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REMant 01/13/2010 01:16 AM Report
The thing is that statistics as presented in the normal social science course has little to do with assessing probability and that's why I think students have such a hard time understanding it. In fact, it not only makes many unwarranted assumptions, it offers little in the way of conclusions.
IMHO, the reason in large part why we have a market society has nothing to do with Adam Smith, but simply because we cannot seem to live together in families and this does seem to be perpetuating itself, so I am a little surprised that under the circumstances ppl not only continue to want to have children and ply them with everything but what they need, a pattern not unlike our overseas adventures.
Prof Gopnick actually falls in a pretty long line of investigators of this subject - Piaget and Kohlberg come to mind - but on the whole as in other areas psychologists' ideas about this are far inferior to those of historians of ideas and religion, etc. The ticket to prominence in the social sciences seems to be to borrow something from these areas (usually without giving credit), which, of course, none of their colleagues knows about, altho I see looking at the Piaget Wikipedia article that a little cottage industry of truly bizarre notions seems to have grown up in the past decade or so.
It has been noticed many times before that we gradually stop considering all events as of equal weight and form concepts that in turn direct our attention. People, who think in terms of unique events are undoubtedly more like children. However, there are a passel of them who will argue that instead the more conceptual are the more irrational. Science is never what it seems.