so it should be emphasised that this is not a Fully General Counterargument against learning anything.
I think it’s okay to tell kids that if you’re incompetent you’ll still do fine in life, because it’s true. The function of telling them that the material doesn’t matter could be to reduce their anxiety over the obvious tension between valuing coursework and real world pragmatism.
Another takeaway from the argument could be that adults are generally pretty incompetent. Most people don’t use math or calculus, but in my experience this hurts them quite a bit. If they have a bunch of data they won’t be able to model it as well. If they have to design an experiment they won’t even think to go look at the constitutive equations. All of this cross-applies to evaluating other peoples’ work… Like professional engineers will frequently look at academic literature but only be able to read the abstract/conclusions section. They aren’t punished for it per se, but they aren’t exactly rewarded for it either. So you could go the other way and say: “look, if you want to be in the top 0.1% of achievers, learn this stuff because it actually is applicable if you go out of your way to apply it, and it will be awesome”.
I also just don’t have any sympathy for the people who are hurt by informing them about their biases :)
And if you tell them to listen to smart and successful people, you might be preparing them to fall for the next MLM scam.
Above I told them to google or wiki stuff. Just start doing it. There are so many things the average person believes that are just false upon reading the wiki article. For example, eating breakfast is the most important meal of the day because you’ve heard it in Kellog’s commercials since you were 5. Except maybe that’s not true and you should look deeper into the issue since you’ll be eating every day for the rest of your life. Similarly it boogles my mind that parents can’t summarize expert opinion on corporal punishment for children. Your children are insanely important, and you can’t even spend 5 minutes reading wikipedia to double check what you already “know”?
Regardless of how they get their information though, it would be good for them to get in the habit of discussing their ideas with strangers (on the internet) to serve as kind of a check on them getting too out of whack. You don’t necessarily have to convince other people, but they shouldn’t be able to destroy your belief by just linking a wiki article :P
Maybe just… give them your e-mail and tell them to feel free to ask anything
I think it’s okay to tell kids that if you’re incompetent you’ll still do fine in life, because it’s true. The function of telling them that the material doesn’t matter could be to reduce their anxiety over the obvious tension between valuing coursework and real world pragmatism.
Another takeaway from the argument could be that adults are generally pretty incompetent. Most people don’t use math or calculus, but in my experience this hurts them quite a bit. If they have a bunch of data they won’t be able to model it as well. If they have to design an experiment they won’t even think to go look at the constitutive equations. All of this cross-applies to evaluating other peoples’ work… Like professional engineers will frequently look at academic literature but only be able to read the abstract/conclusions section. They aren’t punished for it per se, but they aren’t exactly rewarded for it either. So you could go the other way and say: “look, if you want to be in the top 0.1% of achievers, learn this stuff because it actually is applicable if you go out of your way to apply it, and it will be awesome”.
I also just don’t have any sympathy for the people who are hurt by informing them about their biases :)
Above I told them to google or wiki stuff. Just start doing it. There are so many things the average person believes that are just false upon reading the wiki article. For example, eating breakfast is the most important meal of the day because you’ve heard it in Kellog’s commercials since you were 5. Except maybe that’s not true and you should look deeper into the issue since you’ll be eating every day for the rest of your life. Similarly it boogles my mind that parents can’t summarize expert opinion on corporal punishment for children. Your children are insanely important, and you can’t even spend 5 minutes reading wikipedia to double check what you already “know”?
Regardless of how they get their information though, it would be good for them to get in the habit of discussing their ideas with strangers (on the internet) to serve as kind of a check on them getting too out of whack. You don’t necessarily have to convince other people, but they shouldn’t be able to destroy your belief by just linking a wiki article :P
I think we should emancipate 15+ year olds.