Be Skeptical of People Selling the Exact Opposite of Conventional Wisdom
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that when someone claims the opposite of established practice is true — like 'exclusion doesn't work' — the burden of proof is on them.
Key Takeaways
- Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - If someone says decades of established practice is wrong, they'd better have strong proof
- Contrarian claims sell - There's a market for provocative arguments, regardless of whether they're true
- Default to what's proven - Until compelling evidence emerges, stick with practices that have a track record of working
Transcript
If you want to sell a lot of books or make a lot of money as a consultant, one surefire strategy is to tell everybody they're wrong.
Tell everybody that everything they've ever heard is wrong, and the correct thing to do is the exact opposite of what everyone has always done.
We've seen this happen over and over again with grading, with behavior, with trauma.
We have all these areas where our profession has been upended by people who tell us, Everything you've been doing is wrong.
We should do the exact opposite.
And I don't know how many times we're going to fall for this before we catch on, that the reason we have always done things the way we have always done them is not because they're the best possible things, but because they're the best things that we've found.
And we don't always, you know, adapt to the best ideas as quickly as we ought to sometimes.
You know, it's an imperfect march toward progress.
But the idea that somebody can just come out of the blue, come out of nowhere, and propose the opposite of what we've always done and be right, I think it's just highly suspect.
And one of the biggest areas where I think this has been a disaster is exclusionary discipline.
People came out of nowhere to tell us that exclusionary discipline was just this horrible thing that was so unfair to students and tied it to all these terrible kinds of outcomes and even students being incarcerated later in life because we you know, sent them home for hitting somebody.
We accepted the idea that everything we knew was wrong and that we needed to do the exact opposite of what we've always done.
And of course, if you do the exact opposite of sending kids home when they hit somebody, then you're going to have classrooms where kids routinely hit people and hurt people and people are getting injured.
And that's happening all across the profession.
And that's been one of my major goals of being here on TikTok is to reverse that trend so that classrooms can be safe.
But I think the general trend here is we've got to stop believing people when they come out of the blue and say, everything you know is wrong.
i believe we can do better i believe we can learn new things and make new discoveries and come up with new practices that will be better but the bar for that is very high just as the bar for developing new pharmaceuticals is pretty high if you're sloppy about developing new pharmaceuticals those you know new drugs that you suddenly invented out of nowhere like 99.999% chance are just going to be harmful, right?
They're not going to work.
The bar for discovering something new that's actually better is pretty high.
And I think we just need to be appropriately skeptical of anyone who says they have discovered the latest and greatest new thing.
And it's the opposite of what we've always done.
Let me know what you think.