The answer is more likely that modern students just don't learn their history and think they've cleverly come up with something new (after all, it's new to them). If you've learned your history you would understand it has ever been thus. Aristotle and Hesiod complained about it, and Aristophanes even wrote a play satirizing it that could be performed today and it would still be relevant.
Why do they go to university then? The entire point of an university is to get taught the fundamentals and be able to derive current (and thus future) knowledge yourself. If you simply want to learn the current state of a craft, that's what vocational schools are for.
University provides you the opportunity to research and understand the history. You don't need university for that, but the time, people, and resources available to you make it much easier.
But it's voluntary. Actually course curricula basically just drop hints at the history as part of a short perfunctory narrative. Along with the deeper conceptual instruction (framed according to the then-current beliefs), that's better than vocational instruction, but definitely falls short of the idealized liberal education. Ideally you survey the entire historical progression of a field, like St John's College does where, e.g., you start learning geometry by reading Pythagoras, or calculus by reading Newton, and then having vigorous discussion to suss how how thinking changed or didn't change between eras and how that might inform today's thinking. Not sure how much marginal benefit is had by going all-in like that, though, as a practical matter, except for very serious students.
Of course there is always a depth below, which to explore is entirely voluntary. But university courses don't train you directly on the layer you are going to solve the actual problems on your job, they test always at least on layer deeper and then maybe test for one specific algorithm/approach/problem as an example.
> you start learning geometry by reading Pythagoras, or calculus by reading Newton
You can do that, if you actually care about the history of mathematics, but normally it's enough if someone introduces you to a combined theory of e.g. Pythagoras and Newton.
So in a way you are saying, university is often not actually teaching temporal genesis, which I agree with, but my point is that it does teach causal genesis, with citations on the temporal aspect.
Same with the current king Charles III of England. He is the first of that name to be king of the UK (and Canada, Australia, etc). Maybe people should revert to multiple ordinals, like James VI and I in 1603.
I don't think that's right - well, Canada and Australia ofc. The "U" in "UK" refers to James IV of Scotland becoming James of England, thus uniting the states of Albion. Charles succeeded him.
Scotland and England were not united into a single Kingdom of Great Britain until 1707 (under Queen Anne), and it did not become the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ireland) until 1800 (under George III). So technically the "U" actually refers to union of Britain and Ireland, not England and Scotland.
Before the Acts of Union of 1707, England and Scotland were not united into one kingdom, but two kingdoms that shared the same king under a personal union.
Ah, so historically things were build with a lot of slop. It was just the traditional kind with sloppy design, sloppy construction, and sloppy maintenance.
There is a lesson here to be ignored in the name of short-term personal gain.
Funny, I was just there last week. Without getting to know locals all I saw was olive trees and almond trees and some grapes and oranges, many hectares of abandoned farms, and wonderful villages built on the seeming near-vertical sides of hills with small gardens with lots of cabbages (it was October, so that tends to be what's left). I'm sure lots was hidden from my passing eyes.
The roads were, well, challenging. We followed Google Maps directions to one destination, but it's not very good. It led us through a medieval town made of stone where the roads were just a centimetre or so wider than our tiny subcompact rental car and then up a steep hill from which we could actually see our destination on the other side of the village. After letting the scent of overheated clutch and burning transmission oil dissipate, we did a 3-point turn with a sheer drop on either side and no guardrails and then back through the village, hoping the breaks were good and holding our breaths passing between the houses. Locals just stared and pointed the right direction without saying a word (I guess we were not the first strangers to be misled by the Googs). Anyways the roads are harrowing but make for great stories.
Also, we found an old abandoned quinta for sale that we'd love to buy (even has paleolithic rock art on the property) but they're asking 3.5 million euros, which is about 3.5 million euros more than I have for such things.
So I'm not surprised if there are local agricultural treasures. Isn't that the part of Portugal where they speak the country's official second language Mirandese?
€3.5m! You can’t have been too near to us, as most everything here is cheap. There’s a watermill with 40ha of pistachios about 5km from us, €320k last I checked. It ain’t selling, even at that price.
Yeah, Miranda is south of us, and pretty metropolitan compared to our particular corner - and here we encounter words and pronunciations we encounter nowhere else in Portugal - not even 30km down the road.
I love it here, but living in the backwater of backwaters has its pros and cons.
Does whole wheat bread made from the same grain not have the same protein, or does removing all that fiber, flavour, and micronutrients somehow enhance the protein content and render it less expensive?
White flour has a slightly higher protein content (e.g. I bake bread from flour with 13% protein), but the important difference is that it is much cheaper, e.g. at least twice cheaper than whole wheat flour.
The reason for the price difference is unlikely to be due to a more expensive processing technology, but mostly from the economies of large scale processing, because the production of white flour is much greater.
Whole wheat flour has slightly higher amounts of the more valuable nutrients, but due to its high price it is an inefficient way to get those nutrients. A both cheaper and healthier diet can include white bread and larger amounts of other vegetables that are better sources of fiber, vitamins and minerals than whole wheat flour. (E.g. the food that I cook usually includes ingredients like lentils, carrots, parsnips, onions or garlic, broccoli or cauliflower, bell peppers, parsley or dill etc. Spending less on those in order to make more expensive whole wheat bread would provide much less desirable nutrients, so it would be a bad allocation of funds.)
That highlights the oddity of your calculations. You say that wheat is cheaper, but little about why. If the economies of large scale processing makes more processed wheat cheaper than less processed wheat, then maybe something else would be cheaper if our habits were different. So it's dubious to use the cheapness of white flour to argue that we should eat more white flour products.
"if...were" means nothing today, because woulda, coulda, shoulda. Today white is cheaper, so the calculation stands as it is, and makes for a very interesting argument in today's flood of influencer diets/fads.
It's very unlikely to matter economically for you or me or the op that whiter flour is cheaper. Bringing it up suggests it matters in some other way - like we have an obligation to buy the cheaper option because that has least impact on the environment maybe? But that does not follow at all. I don't think we should award points for originality either.
> White flour has a slightly higher protein content
The bags of 13.5% protein whole wheat flour and 16% (!) protein whole khorasan flour in my pantry are not convinced this is a generally true statement.
Well, see, the problem for me is mostly that white bread is just unhealthy. If I eat white bread, my blood sugar spikes. If I eat while wheat bread, it doesn't. Given the difference in cost does not even appear as a rounding error in my food budget, and that white bread has long-term negative health effects for this diabetic, I'll go with the more nutritious choice over the marginally cheaper one and get almost all my protein from better sources than grain seeds.
Make no mistake: I dream of gorging on delicious chunks of white sourdough bread hot and steaming from the oven. I just have good and indisputable evidence from my test strips that it is not good for me.
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