I also agree that my students don’t actually think that things cause themselves — although I do wonder what it means when they say “that’s just the way it is” (another mission for this year: find an opportunity to unpack that). Although they probably don’t think it, they sometimes act as though they think it. It’s something I’m trying to get better at noticing and describing.

RE: making sense of mechanisms rather than focusing on definitions… I don’t have much patience for students memorizing definitions. But I’ve got lots of time for students doing the work of defining — and it seems like it is part of the process of sense-making. What is a description that has just the right scope to include all things we want to include, while also excluding all the things we want to exclude? Do we even understand the mechanism well enough to attempt this? When we try to define something and come up with competing definitions, how do we decide what else we need to research or measure in order to resolve the apparent contradiction?

Being able to do this means that we need a shared way to talk about “the description that includes just the right things and excludes just the right things.” We also need to have some criteria against which to judge the goodness of a definition. Working on it…

Glad to know I’m not the only one noticing “What caused you to believe that” vs. “What caused that to happen.” It’s a pretty subtle distinction, so an interesting thing to explore. One piece of good news about this: it’s close in meaning to “how does your conclusion follow from your premises,” something I struggle to articulate to students, so finding a way that students already think that way could help us find some common ground.

Spent some time exploring this with the second-year students this week (the same group I describe above), because it was tricky for them to articulate why they considered open-loop gain to be a differential or common-mode gain, as opposed to why it was. Our (now-) shared vocabulary about causality allowed us to discuss that difference, so I guess I can lay off the booze…

Nice blog, by the way. Liked the eyebrows

Maybe it is. Is the wakalix “cause” or is it “voltage”? (If it’s both, does that make it a superwakalix?) What disgusted me about the whole process was how long I was oblivious to it.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not like a wakalix. “Cause” didn’t seem to be a placeholder for a nonsense syllable — it had a small number of highly repeatable implications, notably “definition,” which I suspect is related to “what caused you to decide that.” (e.g. “The definition of what voltage *is* caused me to decide that something did or did not fall into that category,” which is a perfectly reasonable line of thinking).

Incidentally, you probably already know this, but Brian Frank tames wakalixes and takes them for walks on his blog. They’re quite friendly once you get to know them.