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PuyaSharif comments on The Need for Universal Experience Classes - Less Wrong
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Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microbiology etc are areas describing objective reality. They explain how the world we live in works on a fundamental level, i.e the very fabric of reality. Not only do they give answers to basic questions of human life, they also activate the students toward systematic analytical thinking and questioning.
Do you really mean that people would be better off never being exposed to ("interesting but useless") natural science? Would you prefer a society where most people doesn't have a clue about how things around them came to be or how they work? How would a potential engineer or a researcher build up its interest towards science if never exposed to it systematically?
Learning about music and art is good, but not at expense of science!
I suspect that your are making and destroying a straw man here. The original (admittedly rather rambling) post did not advocate never exposing students to science, but rather a specific way of doing it, a sort of a loose version of Socratic questioning.
shend, shimux. I am not questioning the overall thesis of the post. Just reacting to:
"I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. But, they are relatively advanced topics. People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most? "
Isn't this statement true?
It depends on how you define 'use'. People are trying to make sense of reality all the time. Different scenarios needs different tools and different ways of thinking. Basic high school science helps you understand parts of the news flow, some aspects of the mechanisms of your household appliances, transportation related concepts like time, velocity, acceleration, your body and so on.
As a general principle, resolving ambiguities in other people's assertions so those assertions are true is more charitable, and more likely to allow us to understand their point.
If a sentence "people don’t use X in daily life unless they are professionals" is followed by "why not learn things that we think about every day", it's reasonable to assume that "use" in the former sentence means the same as "think about" in the latter, not "use professionally".
I suppose I can see how one could interpret the post the way you did, though the author emphatically did not advocate teaching art instead of science, just a different way of teaching (or, rather, not teaching) in general.
Actually, I was never saying that we shouldn't learn about science or any other "areas describing objective reality." I love science myself. I just think that we shouldn't focus on these areas exclusively, like many schools do now. For example, I think that an engineer who loves listening to music all day should at least learn the basic theory of how music works, so that he can appreciate it more intellectually and understand it better. Why should we choose to understand some aspects of life and not others?
Many schools focus on science and math exclusively? I don't believe that is at all true-- even for science and technology magnet programs.