I think people need to work in a space that moves them away from the kinds of non-scientific thinking that you do when you can't see what you're doing -- moves them away from blindly following recipes, from superstitions and rules of thumb -- and moves them towards deeply understanding what they're doing, inventing new things, discovering new things, contributing back to the global pool of human knowledge.
Hey look, there's Alan waving in the background! Hi Alan! (sorry Bret) :P
But I like the framing in that part, implying that we have trouble thinking scientifically because our media don't help us to think that way. A lot of the time this sort of message can be muddled into implying something like "people are stupid and science will save them", which is an off-putting framing for many people (me included), and rightly so! It feels analogous to "blaming the victim". But your way of saying it (including the great part about the wire detaching) is much more positive, and singles out the technology as stupid, not the people!
Only briefly mentioned in the talk but still important to mention in this discussion is the
social dimension of maker spaces. Perhaps because I've hung around
Artisan's Asylum and
Lifelong Kindergarten, I tend to think of maker spaces as much more than places where individuals go to use powerful tools. They're places where people go to learn from each other, work together, share ideas, brainstorm together, be inspired by each other, and have fun together. In my experience, these functions are just as important as the tools that exist in the space (perhaps even more so) and are essential to consider if you want to encourage scientific thinking.
The adoption of technology (and thus the adoption of ways of thinking) is always socially mediated. I'm not sure a technology's "message" in the McLuhan sense can inherently contain scientific thought patterns, but the community mindset sure can! Said another way: even if this sort of diagnostic technology exists in maker spaces, if the social environment doesn't encourage scientific thinking then it seems unlikely to me that scientific thinking will happen, though it could be more likely. I don't know! Building science as a way of thinking into tools is a fairly new idea in our culture and is new to me, so I would love to hear other opinions.
Thanks for the talk, Bret!
-Glen