I don’t remember how but I could easily look it up and do it.
Nobody remembers this shit. I don’t remember how to do any geometric proofs. You think it was valuable because you’re in the minority of people who went on to things where that, or at least that way of thinking about things, was relevant.
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Ya, those numbskull philosophers/lawyers like Leibniz.
If it’s not valuable why do so many people need to keep asking me how many square feet _____ is? I think people should be able to figure out how much paint they need for the bedroom by themselves. I’m not expecting anybody to do proofs, just be able to multiply length x width. A handful of fundamentals for quantifying the physical world doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to teach.
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I agree with that, things with regular application to the world is fine. I’m more talking about like… I mean I did math up to first year college level and I can no longer explain to you what sines and cosines are or how to calculate them. I have absolutely no idea. I’ve forgotten it because it has no relevance to anything I ever do. Basic things with regular practical application like Pythagoras’s theorem and the area of a rectangle and so on are fine by me.
I’m also skeptical of the argument that learning trigonometry “taught me how to think” or whatever because it seems to me an unfalsifiable claim along the lines of “being beaten as a kid made me the man I am today”. We all have a tendency to be overly credulous of the idea that our own life experiences were necessary. When I look at the world around me, people being unable to evaluate information seems like a way more urgent problem than people being able to figure things out from scratch on their own.
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Jesus fucking christ, you look around at today’s political environment and you want people to be even more uneducated? How fucking stupid do you have to be to think people who know less about math are going to do well against corporations and governments who do know math? On a refugee board filled with fucking poker players no less? This conversation is why it is correct to say young people are dumb, and if you aren’t young then congratulations you managed to get out of your 20’s without learning enough to be useful.
How you don’t think being able to understand logic which you learned to do doing geometric proofs is a valuable part of this is what I don’t get. Trig, sure, I didn’t need it again for like 10 years.
More broadly, incompetence in arithmetic and statistics is a huge and super common life leak.
I just finished listening to this podcast. The authors being interviewed have a thesis that centers around how the plutocrats are manufacturing outrage induced by racism, xenophobia, and in/out group othering in order to manipulate groups of people to vote for and support policies and ideologies that go against their own economic self interest, while further entrenching the plutocrats power.
Perhaps that is fresh insight and a “rigorous framework” for a radical centrist. To me, it was simply two guys acting like they have a novel thesis while pretending that marxist class analysis, and classical anarchism’s critique of capitalism’s power structures are things that haven’t existed for nearly 200 years.
I was looking forward to the authors presenting some sort of plan for countering the plutocrats’ divide and conquer strategy. The authors did pontificate about how the Democratic party should be reacting to this by reaching out to rural voters because of the baked in (rural v urban) gerrymandering of American-style representative democracy. It seems that’s the limit of advice that someone can give when trying to thread the needle of objecting to plutocratic tactics & policies while saying no ill words about the capitalist system that spawned and empowered the plutocrats.
In order to effectively combat plutocrats, they’d have to critically examine why the capitalist policies favored by plutocrats are bad, which requires critical analysis of capitalism. Maybe their PhDs from Yale (aka #1 Capitalist School) combined with paychecks from capitalist think tanks makes them blind to things that are in plain sight for an “empty headed anarchist”.
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I agree with your last sentence which is why I think math education should focus on those things. This argument that we need geometry for some abstract reason of teaching logic is extremely suspicious to me. There are many domains in which logical thinking can be taught, I don’t think we need to do so in a domain that is near-irrelevant to most people.
If you rewind 20 years I remember my grandmother arguing that it was absolutely essential that kids be taught to write in cursive. Prior to that it was the importance of teaching manners at finishing school or whatever. I’m caricaturing your argument here I know, but I’m very skeptical of this idea that “thing X I learnt as a kid granted me my ability to be a complete person” when no direct usefulness of thing X can be demonstrated.
I’m 40. If you want to argue that trigonometry and the volume of a cylinder provide people with the education they need to navigate the modern world then we can have that argument I’ll just lol, but instead you’re accusing me of arguing for less education in general, which I manifestly have not. This is not the first time you’ve accused me of being dumb while demonstrating inability in reading comprehension.
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Flu vaccine is out. Got mine today, no line. Many local drugstores have them for cheap.
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Yeah trig is a bit of a puzzler. Usually it is taught before calculus, but it seems that you can learn calc without trig.
Maybe it is taught because of engineering and physics applications and wanting to prepare people for that.
It’s not like everyone has to take trig in high school.
I took trig in 12th grade math and calculus the following year (5 years of high school in Ontario back then) and I can’t imagine doing calculus without having the trig foundation already.
It reminds me of a debate that rages within tech. Do I really need to go deep into the bowels of big O proofs to be a good developer? Probably not, but there are a lot of good foundational concepts in CS that you should probably learn.
I don’t think it’s a black or white thing with math either. I think there are concepts you should know but overall you can be a decently productive and happy human without a lot of it.
I’ve noticed some support in favor of replacing trig with statistics. I don’t think everyone needs trig, though a semester is probably necessary for calculus, but I think everyone needs statistics and it was rarely taught in CA high schools as of 25 years ago. I had it as a required class for a social science minor in college.
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Trig isn’t needed to understand to understand the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, but it is needed to understand many classic calculus problems, such as the volumes of solids created by rotating functions around the x axis.
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btw as someone who gambles for a living I also think about whether I’m falling into the same trap in thinking that probability and statistics are valuable things to know, but I don’t think so. If you read that exposure to some chemical triples your risk of some disease, it does matter whether your next move is “OMG OMG PANIC” or “OK, sure, but what is the base rate?”. It’s such a valuable way to think. If you can’t calculate the area of a rectangle, at least you can just hire zikzak to do it for you. You can’t hire someone to sit next to you and help you interpret risks and rewards in daily life.
Edit: Obviously the same goes for arithmetic and basic algebra.
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+1
How many people can interpret risks and rewards in daily life through instinct and the use of heuristics in a manner that is close enough to correct that they can get by?
I had a fluids class in college that might as well have been named ‘find the obscure trig rule to make this integral solvable without a computer’. It was the worst class I’ve ever taken. Exams were take home and took 7 days of work and I still didn’t finish half the problems. Got a B+. Absolutely brutal.
Yeah, once you get into physics, engineering, and vector calculus, trig is essential. And trig identity stuff is pretty brutal.
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