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How otherwise are you going to develop abstract thinking? There's a huge boulder in front of you and you need to hire a truck to move it. But to do that you nee

by akomtu 4y ago

How otherwise are you going to develop abstract thinking? There's a huge boulder in front of you and you need to hire a truck to move it. But to do that you need to know the weight of the boulder. How do you measure it? Or there is a very tall tree you need to cut down, but if the tree is too tall, it might fall on your house. How do you measure its height?

eternityforest 4y ago
Math is great, but examples like that are pretty unconvincing. The real value is in solving new problems that nobody has encountered before. I'm not good at math, so I have no idea what I'd use it for. I'd probably get a high end tech job working with advanced stuff, and whatever I was doing there would be stuff that made no sense to someone who doesn't already know math. It's exactly the kind of leap of faith that young people seem to be uninterested in. People have figured out by now that they will always have a calculator 99% of the time, and probably won't need math in the remaining 1%, Google can tell you how to do niche stuff that doesn't come up a lot, and lots of the stuff you use math for also requires specialist equipment, so you'll probably just hire someone. Perhaps if we had more of a DIY culture. But even then, I do a lot of DIY work and almost never encounter math, because I've got FreeCAD. And even though I'm vaguely aware of they Pythagorean theorem, I doubt I'd use it to find the height of a tree, I'd draw it as a sketch and use a constraint solver, actually seeing the triangle on the screen would make it a little clearer if there was a mistake, and it's one less calculation to mess up. Or, I'd just use the height feature on the laser measurement tool. I do have friends who use math in real life, but I rarely see them do anything they couldn't do with an understanding of what software can do, rather than an understanding of the actual physics. And yet everyone seems to say they are very happy to have learned it, and most of our big innovations are from people who know it. I think the important part is how do you convey the benefit of math without saying anything people will immediately recognize as kind of an exaggeration. Math isn't directly useful in an average person's life, it gives people the possibility of doing certain things average people don't do, and lets people understand things, that are not always obvious ahead of time why you would want to understand them.

by akomtu 4y ago

eternityforest 4y ago

Math is great, but examples like that are pretty unconvincing. The real value is in solving new problems that nobody has encountered before. I'm not good at math, so I have no idea what I'd use it for. I'd probably get a high end tech job working with advanced stuff, and whatever I was doing there would be stuff that made no sense to someone who doesn't already know math. It's exactly the kind of leap of faith that young people seem to be uninterested in. People have figured out by now that they will always have a calculator 99% of the time, and probably won't need math in the remaining 1%, Google can tell you how to do niche stuff that doesn't come up a lot, and lots of the stuff you use math for also requires specialist equipment, so you'll probably just hire someone. Perhaps if we had more of a DIY culture. But even then, I do a lot of DIY work and almost never encounter math, because I've got FreeCAD. And even though I'm vaguely aware of they Pythagorean theorem, I doubt I'd use it to find the height of a tree, I'd draw it as a sketch and use a constraint solver, actually seeing the triangle on the screen would make it a little clearer if there was a mistake, and it's one less calculation to mess up. Or, I'd just use the height feature on the laser measurement tool. I do have friends who use math in real life, but I rarely see them do anything they couldn't do with an understanding of what software can do, rather than an understanding of the actual physics. And yet everyone seems to say they are very happy to have learned it, and most of our big innovations are from people who know it. I think the important part is how do you convey the benefit of math without saying anything people will immediately recognize as kind of an exaggeration. Math isn't directly useful in an average person's life, it gives people the possibility of doing certain things average people don't do, and lets people understand things, that are not always obvious ahead of time why you would want to understand them.