It is true for multiple topics too, like economics. It is almost worse off for people to take these 100 level classes without then taking 200 and 300 level continuations. They think they have extra knowledge in the subject because of the classes but it was really just a primer later to tell them why all that stuff sounds good at first but is completely wrong and useless.
A kindergarten science education person suggested their kids have a human right to understand their world then, rather than a lifetime (for them) later. So atoms, etc.
I think that far far harder than they thought - "adapt later material for a younger audience" vs "wield lots and lots of research community domain expertise to craft largely novel content".
But I've found it an interesting probe question: How would you teach some domain differently, if you primarily cared about... what to call it... non-deferred epistemic agency and calibrated/unfiltered sense-making? No learning linear systems without learning how to do linear approximation of systems in a mostly non-linear world. Ideal Gas Law chapter questions still have numbers for solid argon, but the intended learning outcome is "nope!" not mindless "PV=nRT!". No "this course will leave you with lots of new misconceptions about the world, but we'll clean those up in later years for those who stay with us".
> No learning linear systems without learning how to do linear approximation of systems in a mostly non-linear world.
That's why Common Core trains kids on estimation from Grade 2. Instead of adding 12 + 23 = 35, you add 10 + 20 = 30 to get a number close to the right answer.
This plants the idea "I can simplified numbers to get the answer if I don't need the last digit, which lets me solve problems faster". Which gets generalized as "I can use the simplified Ideal Gas Law to model a complex system if I don't own a supercomputer".
Even in university I had this: my physics course heavily emphasized properties of linear systems to demonstrate why I'd want to use one and we ran linear regressions in other courses if we didn't "know" the true equations.
Nod. A random TIL from Friday, courtesy to qwen.ai: In contrast to USA educational estimation, which emphasizes point estimates, China reportedly emphasizes directional estimation to establish an envelope, upper and lower (strict) bounds - Da Gu and Xiao Gu.
I've long though we'd be better off doing incremental bounding, hard and soft, in part because the group discourse dynamics are so much better. "Ok, who can suggest another bound, upper or lower, hard or soft?" vs "Your step 2 is too big. Well, your step 4 is too small!".
Which raises a question - might this diversity be leveraged? Science education content improvement is often bottlenecked on regional conditions. As when a high-stakes exam doesn't cover topic X, so there's regionally less interest/opportunity to explore better teaching of X, or using X to better teach other things. This especially bites when you wish to explore mashups, X+Y+Z with each taught well, but they're every one both in poor shape and bottlenecked.
Both countries largely fail to create a physical intuition, a feel for reasonable values - in the US because it's a secondary priority, and in China reportedly because estimation has become nationally high stakes, so memorization gets emphasized over feel.
Can we leverage that regional difference? For a strawman, might one develop content with improved bounding facilitating a rough quantitative feel for reasonable values, in China where it's sort of aligned with the flow, even if off to the side, rather than in the US, where the aligned energy is much less. And then, having developed that content in China, bring it back to the US, where again off to the side, there's perhaps the flexibility and inquiry perspective for the material to appeal in its developed form? And WeChat Groups seem potentially a way to get heterogenous ad hoc communities around content development, for which I don't know a US equivalent.
For analogy, I'm told the US advanced placement exam for French, is both hard, and narrowly focused on a style of conversational French. So people teach to the test, and all else that is "French", is deemphasized. But let's say you have a VR app which develops both that conversational, but also cultural and business and travel. You might develop it the US, leveraging the conversational incentive. And release elsewhere, where there's interest and room for the other bits, even if there wasn't sufficient incentive elsewhere to build the app in the first place. Maybe?
This kind of market shopping is common in grant-funded domains. There's a project that you know is a good, but nobody wants to pay for it… but grant body X will pay for component A, which can be slightly modified into component A' which grant body Y will be enthused by, and fund components B, C and D; and component C isn't very useful, but you can make sure to develop a generic architecture that makes implementing component E easy, and now you have a basic BEAD product…
A little more effort than VC-funded work, but there are fewer strings attached.
Oh my... Braided stacking of a global pedagogic exploration supply chain? Conceptually a repo with long-term ngss and gaokao forks, and a third neutral space (IB schools?) integrating them? Entrepreneurial Sarasvathy-effectuation market co-creation? ... Thought provokingly fruitful - thank you.
It annoys me, though, that there's a prescribed method of estimation, which is hard to remember. I always used to get the "wrong" answer because I picked easier-to-add approximations, even though my estimates were generally both faster and closer. (To use your example, I'd have estimated 35 or 36: the sum of two small numbers, like 2 and 3, is normally about 5; and this sum is a little bit less than (1 + 2)×12 = 3×12.)
Yes, teaching and assessment of estimation can get quite dreadful. Wish I'd saved a video I saw years ago, intended as an exemplar of best practices in early primary, where it was clear neither teacher nor students had a clue, all the effort was around attempted signalling of the expected but misguided answers, and everyone was collaborating to pretend that understanding had occurred. Recording a class can be hard, but it was wild.
I always bring up the example of how the atomic nucleus is taught:
Elementary school: Stuff is actually made out of tiny little balls you can't see.
