This is a hard question to ask so stick with me. Sometimes science and facts are not intuitive at all (see quantum mechanics). However, there are a few questions in which both a child and an expert could give a correct answer but not someone with an intermediate level of knowledge. There undoubtedly other cases where the child or uninformed person gets it more correct than the intermediate level of knowledge to this day because science and expertise are constantly being revised and sometimes reverse themselves.
Let me give you an example. If you asked any child in 1980 what type of animal a Panda Bear is, he or she would have responded with ‘a bear’. A zookeeper would reply that it is a cute answer but it isn’t true. Pandas aren’t bears, they are more like cuddly overgrown raccoons. Flash forward a few years later and suddenly Pandas are back to being bears again even though that traumatized child was correct in the first place and will never receive an official apology letter.
Do you know of any other examples? I have a few other ones but they will spark controversy so I am more interested in what you have to say.
How about clusters of general symptoms, such as what is generally termed fibromyalgia? There is a lot of disagreement among experts, and even lay people, as to whether fibromyalgia can be proven to exist.
Yes, I remember the Panda example. :mad: I felt I was remembering wrong and crazy for awhile. Confusion with the Red Panda, which is closeish to raccoons?
How about blurting out trivia:
“What is the name of this third president of America…”
“Oooh! Oooh!”
“…n Airlines?”
Or when you overthink trivia answers:
Proctor: All right, here’s your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter–
Proctor: Wait, wait… just say slavery.
I thought of another non-controversial example. Ask any child how airplanes fly. The will tell you some version of ‘catching air’ under the wings because they intuitively understand the principle by sticking their hands out of car windows. That happens to be much more correct than the standard explanation taught in virtually every science book in America. The intermediate (and largely incorrect) explanation depends on Bernoulli’s Principle which states that lift is somehow generated by air magically travelling faster over curved surfaces than the flat surfaces below it and airplane wings have to be designed with those curves in mind to work at all.
That is false. There is such a thing as Bernoulli’s Principle but it doesn’t require air to magically speed up over the top surface to generate lift. That is impossible. It is a minor contributing factor for lift and can best be described as a side-effect of good wing design rather than a cause. Of course, that is all obvious when a child realizes that planes can fly upside down just fine without being sucked towards the ground.
The factor that makes flight possible is angle of attack just like the kids first assumed and not some convoluted theory about fluids wanting to be with their friends so much that they speed up to meet them. You can make an airplane with barn door wings if you have enough power. All of this was worked out very early and definitively but people with intermediate levels of knowledge get it wrong.
Sorry man, but Bernoulli works just fine for lift. They are perfectly correct about that. The only incorrect thing is if they say that air moving over the top has to move further, and therefore faster, to get to the rear at the same time as the air going past the bottom. “Equal transit time” is bullshit, but Bernoulli for lift is correct.
Don’t make me take my gloves off on this one. It wasn’t supposed to be the point of this thread. “Equal transit time” is the core point to all standard textbooks so if we can agree on that, we can still be friends. I already said that Bernoulli’s Principle does exist but it isn’t a critical component of lift. Otherwise, planes could not fly upside down. It is more about efficient wing design. Angle of Attack is the much more important factor and the one that is both easier to understand and the one that is glossed over for no apparent reason.
Judging by your user name, you probably take this issue seriously as do I but I was just using it as an example. We can take the nuances off to another thread if you wish.
It seems to be good to talk about here as it shows how lift is a great example of the OP. Except here, each bit of further knowledge and flip you back and forth as far as getting it right.
Bernoulli is a perfectly fine way to fully explain lift. The problem is that you need some other method to calculate the velocities to plug into it. It works even on flat airfoils or upside down planes.
Angle of attack doesn’t mean a lot on its own, but I take it you are using it as an introduction to momentum deflection, which is another perfectly fine way to explain lift.
The US Air Force teaches that lift,drag, weight and thrust are all the important components in flight. But hey…what do they know?
Some questions:
[ol]
[li]Can animals tell time? - Not as easy a question any many may think.[/li][li]Why is the sky blue? - Again,multiple answers any one of which will only be somewhat correct.[/li][li]When did World War Two begin and end? - Again,multiple answers depending upon your perspective.[/li][/ol]
Arguably medical diagnoses in general. A layman might hear the symptoms and guess the most obvious disease. Pain in your chest? It’s a heart attack.
But a doctor might know dozens of conditions that could produce the same symptoms. So he might conduct a number of tests to rule out all the less likely possibilities before settling on the likeliest one: a heart attack.
What state is the Statue of Liberty in? Any idiot can tell you it’s obviously in New York. Someone with a little knowledge knows that Liberty Island must be in New Jersey because it’s to the west of the state boundary (which runs down the middle of the Hudson). Somebody with a lot of knowledge knows that Liberty Island, although entirely surrounded by New Jersey waters, is nevertheless part of New York state.
Yeah, they thought it was related to the Red Panda, so called it the Giant Panda. But they were wrong, it’s a bear, so it shouldn’t even be called a Panda at all. It should be the Pied Bear or something.
This may be a controversial one; if kids get a fever they’d probably think it was a bad cold. Adults would call it the flu. However most of the time experts would diagnose that it wasn’t actually true influenza, it was just a bad cold after all.
Asperger’s Syndrome is no longer a psychiatric disorder. That’s going to be a head scratcher for all the people and families dealing with that disorder. I imagine many years from now there will be confusion over this.
Tripolar, I think those would only fit the OP if it turned out that the “intuitive” answers actually turned out to be true.
I guess you could say they are true if you keep going in a straight line, all the way around the Earth…but I think that such convoluted reasoning would violate the spirit of the OP.
For years after the REM sleep stage was discovered and recognized as when dreams occur, sleep experts refused to acknowledge that babies have REM sleep periods, even though anyone could see that they objectively showed the exact same physical signs as anyone else. Sleep experts were holding on to a weird bias against the idea that babies could dream.
So, for a decade or two at least (I think maybe around 1965 to 1980), someone with intermediate knowledge of sleep science would have been wrong about this, and any mere observant parent would have been right.
The rate at which different objects fall in air: it’s surprising how often someone with some science education will insist that everything falls at the same speed under normal earth surface conditions. It’s invariably because they are so pleased with themselves for remembering the counter-intuitive physics principle that everything accelerates at the same rate under gravity, they forget the very important qualification regarding air resistance.
Another one is losing weight through drinking ice cold low calorie beer: people with a bit of science get so carried away with showing off their ability to calculate how many calories it takes to raise ice cold beer to body temperature they overlook basic human physiology. Even Cecil gets this one wrong.
I think maybe Robert MacNamara’s approach to conducting the Vietnam unpleasantness sort of fits the OP. He steeped himself in facts and stats, and came up with formulae for a few thousand more troops here or a few thousand more there, while failing to step back and look at the big picture, to see what pretty much any ten-year-old could see: a mess.
People with a little knowledge will say, yes, of course, because it’s evenly divisible by 4.
People with a little more knowledge will say, no, because it’s a century year.
People with even more knowledge will say yes, because it’s a century year evenly divisible by 400.
