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KatieHartman comments on The Need for Universal Experience Classes - Less Wrong
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It is precisely this kind of thinking, fostered by a pretty low-par early education in math and physics, that led me to believe that knowledge in these areas is virtually useless to just about everyone. And so I passed my one and only college math course in my first semester, filled in my hard science requirements with courses like Environmental Geology, and moved on.
I was wrong. So very, very wrong. Where isn't math useful? I'll refrain from preaching to the choir and instead just ask "Why?" Why do you feel the need to disparage these fields in order to make a point about the usefulness of music theory?
Oh wow, now that I look at it again... that is some horrible wording. I apologize. That "instead" should have been "before" or "in addition to." Also, I meant to be talking in relative - not absolute - terms. I repeat, I do not think they are "useless." I am not at all disparaging this fields. Rather, I was trying to say that learning other fields can sometimes be as useful.
Literature, most of the humanities, the social sciences except at high levels of abstraction, i.e. those things that we've evolved to deal with or that are products of those subsystems that we encountered all the time in the EEA.
Statistics aren't useful in social sciences???
The mains fields listed on Wikipedia are: anthropology, economics, education, geography, history, law, linguistics, political science, psychology and sociology. I'd say statistics are probably useful in around half of those.
The response I'd expect from most people studying psychology, history, sociology, linguistics, political science, anthropology, and law if I asked them when they use math in their work.
That's quite likely, but you may get a more positive response if you ask them about statistics (at least in psychology, sociology and political science); it probably mostly depends of what is implied by "maths".
I would say statistics are useful for many social sciences, and that some maths are needed to understand statistics, though things like theorems and proofs and calculus and category theory are not. Calculus is useful for the (smaller) set of disciplines that can use numerical models (mostly economics). Game Theory is useful in law, economics and political science and also requires a bit of maths.
I'd like to know of a science - any science, social or otherwise - that can be optimally useful without utilizing mathematical analysis.
I suspect this is like demanding a married bachelor. If you understand something well enough to have a theory that explains a lot about something's characteristics or behaviour you can probably model this abstraction mathematically. And math is unreasonably effective at manipulating abstractions.
Math can be a very powerful tool. I don't think anybody is arguing against that possibility here?