Introduction
It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out the consequences of all the laws we know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate the consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.
Steven Weinberg, 1979 Nobel Laureate in Physics

Dr. Fox's Lecture
Nearly thirty years ago one of the funniest articles ever published in a respectable medical journal appeared. Of course, it was not meant to be funny. Its purposes were serious and sober enough. The conclusions, moreover, were trustworthy and had important implications for education at all levels. In fact, the conclusions had implications for all conveyance of knowledge by experts to intelligent, but nonexpert, audiences. In the Journal of Medical Education, D. H. Naftulin, M.D., and colleagues published a research study entitled “The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction.” 1 There is no better way to explain the intention and the results of this work than to quote from its abstract:

The authors programmed an actor to teach charismatically and nonsubstantively on a topic about which he knew nothing. The authors hypothesized that given a sufficiently impressive lecture paradigm, even experienced educators participating in a new learning experience can be seduced into feeling satisfied that they have learned despite irrelevant, conflicting, and meaningless content conveyed by the lecturer. The hypothesis was supported when 55 subjects responded favorably at the significant level to an eight-item questionnaire concerning their attitudes toward the lecture. (emphasis added)

For purposes of this experiment, the investigators hired a mature, respectable, scholarly looking fellow, a professional actor. He memorized a prefabricated nonsense lecture entitled “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” The better popular science magazines had recently covered (real) game theory and its possible applications, so the title was appropriate. The silver-haired actor was trained to answer affably all audience questions following his lecture—by means, as the authors explain, of “double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements. All this was to be interspersed with parenthetical humor and meaningless references to unrelated topics.” 2 In two of the three trials of this experiment, the audience consisted of “psychiatrists, psychologists, and social-worker educators,” while that of the third trial “consisted of 33 educators and administrators enrolled in a graduate level university educational philosophy course.” This counterfeit scholar of “Mathematical Game Theory” was called Dr. Myron L. Fox, and a fraudulent but respectful and laudatory introduction was supplied.

Very interesting data followed from the survey and questionnaire administered after each session in which Fox's (and other) presentations were made. These were simply the detailed statistics of approval or disapproval. The phony Dr. Fox's presentations of discoveries in mathematical game theory were strongly approved by these educationally sophisticated, lecture-experienced audiences. But the really funny results are in the “subjective” comments added to the questionnaire, that is, in what listeners wrote as prose responses to the invitation to comment (the following comments are from a number of different respondents). “No respondent [in the first group],” Dr. Naftulin and his co-authors wrote, “reported having read Dr. Fox's publications. [But] subjective responses included the following: ‘Excellent presentation, enjoyed listening. Has warm manner. Good flow, seems enthusiastic. What about the two types of games, zero-sum and non-zero-sum? Too intellectual a presentation. My orientation is more pragmatic.’” From the largest group of subjects for this experiment, the substantive comments were, if possible, even funnier: “Lively examples. His relaxed manner of presentation was a large factor in holding my interest. Extremely articulate. Interesting, wish he had dwelled more on background. Good analysis of subject that has been personally studied before. Very dramatic presentation. He was certainly captivating. Somewhat disorganized. Frustratingly boring. Unorganized and ineffective. Articulate. Knowledgeable.” 3

We highly recommend this article. It should still be possible to find it in any university, especially one with a good medical or education library. The “educational seduction” of the title refers to what “Dr. Fox” did for (and to?) his listeners. This result and many others like it should have affected all schools of education, if not teachers generally. However, such was not the case. The possibility, indeed the likelihood, of intellectual “seduction” in circumstances such as these is probably increasing as specialization increases. Countless clones of Dr. Fox tread the academic and public policy boards today, as always. Readers familiar with the nowuniversal practice in higher education of using end-of-course student evaluations as key evidence in faculty promotion and tenure decisions will know this: evaluations by students, who lack the requisite knowledge but are called on to judge their professors’ expertise in their disciplines, can determine the academic fate of nontenured faculty and the possibility of merit raises for tenured ones. Intellectual seduction by substantive (“content”) nonsense, offered to audiences who want or like to hear what they are being told, or who simply assume that what they don't understand must be correct if it sounds scholarly, is nearly universal...