The rescuers were just random people hindered by bystander effect like everybody else.
You do not seem to go into the possibility that many people who were asked to help refused to do so, in contrast to the rescuers. Since it was a literal matter of life and death, I believe that many or even most Jewish people did try to ask for help but were declined.
But otherwise a great post, and I was happy to see it included in the Curiosity Book.
Thank you for this great post. I would like to comment on a particular part:
“Besides, even in the technical classes, forgetting is the near-universal outcome, and the long-term benefits are mostly conceptual — for if you don’t use these skills continuously for the rest of your life, you’re almost certainly going to lose them. Maybe more than once.”
This seems strongly like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. At least for math, it is, as you say, very clear that skills build on top of each other, and that weak students struggle greatly because they lack the foundational skills. I used to tutor friends and used to be regularly shocked by how much they forgot: how to divide by fractions, summation with exponents, just basic stuff. So the following is pretty likely:
1)If you don’t understand old concepts in math, you will not understand many new concepts
2) many students forget old concepts
3)Spaced Repetition (not necessarily software!) ensures remembering
We should be making sure they remember this material not in 20 years, but in 2 years if and when we make them struggle through calculus (unless one has a realistic plan for how to let the majority of underachievers in math just drop out of advanced math classes). This gives mediocre students a fair chance of actually building deeper understanding of what is going on on a conceptual level, and underachieving students a chance to get acceptable grades so that they do not become dejected and apathetic.
For math, students get assigned homework anyway. I see no reason why that homework should not include an automatically generated exercise aimed to repeat an old concept. Of course, multiple-choice flashcards would be a failure mode.