6 ms·

Was this in the US? I went to a very large public middle school and high school in Texas, so our experiences may differ, but it was certainly standard there. (T

Was this in the US? I went to a very large public middle school and high school in Texas, so our experiences may differ, but it was certainly standard there. (This, of course, varies even district to district, but perhaps my experience isn't as general as I imagined.)

wahern 6y ago
I can't image that the mechanism isn't taught. I mean, this is basic biology that we probably all learned in middle school, and certainly had to learn in chemistry class. But I think we just fail to put 2-and-2 together, even the teachers. I think I was in my late 20s when it dawned on me that I was exhaling the food I ate. But I came to that realization in a matter of seconds based on first principles--principles learned in middle and high school. Economics is similar. Almost every undergraduate students take economics. And Economics 101 is a pretty simple topic. But very few people learn to "think like an economist", even many economists. I guess alot of subjects are like this--real life isn't like the examples in textbooks, but that doesn't mean the rules and principles don't apply just the same. They do apply. Things can quickly get more complicated than in the textbooks. Perhaps we translate "complicated" to "it doesn't apply" rather than what we should be thinking: it does apply just the same, but so do other dynamics, and the interactions can produce counter-intuitive results.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > I think I was in my late 20s when it dawned on me that I was exhaling the food I ate. But I came to that realization in a matter of seconds based on first principles--principles learned in middle and high school. But as noted elsewhere in the thread, you mostly aren't exhaling your food. Respiration is a reaction that takes in O2 and produces CO2. The only thing you can get rid of by breathing is carbon. But you need to excrete a mixture of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. (Plus trace elements.)
  - wahern 6y ago
    Sure, "it's more complicated". But the most basic, predominate mechanism is that you're literally burning carbon and exhaling CO2. Only from that realization can you start to identify and answer more sophisticated questions, including the exceptions. My point is that you can get an incredible amount of mileage from the most basic principles taught in school. Which is literally the point of a basic education. But people tend to emphasize "don't believe everything you learn in school" rather than "most of what you're taught in school are foundational truths to your environment that can have immense utility in your day-to-day life." If you focus on the former rather than the latter, you won't get into the habit of learning how to apply your knowledge. And if you're not well practiced at application--which is a life-long endeavor for even the most basic rules--then superficially that knowledge tends to seem useless. I never studied computer science in college--I was already writing Perl and JavaScript when I entered a 101 course which was teaching Pascal, and I dropped it the next week. But I did end up learning--and still learn--the theory and its application. I often hear computer science graduates lament that they never actually need to apply what they learned in school in their professional lives. Well, "need" and "can" are two different things and it's a choice you make. Failure to rigorously apply even basic principles is a big reason, IME, why so much software is utter crap. Do you need to consider algorithmic complexity for every little script you write? Yes! Not because it necessarily matters to the performance of the script, per se, but because the script will be part of a larger data processing system, and the way it fits into and shapes that system can and often will effect algorithmic efficiency down the line. It's a useful skill to apply first principles to everything you encounter in life. Not just scientific principles, but moral and emotional principles, too.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > But the most basic, predominate mechanism is that you're literally burning carbon and exhaling CO2. Well, again, you're burning oil (or if you're starving, meat), not carbon. It's mostly carbon by mass, but not by molarity.
      - wahern 6y ago
        That's not a more accurate representation than "burning carbon". The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is recognizing the relationship to more familiar forms of combustion and oxidation in day-to-day life; that's how you orient yourself when you come to the question for the first time. My middle school biology class would have been in the early 1990s when many of the finer details of cellular respiration weren't in any textbooks (certainly not middle school). It wasn't until 1996 that a critical step in ATP synthase was confirmed. But you don't need to know anything about ATP to understand the basic role of carbon in energy extraction and respiration. Actually, now that I think about it biology classes tended to focus more on photosynthesis, which sort of makes sense historically--I suppose breaking CO2 photosynthetically was for hundreds of years the far more scientifically intriguing question, and perhaps that's why it was emphasized so heavily in primary and secondary school biology.

wahern 6y ago

I can't image that the mechanism isn't taught. I mean, this is basic biology that we probably all learned in middle school, and certainly had to learn in chemistry class. But I think we just fail to put 2-and-2 together, even the teachers. I think I was in my late 20s when it dawned on me that I was exhaling the food I ate. But I came to that realization in a matter of seconds based on first principles--principles learned in middle and high school. Economics is similar. Almost every undergraduate students take economics. And Economics 101 is a pretty simple topic. But very few people learn to "think like an economist", even many economists. I guess alot of subjects are like this--real life isn't like the examples in textbooks, but that doesn't mean the rules and principles don't apply just the same. They do apply. Things can quickly get more complicated than in the textbooks. Perhaps we translate "complicated" to "it doesn't apply" rather than what we should be thinking: it does apply just the same, but so do other dynamics, and the interactions can produce counter-intuitive results.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> I think I was in my late 20s when it dawned on me that I was exhaling the food I ate. But I came to that realization in a matter of seconds based on first principles--principles learned in middle and high school. But as noted elsewhere in the thread, you mostly aren't exhaling your food. Respiration is a reaction that takes in O2 and produces CO2. The only thing you can get rid of by breathing is carbon. But you need to excrete a mixture of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. (Plus trace elements.)
- wahern 6y ago
  Sure, "it's more complicated". But the most basic, predominate mechanism is that you're literally burning carbon and exhaling CO2. Only from that realization can you start to identify and answer more sophisticated questions, including the exceptions. My point is that you can get an incredible amount of mileage from the most basic principles taught in school. Which is literally the point of a basic education. But people tend to emphasize "don't believe everything you learn in school" rather than "most of what you're taught in school are foundational truths to your environment that can have immense utility in your day-to-day life." If you focus on the former rather than the latter, you won't get into the habit of learning how to apply your knowledge. And if you're not well practiced at application--which is a life-long endeavor for even the most basic rules--then superficially that knowledge tends to seem useless. I never studied computer science in college--I was already writing Perl and JavaScript when I entered a 101 course which was teaching Pascal, and I dropped it the next week. But I did end up learning--and still learn--the theory and its application. I often hear computer science graduates lament that they never actually need to apply what they learned in school in their professional lives. Well, "need" and "can" are two different things and it's a choice you make. Failure to rigorously apply even basic principles is a big reason, IME, why so much software is utter crap. Do you need to consider algorithmic complexity for every little script you write? Yes! Not because it necessarily matters to the performance of the script, per se, but because the script will be part of a larger data processing system, and the way it fits into and shapes that system can and often will effect algorithmic efficiency down the line. It's a useful skill to apply first principles to everything you encounter in life. Not just scientific principles, but moral and emotional principles, too.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > But the most basic, predominate mechanism is that you're literally burning carbon and exhaling CO2. Well, again, you're burning oil (or if you're starving, meat), not carbon. It's mostly carbon by mass, but not by molarity.
    - wahern 6y ago
      That's not a more accurate representation than "burning carbon". The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is recognizing the relationship to more familiar forms of combustion and oxidation in day-to-day life; that's how you orient yourself when you come to the question for the first time. My middle school biology class would have been in the early 1990s when many of the finer details of cellular respiration weren't in any textbooks (certainly not middle school). It wasn't until 1996 that a critical step in ATP synthase was confirmed. But you don't need to know anything about ATP to understand the basic role of carbon in energy extraction and respiration. Actually, now that I think about it biology classes tended to focus more on photosynthesis, which sort of makes sense historically--I suppose breaking CO2 photosynthetically was for hundreds of years the far more scientifically intriguing question, and perhaps that's why it was emphasized so heavily in primary and secondary school biology.