How to learn SD SD0218)

["William H. Cutler" <72734.3452@]

To the SD Community,

Much dialog goes on about the best way to teach SD, and the value of various
levels of understanding, from blind faith in a black box through simulations
built out of functional icons to mastery of the underlying math. I think wed
all agree that faith in black boxes is very dangerous. There is much advocacy
of hands-on learning which I believe is very important since little real insight
can occur without developing a feel for how things work. However, I saw a
recent comment in print criticizing sole reliance on the hands-on over book
learning. The problem is, there is too much ground to cover conceptually to get
it all hands-on. Further, hands-on may never give the experience of
discovering/creating the deep theory which ties together a wide range of
seemingly unrelated surface phenomena.

Example: a recent posting about teaching SD to school children had praise for
experiments with cups of hot water, leading to discovery of Newtons law of
cooling. Thats good from the standpoint of establishing powers of observation
and curiosity about underlying principles, but it wont show why the cooling
obeys an exponential relationship, or why the same exponential behavior occurs
in wide range of situations, or why exponential behavior is just a specific case
of a much more general set of problems with transcendental function solutions.
In other words, knowing how to construct a deep theory and express it in some
abstract language is important too.

A related point: the body of knowledge needed for successful life in the complex
post-modern world is just too big to get it all by experiment. We have to get
most of it from other people, and we have to have the tools to evaluate whether
what we are getting is valid or garbage.

Regards,
Bill Cutler
4114 Park Blvd.
Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA
415-493-8715
72734.3452@compuserve.com