Bielefeldt's Caveat of Paradoxical Instruction
In 1968, when I was a student at Reed College, the institution had just installed a small nuclear reactor for research. It was housed in a bunker on the edge of Crystal Springs Creek, a wildlife sanctuary in the middle of the Portland, Oregon campus. One day the physics professor who oversaw the project was invited to give a talk on the facility to the freshman general science course provided for would-be poets, anthropologists, and other soft-brains like myself.
The physicist described the reactor operations and the discharge of coolant water into the creek at a point below its headwaters marsh. When he took questions, I asked if there was any chance the water would raise the temperature of the marsh. The physicist and my professor exchanged a look that said, “Where do we get these people?” With exaggerated patience, the physicist explained that water in fact runs downhill, so no, it could not affect anything upstream.
A year after I graduated, the local paper carried a story about Reed being required to address increased marsh water temperatures caused by coolant discharge. The reactor lecture remains my most instructive learning experience from freshman science. Call it Bielefeldt’s Caveat of Paradoxical Instruction: A little knowledge, delivered with authority, can make you stupid.
The podium tells you what you know, and embarrasses you into forgetting competing knowledge and ignoring open questions. By the time I read the news of the reactor shutdown, I had studied the infamous Milgram experiments where subjects were persuaded to deliver fatal shocks under the direction of actors in white lab coats. I had rafted rivers where we floated upstream using backwater pools in order to run the same rapid twice. But even at the time of the lecture, I knew that there was something missing from both the process and the hydrology. Reed generally encouraged student inquiry. I spent childhood summers engineering waterworks in the creek near my home, sometimes with spectacularly bad results. But those values and experiences were quashed in a second by the power of the podium.
Why am I going on about this? I have evaluation reports due, and I need to soften up my audience for the hard truths of the soft answers. “Evaluation shows that the program is effective, as long as . . . um, you know, you do everything right.” Also, it’s an election year in the U.S., and there are lots of podia in action, with lots of fundamentals being thrown around. Supply and demand. Reward and punishment. We all should be asking evaluation questions: Is that the only principle that applies? Is that even what the principle means? In my example, the physicist confused “downstream” with “downhill.” Fluids flow from higher pressure to lower pressure. You could be paddling upstream of an eddy where the water accumulates, and the stuff still all runs downhill to you.
