolution".

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The goal would be to have an authoritative source of such information. First, a reasonable proportion of practicing scientists would need to respond to the survey, so you know that the statistics it provides are representative. Hopefully scientists would be willing to respond to the survey, as a kind of public service.

Second, it would need to be a "brand" that was known to be reputable. So that if you presented a fact like "99% of surveyed biologists believe in evolution", linking to this source, the people seeing it would recognise that site and know what it's about and believe that it is reputable. (Obviously this is just an ideal. It couldn't just start out with that reputation, and it could never have that reputation for everyone in the population).

A goal for education: giving people confidence in their learning ability

Too many adults fear learning. They think they can't do it. I think a lot of this comes from their school experience.

I think education should have the explicit goal of preventing this fear. Of course, this shouldn't be the only goal of education, but I think it should be there to instill people with confidence that they actually can learn about things, so that they will feel able to learn new things on their own later in life.

This doesn't mean having some lame attempt to simply tell students they can learn things, nor does it mean just getting them to believe they can. (I'm thinking of the lame way that self-esteem seems to be taught - or at least how it was taught in my school). Just telling people how they should feel doesn't do anything.

People actually need to successfully learn things. Only then will be able to build confidence. Then they'll genuinely know that they can do it.

I'm not saying it's practical to do a perfect job at this, I'm just saying it is an area we should target and try and do better at. From my experience of schooling, I don't think this was a terribly high priority. It seemed to be more about grading people.

People also need to appreciate that learning things can be difficult, that there can be extended periods of pain with no apparent progress before finally getting over the hump. That's probably a separate matter, and perhaps one that is harder to get people to appreciate. It's one that is especially applicable to when people head out into the "real world".