Desrtopa comments on [Link] Offense 101 - Less Wrong
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That would be an amazing class. Even dropping the "offensiveness" billing and just advertising it as a class that would expose you to as many new and unconventional ideas as possible would be pretty neat.
While we're asking for the impossible, I'd kind of like to scrap the entire current primary/secondary school curriculum and replace it entirely with rationality. You'd learn math on the way to being able to use Bayes' Theorem. You'd learn English while writing counter-attitudinal essays. You'd learn history because your assignment is to point out what cognitive biases led Napoleon to make the mistake of invading Russia, and how you would have done better in his shoes. And then you'll play a game of Diplomacy (or Civilization IV, or whatever) to prove it. All exams are calibration tests.
People will complain that it might not give people the same breadth of knowledge. But our current curriculum is entirely about signaling breadth of knowledge. I learned about Sargon of Akkad in sixth grade and I have >90% confidence I'm the only person in the class who remembers his name, and that entirely because I'm the sort of person who would read about people like Sargon anyway outside of class. Once the primary/secondary school system is producing a generation of scholars of Mesopotamian history - or even people who can still speak Spanish five years after their high school Spanish class is over - then they can complain about breadth of knowledge.
But if you optimized the entire school experience for learning how to evaluate information and make good choices, maybe some of that would stick.
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.