So What Do YOU Really Know About Bicycles?

[Tandem Rider]

My guess is that many here would score pretty high.


http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/07/06/420513593/what-you-really-know-about-bicycles

[MattTuck]

Reminds me of this picture I saw today while browsing the Wahoo website. Why they chose that angle is beyond me. I looked at the picture thumbnail, before I could see the text was upside down, and my brain was saying, "something isn't right here"



http://www.wahoofitness.com/media/catalog/product/w/a/wahoo_rpm-2_3.jpg

[Mark McM]

Interestingly, the article repeats a mis-reporting about the riderless bicycle stability paper:

Illusions of understanding (at least, of "bicycle understanding") may even plague scientists. As recently as 2011, new research changed scientists' understanding of how bicycles stay up and automatically steer themselves to recover from a tip. The researchers showed that neither gyroscopic precession of the front wheel nor a caster effect — the two factors that were thought to explain a bike's stability — were necessary to create a stable, self-steering bike.

No good scientist would claim that gyroscopic stability or caster affect were truly necessary for a bicycle to be self-balancing - only that these affects are used by some self-balancing bicycles (especially as self-balancing scooters have been available for some years that used neither). The paper simply discovered another mechanism to achieve self-balancing.

While many experienced cyclists wouldn't make the same mistakes as the casual cyclists in the study regarding the fundamentals of bicycle mechanics, even experienced cyclist often make incorrect assumptions regarding some of the details of bicycle mechanics. For example, assuming that using both front and rear brakes simultaneously produces the shortest stops on pavement (nope), or that tension spoke wheels support loads by increases in spoke tension (nope again).

[Ti Designs]

What you really know vs. what you think you know is subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10626367

In the computer science field, the expertise on viruses is so effected by this that you're almost certain to get bad information. Everyone who's ever bought a copy of Norton anti-virus thinks of themselves as an expert...

The bike field may be just as bad. I'll use myself as an example, as to not offend anyone else here. I work in a shop, I sell stuff, my position somehow makes me an expert. Well, no it doesn't, but the customers hardly know that. They ask me questions about bikes and clothing and fitting, and they make the bold assumption that I know what I'm talking about. I don't.

Dunning and Kruger made a number of interesting findings, including the one where people with training recognized their prior incompetence. They published nothing about the trend where people who thought they were competent would never get training, or even have their skills put to the test. This trend almost defines the bike industry. If someone is an expert based on their title, why would they ever put that knowledge to a real world test?

The distribution of knowledge on cycling probably has the same bell curve as most other data sets. On one end you have the people who have never seen a bike, on the other end you have the truly competent - those riders who have made everything about the sport autonomous. Ask anyone where they fall in that bell curve and I doubt you would ever find anyone, 'cept maybe someone who has never ridden a bike, to say the're on the left side of that curve.

In a class at Harvard, the professor asked each student to write down where they felt they fell in terms of percentile. None of them answered below 20% of the top, 80% put themselves in the top 5%. OK, it's Harvard, you should expect that. Just the same, how would you have answered that question? Do you feel your skills and knowledge are above average, because it's you? The only correct answer to that question would have been to not answer, because you don't have enough information about the other people in class. That would show a sense of awareness of the competence levels of those around you, which is another thing that Dunning and Kruger observed.

So, where do you think you would fall on what you really know about bicycles?

[drewellison]

The more I learn, the less I know.
Drew

[fuzzalow]

Don't really need to know the physics (e.g. gyroscopic precession) behind why a bicycle rides in order to ride a bicycle. So I'm not sure what the linked article is getting at other than people somehow assume they know more than they know - which most people will not have the rigor to answer honestly about themselves. "You don't know what you don't know".

The interesting nugget IMO in the OP is the reference to the linked article "Illusion of Explanatory Depth" (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062901/). I was interested to peruse this article to possibly find out if I was guilty of this delusion myself. In a quick skim of it, I couldn't make heads or tails of it - academic articles forever elucidate test and sampling conditions without getting to the point. ;) But I found this on page 7:2.1.2. Results
Nearly all participants showed drops in estimates of what they knew when confronted with having to provide a real explanation, answer a diagnostic question, and compare their understanding to an expert description, as seen in Fig. 3.
I had to chuckle. The web is fulla these type responses done by people making pronouncements as if self evident and etched in stone. Thing is, I don't think self-appointed web experts really do this to dissemble - for some folks, that might be all there is, all that they have and all that is required! :eek: This article did not give me enough info for me to self-diagnose. Oh well, when in doubt I'd say of myself that I'm full of it! Don't follow me I'm lost!
The more I learn, the less I know.
Drew
That's not a bad strategy for anything.

[paredown]

Kinda reminds me of when I proctered the challenge Spanish exam for undergrads that would let you skip the language requirement--hey, everyone knows Spanish right?

Not!

You could see the shared thought balloon when they took a look at the exam--"Holy cripes this is hard" followed by 15 minutes of sheepish undergrads filing out, exams not completed...