gwern comments on [Link] Offense 101 - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Alejandro1 24 October 2012 09:28PM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 27 October 2012 02:56:35AM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 27 October 2012 05:35:18PM 9 points [-]

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?"