3 ms·
It's fascinating how much of this there is about. It gets worse when people don't realize there's other ways of looking at things. You'll note there's a whole s
by moomin 3y ago
It's fascinating how much of this there is about. It gets worse when people don't realize there's other ways of looking at things. You'll note there's a whole social movement based around what its proponents refer to as "primary school biology". The idea that primary schools might be teaching a simplified version just doesn't come up.
I once had the honour of talking to Chris Zeeman down a pub. He asked me what I was studying, and I said Newtonian dynamics. This began a solid rant about how he thought it was taught all wrong and by the time we were at university we should be taught about the principle of least action as that would stand us in much better stead as we moved onto more sophisticated versions of physics.
- rjsw 3y agoHis Royal Institution Christmas lectures inspired me to study maths, I was quite proud of getting red ink all through one school homework answer where I used his main area of work instead of whatever method the teacher was expecting to see.
- moomin 3y agoSeriously, I met the dude once 25 years ago for a single evening and I still remember it vividly. Charisma seems an inadequate word for what he had. And he had the chops to back it up. Meanwhile my University group invited Benoit Mandelbrot along in the same year and were making fun of him for years later. So self-important, so little to say. Zeeman, for his part, didn't actually mention his own work once. He wanted to talk maths and the history of maths and there was no subject we touched that he hadn't already thought deeply about.
- jgwil2 3y ago> The idea that primary schools might be teaching a simplified version just doesn't come up. This reminds me of an Atlantic article from a few years ago entitled, "The Curse of Econ 101."[0] In that case, IIRC, the subject was how debates about economic policies like minimum wage laws suffered when people with some knowledge of microeconomic principles tried to extrapolate that to much more complex questions. [0]https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/economism-and-the-minimum-wage/513155/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/economi...