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Desrtopa comments on [Link] Offense 101 - Less Wrong
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I'm supportive of this idea, but I wonder if people (including me) who make proposals such as "let's scrap the primary school curriculum and fill it with learning that's actually useful" underestimate the amount of useful things that they've learned in primary school, because they no longer remember the origins of that knowledge and have filed it under "those obvious things that everyone knows".
Personally, watching slideshow clips in the "Strangers Like Me" musical sequence in Disney's Tarzan always makes me think "Wow... I know a lot of shit." Because I can give at least a basic description of the things appearing in every single clip, and it gives me a hint of the scope of all the motley stuff I know that would be completely alien to me if I had grown up, say, in an isolated tribal village in Africa.
How much of it is actually useful is another matter, but there are certainly occasions where I find myself drawing on knowledge like, say, which is the country of origin of sumo wrestling, which I wouldn't predict in advance to be especially useful.
Yesterday I was thinking about how expensive education is, and why human capital seems to be so important, as I knelt down to tie my shoes and I suddenly thought - "I had to be taught how to tie my shoes! In school, for that matter, we had little shoe boards we could practice tying laces on. Wow, how did I forget that?"
You have the Encyclopedic Knowledge merit from World of Darkness.
But, yeah, random knowledge has more uses than merely impressing people. However, please note that your African would have specialized knowledge and skills related to his own environment, not to mention cultural lore. He has probably memorized thousands of verses of poetry, for example.
Some Africans surely have - a specialist like a griot presumably would. But is that really comparable? Desrtopa presumably isn't a professional singer, storyteller/raconteur, comedian, or actor. He is, as far as I know, an ordinary person albeit a geeky and intelligent one.