Let me try to separate two different issues here, teaching science and teaching rational thought. The latter should indeed be taught better and to most people. The standard “critical thinking” curriculum is probably inadequate and largely out of date with the current leading edge, which is hardly surprising. Game immersion can be one of the tools used to teach this stuff. A successful student should then be able to apply their new rationality skills to their chosen vocation (and indeed to making a good choice of vocation), be it research or engineering, commerce or politics.
Teaching people arithmetic is of much greater value when successfully accompanied by a taught appreciation for and joy in arithmetic.
This is largely a typical mind fallacy. Plenty of people can find no joy in arithmetics, just like plenty of people find no joy in poetry, no matter how hard you make them.
And I don’t think this is only necessary for researchers. In some cases it’s even more important for users to be good scientists than for researchers to be, since our economic and political landscapes are shaped by the micro-decisions of the ‘users’.
Right, this is the new critical thinking curriculum part, unrelated to any particular science.
Let me try to separate two different issues here, teaching science and teaching rational thought. The latter should indeed be taught better and to most people. The standard “critical thinking” curriculum is probably inadequate and largely out of date with the current leading edge, which is hardly surprising.
And here’s why I try not to separate those two issues: (1) Teaching science and teaching rational thought are largely interdependent. You can’t do one wholly without the other. (2) ‘Rational thought’ and ‘critical thinking’ don’t generally get their own curricula in schools. So we need to sneak them into science classrooms, math classrooms, philosophy classrooms, history classrooms—wherever we can. Reminding ourselves of the real-world intersectionality, fuzziness, and interdependence of these fields helps us feel better about this pragmatic decision by intellectually justifying it; but what matters most is the pragmatics. Our field divisions are tools.
This is largely a typical mind fallacy. Plenty of people can find no joy in arithmetics, just like plenty of people find no joy in poetry, no matter how hard you make them.
The worry of typical-mind errors looms large on any generalized account, including a pessimistic one. To help combat that, I’ll make my background explicit. I largely had no interest in mathematical reasoning in primary and secondary schools; hence when I acquired that interest as a result of more engaging, imaginative, and ‘adventurey’ approaches to teaching and thinking, I concluded that there were probably lots of other students for whom mathematics could have been taught in a much more useful, personally involving way.
Perhaps those ‘lots of others’ are still a minority; no data exists specifically on how many people would acquire a love of arithmetic from a Perfectly Optimized Arithmetic course. But I’m inclined to think that underestimating people’s potential to become better lay-scientists, lay-mathematicians, and lay-philosophers at this stage has greater potential costs than overestimating it.
Let me try to separate two different issues here, teaching science and teaching rational thought. The latter should indeed be taught better and to most people. The standard “critical thinking” curriculum is probably inadequate and largely out of date with the current leading edge, which is hardly surprising. Game immersion can be one of the tools used to teach this stuff. A successful student should then be able to apply their new rationality skills to their chosen vocation (and indeed to making a good choice of vocation), be it research or engineering, commerce or politics.
This is largely a typical mind fallacy. Plenty of people can find no joy in arithmetics, just like plenty of people find no joy in poetry, no matter how hard you make them.
Right, this is the new critical thinking curriculum part, unrelated to any particular science.
And here’s why I try not to separate those two issues: (1) Teaching science and teaching rational thought are largely interdependent. You can’t do one wholly without the other. (2) ‘Rational thought’ and ‘critical thinking’ don’t generally get their own curricula in schools. So we need to sneak them into science classrooms, math classrooms, philosophy classrooms, history classrooms—wherever we can. Reminding ourselves of the real-world intersectionality, fuzziness, and interdependence of these fields helps us feel better about this pragmatic decision by intellectually justifying it; but what matters most is the pragmatics. Our field divisions are tools.
The worry of typical-mind errors looms large on any generalized account, including a pessimistic one. To help combat that, I’ll make my background explicit. I largely had no interest in mathematical reasoning in primary and secondary schools; hence when I acquired that interest as a result of more engaging, imaginative, and ‘adventurey’ approaches to teaching and thinking, I concluded that there were probably lots of other students for whom mathematics could have been taught in a much more useful, personally involving way.
Perhaps those ‘lots of others’ are still a minority; no data exists specifically on how many people would acquire a love of arithmetic from a Perfectly Optimized Arithmetic course. But I’m inclined to think that underestimating people’s potential to become better lay-scientists, lay-mathematicians, and lay-philosophers at this stage has greater potential costs than overestimating it.