This is a fascinating topic. My students have often said to me, after learning things in upper level courses, that "everything we learned in intro class was a lie!" They were obviously exaggerating, but they were expressing the realization that things aren't as simple as they had originally thought. I think that's a really great discovery about one's own knowledge.
But I don't care for the term "lie" in this context. Approximations, such as the moon causing the tides in the first bullet point, are not attempts to deceive. There are plenty of people in the public who are distrusting of science. When they hear the term "lie", they aren't going to think "an approximation that helps me learn in steps". I don't see how using this terminology of "lies to children" is at all helpful to science education, and it could instead serve to turn off more people and cause more confusion between scientists and the public. Approximations, rather than being attempts to deceive, are attempts to understand. They are not lies.
This topic actually came up in a conversation I had with another geoscience blogger last week. He had made a statement in a blog post that he described as a simplification, but I felt that his simplification went too far as to be a false statement. We had a nice discussion about that.
This brings me to the point: when communicating with the public or teaching students, it is going to be necessary to simplify, approximate, and eliminate jargon, but it is critically important not to say anything that's demonstrably false. I think your bullet points above to a good job of getting us there, but I think we need to be clear and careful about that, and using this terminology of "lies to children" I think confuses that important reality.
But I don't care for the term "lie" in this context. Approximations, such as the moon causing the tides in the first bullet point, are not attempts to deceive. There are plenty of people in the public who are distrusting of science. When they hear the term "lie", they aren't going to think "an approximation that helps me learn in steps". I don't see how using this terminology of "lies to children" is at all helpful to science education, and it could instead serve to turn off more people and cause more confusion between scientists and the public. Approximations, rather than being attempts to deceive, are attempts to understand. They are not lies.
This topic actually came up in a conversation I had with another geoscience blogger last week. He had made a statement in a blog post that he described as a simplification, but I felt that his simplification went too far as to be a false statement. We had a nice discussion about that.
This brings me to the point: when communicating with the public or teaching students, it is going to be necessary to simplify, approximate, and eliminate jargon, but it is critically important not to say anything that's demonstrably false. I think your bullet points above to a good job of getting us there, but I think we need to be clear and careful about that, and using this terminology of "lies to children" I think confuses that important reality.
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