Middle school: Those tiny little balls are actually atoms, they consist of a positively charged core of protons/neutrons with negatively charged electrons flying around it. An atom is the smallest thing matter is made of. (Rutherford model)
High school: Those electrons don't just fly around, they actually orbit within specific energy levels. Also they're not really particles, but waves, but also particles, all at the same time. Also subatomic particles exist. (Bohr model)
University: "Electron orbits" are actually orbitals defined by the wavefunction of those electrons, like probability distributions. (Quantum Mechanics)
Fwiw, just to share old work, here's[1] an archived page (slowly loading; wasn't intended to be public; variously broken) exploring sort of a "teach scale down to atoms, and then nucleons up to materials" approach, based on hands-on scale modeling, physically realistic representations, and real-world connections. Vision was one would start early with piles of tiny sticky atom fuzzballs, containing massive blurred sometimes-oddly-shaped (eg, ground-state Neon's wine-bottle) nuclei. Nuclear dynamics are traditionally not much covered, but have analogs for atomic phenomenon which are, hypothetically providing an opportunity for "see it again, but different".
mind defending that? I suspect that opinion would only come from one who took philosophy 101 and stopped there. If all you took was philosophy 101, this sounds a lot more reasonable and runs right into the point made by the pos you just responded to
How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion. I could give you a long list of things in philosophy that I consider BS, but what good would that do? Do you really doubt that I could provide such a list? The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy and say, "Oh, of course those things are bullshit, but that's not real philosophy." And the fact that I can make that prediction with confidence is my defense.
If you really want my list, since this is HN, I'll start with Ayn Rand and the Austrian school. You can read this if you like:
I think it's ironically telling about your opinion on philosophy that your argument is illogical and boils down to:
1. people who aren't philosophers said some bullshit
2. don't you dare point out people who don't do philosophy shouldn't have their ramblings labeled philosophy
Ayn Rand, a 20th century writer without a university education; Paul Graham, a computer scientist; and the Austrian School, an economics movement, are categorically not entities that have produced or ever will produce philosophy.
That's no a No True Scotsman fallacy. It is a strict application of the definition of philosophy, a deep analysis of certain specific topics. Neither Rand nor Graham is educationally equipped to plumb that depth. And, again, the other name you dropped is not even a philosophical school.
> Neither Rand nor Graham is educationally equipped to plumb that depth
In his defence, Graham does hold a BA (Philosophy) from Cornell University in 1986.
Is your distaste here due to BA degrees rather than PhDs, a dislike of Cornell, or that Graham didn't chase academic philosophy and join a philosophy department?
> people who aren't philosophers said some bullshit
Wow, I didn't expect to be vindicated quite so definitively when I predicted: "The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy."
> That's no a No True Scotsman fallacy.
It absolutely is:
> the definition of philosophy, a deep analysis of certain specific topics.
I see nothing in that definition about writing in a particular time period or having a university degree, which are the two features you cited that allegedly disqualify Ayn Rand. I also see an awful lot of wiggle-room in the "specific topics" and how one measures whether one's analysis is sufficiently "deep". You exclude economics and computer science from your list of "certain topics" but you don't say what topics are allowed or on what basis this assessment of admissibility is to be made. Your argument is a paragon of muddled thinking, and does more to support my position than refute it.
> You exclude economics and computer science from your list of "certain topics" but you don't say what topics are allowed or on what basis this assessment of admissibility is to be made
Oh, so you're not at all engaging in good faith. Thanks for wasting my time. It breaks credulity when you try to argue that economics is a field of philosophy in some attempt to demonstrate I'm engaging in a NTS fallacy.
> How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion
One of the first useful things that philosophy teaches you is how to construct a well-rounded argument in support of any position. Following up "philosophy is useless" with "I don't know how to argue my own opinion" demonstrates quite a lack of awareness.
Apparently they don't teach you about straw-man arguments. I didn't say philosophy was useless, I said a lot of philosophy is bullshit. That is not the same thing. A lot of physics nowadays is bullshit (like string theory) but that is not to say that physics is useless.
"Alice O'Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum;[c] February 2 [O.S. January 20], 1905 – March 6, 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand (/aɪn/ ⓘ), was a Russian and American writer and philosopher.[3] She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system which she named Objectivism."
Well, yeah, obviously. I didn't say that all philosophy is BS, only that a lot of it is, including a lot of what is included in SEP. But as a source for making the field accessible, SEP is excellent.
I'm not sure if providing a counterargument to a point not being made is a good way to argue against a field that trains people to notice when you do that.
There's a lot of BS in most fields. The problem with philosophy is that it has no criterion for separating the wheat from the chaff. All other fields have some kind of external forcing function. In science, its experimental data. In the arts, it's the ability to produce novelty or exhibit skill or attract an audience. In philosophy there is no external forcing function. The only thing that makes a great philosopher is other philosophers saying they are great philosophers.
There are definitely some non-BS philosophers, like Dan Dennett and Tim Maudlin. But really they are more like scientists than philosophers. In Maudlin's case, he's really a physicist, he just happens to work in a philosophy department.
The problem is that you're citing people known for their popularisation, not academic work. None of that is subject to the kind of critique that happens between academics.
Yeah, well, the topic at hand is how Silicon Valley tech bros abuse philosophy. The philosophy they abuse includes a lot of non-academic stuff.
I can cite a lot of bullshit in academic philosophy, but so what? There's a lot of bullshit in academia in general. There is bullshit in physics (string theory). There is bullshit in chemistry (James Tour). There is bullshit in botany (John Sanford). There is bullshit everywhere. If you really want an example from academic philosophy, I'll give you John Searle and the Chinese Room.
So every passing thought feels like "philosophy".