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Timothy Gowers had a similar point at https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot (dead

by svat 7y ago

Timothy Gowers had a similar point at https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot (dead link now): > if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and 8 passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being trained to think, these children have been trained to do the opposite. Also here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/11/maths-isnt-problem-curriculum-lacking-imagination https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/11/maths-... This is basic stimulus-response behaviour: school education is effectively a game that the children are playing to win points, and within that environment “thinking” is wasteful and disincentivized. (See also: Lockhart's Lament https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament...., the heart-breaking How Children Fail by John Holt, etc.) Gowers also had a couple of posts on a very different way of teaching mathematics: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathematics-be-taught-to-non-mathematicians/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathemati... https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/a-trip-to-watford-grammar-school-for-boys/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/a-trip-to-watford-gr...

LeifCarrotson 7y ago
The same attitude persists long after graduation: if the task is to build a website/app/project, completing the project is what's measured and rewarded. Learning how to work with the tools provided isn't valued. At my previous shop, it was called a wasteful tendency for curiosity...until you urgently needed an answer that was only available because someone sought to answer a question that wasn't purely tied to a deliverable.
dredmorbius 7y ago
NB: Searching by numeric G+ UUID sometimes works, though in this case, the Wayback Machine seems not to have captured the URL: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://plus.google.com/103703080789076472131/posts/4bkfusUoXot/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://plus.google.com/103703... There's a mapping of a few notable G+ usernames here, including Dr. Gowers: https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2B_Notable_Names_Database https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2B_Notable_Name... We tried. Sorry.
- svat 7y ago
  Thanks for your efforts! Actually, despite ArchiveTeam's statement of having captured 98.6% of public profiles, I wasn't able to find a single post (let alone a complete list of posts) of a single person I cared about on the Wayback Machine as a result of the last-minute scraping (there were a few that had been crawled earlier): neither any of my friends, nor people like Timothy Gowers, Terence Tao, John Baez, Linus Torvalds, etc. I just assumed it had somehow not been uploaded to the Wayback Machine yet, but if it's gone... oh well. Such is life. Thanks again anyway!
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    It's possible some content hasn't yet been ingested, though I'd thought it would be there by now. Just checked Archiveteam's pages, no clear info there.

by svat 7y ago

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

The same attitude persists long after graduation: if the task is to build a website/app/project, completing the project is what's measured and rewarded. Learning how to work with the tools provided isn't valued. At my previous shop, it was called a wasteful tendency for curiosity...until you urgently needed an answer that was only available because someone sought to answer a question that wasn't purely tied to a deliverable.

dredmorbius 7y ago

NB: Searching by numeric G+ UUID sometimes works, though in this case, the Wayback Machine seems not to have captured the URL: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://plus.google.com/103703080789076472131/posts/4bkfusUoXot/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://plus.google.com/103703... There's a mapping of a few notable G+ usernames here, including Dr. Gowers: https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2B_Notable_Names_Database https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2B_Notable_Name... We tried. Sorry.

svat 7y ago
Thanks for your efforts! Actually, despite ArchiveTeam's statement of having captured 98.6% of public profiles, I wasn't able to find a single post (let alone a complete list of posts) of a single person I cared about on the Wayback Machine as a result of the last-minute scraping (there were a few that had been crawled earlier): neither any of my friends, nor people like Timothy Gowers, Terence Tao, John Baez, Linus Torvalds, etc. I just assumed it had somehow not been uploaded to the Wayback Machine yet, but if it's gone... oh well. Such is life. Thanks again anyway!
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  It's possible some content hasn't yet been ingested, though I'd thought it would be there by now. Just checked Archiveteam's pages, no clear info there.