The Innumeracy of Intellectuals (2008)

http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/07/26/the-innumeracy-of-intellectual/

by Thrymr • 14 years ago

101 98 14 years ago

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ColinWright• 14 years ago

You want to see "The Two Cultures" by C P Snow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=CP+Snow+cultures

unimpressive• 14 years ago

Part of the problem is seeing Math/Science and The humanities as opposites or opposed to each other.[0] Human knowledge mostly likes to spit in our face when we attempt to label it.[1]

[0] http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/497891/Renaissance...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertwingularity

barrkel• 14 years ago

The problem is that mathematics and the sciences are useful, while the humanities are largely about social signalling. One may be proud to be ignorant of mathematics precisely because it is useful; being ignorant of it indicates you have sufficient wealth in other areas that you don't need to get your hands dirty, as it were. And on the other hand, being ignorant of something like classical music is looked down upon precisely because it marks you out as not a member of the group.

zeteo• 14 years ago

Precisely. Maybe the best way to make math "cool" is to reclaim for it that status of "completely useless but fun knowledge" that Hardy was so proud about in his Apology.

jinfiesto• 14 years ago

Math is cool, and at least to me is lots of fun. The problem, at least at my university is that all of the lower division math classes have been commandeered by the engineering programs. I enjoy doing a substantial amount of recreational math in my spare time. Unfortunately, the classwork at the lower-levels (basically the calc sequence) basically involves regurgitating formulae over contrived physical problems. At its best, Math can be an extremely entertaining way to spend an evening, or a rainy day; It's at least as much fun as writing or reading poetry, or reading a good novel.

klipt• 14 years ago

Still true of some parts of pure math...

dmhdlr• 14 years ago

Among the Western public this might be true. But among intellectuals the bigger prejudice is that numbers are "hard." I certainly find them to be so, and have felt like this since high school algebra.

At root it seems to be an epistemological problem, complicated in higher learning by over-specialization in all disciplines.

aamar2• 14 years ago

But there are reams of math and many fields of science (astronomy, paleontology) that have no practical utility. It's quite easy to find this sort of material in any university, in books, etc.

While I won't directly take on your social signaling claim, there are some humanities which have clear utility (while also functioning as social signals), for example knowing the precise meaning and usage of a large set of words. People in the academy are not disdained for having this practical facility.

An adjusted version of your claim: I think that in some countries (including the U.S.) math & hard science are tarnished through their association with poorly-protected and therefore indifferently remunerated professions, such as accounting, pharmacology, and engineering. Most educated people I encounter would, all things being equal, like to be good at math, but some let themselves off a little easy. Trying and being bad at history would make you dumber than a lawyer, which feels okay; trying and being bad at algebra makes you dumber than an accountant, which is humiliating--so better not to try.

hatcravat• 14 years ago

>But there are reams of math and many fields of science (astronomy, paleontology) that have no practical utility.

Really? Just how do you think ships (and airplanes while over water) navigated before GPS? How do you think the radius (and from that and the density, the mass) of the earth was determined? Would you be able to drive your car to work if not for the effort of paleontologists (many of whom work for the oil industry)?

kingkawn• 14 years ago

There's also social signaling occurring when he includes boozing in his list of reasons he has chosen to remain ignorant of arts and music.

jdleesmiller• 14 years ago

A related anecdote: I saw mathematician Andrew Dilnot [1] at a Mathematica users conference a couple years ago, and he asked the audience how many times the size of the world economy had doubled since 1900, given that it had grown at about 5% per year. The audience guesses were in the 2-4 range, but he pointed out that the rule of 72 gives 110/(72/5) ~= 7.6. "Don't feel bad," he said, "last week I gave this talk to the council of European finance ministers, and they did no better!" (I may not have remembered the numbers exactly, but they were something like that.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Dilnot

Locke16892• 14 years ago

Your calculation is way off. You forget that the rule of 72 is how long it takes for the money to double. Thus, the final calculation is 2^7.6 which is, as any good computer scientist knows, a little less than 256

Tycho• 14 years ago

Huh? At 5% growth per annum, the economy takes 70/5=14 years to double (I prefer the rule of 70). 112 years since 1900, so that's enough time for the economy to double 112/14=8 times.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

This is a bit of a curious post. I'm not sure the antidote to people being proud of ignorance in science/math (which is a problem) is to be proud of ignorance in the humanities (which is also a problem). I mean, if you'd rather go boozing than read Bertrand Russell, that's a choice you're free to make, but I wouldn't be proud of it. I guess I don't know much about the history of classical music myself, but mostly because one can't study everything, and it isn't currently near the top of my reading list (though the fact that both Douglas Hofstadter and David Cope constantly mention J.S. Bach makes it somewhat relevant to my AI interests).

I also don't generally think as scientists we can afford to be ignorant of the humanities in general, though many people can afford to ignore parts. There is a lot of physics that suffers from "bad metaphysics" precisely because of its practitioners reinventing metaphysics, in the guise of "interpretations" of physics, when they are unaware of obvious problems that arise, which even a small amount of reading would've made them aware of. And there's a lot of work in artificial intelligence that makes more sense with a humanities background.

Oddly this seems to be a recent phenomenon. Early 20th century physicists were very well-read in philosophy, and their interpretations are accordingly sophisticated and rarely run into novice problems. Same with mathematicians; it's hard to even separate whether someone like Frege was a mathematician or philosopher. Some is unavoidable due to increasing specialization, but if anything that would seem to call for more humility, not extra arrogance that we know how to solve the philosophical problems that we don't time to study in as much depth as Einstein/Planck/Bohr/etc. did...

I'd trace some of it (on both sides) to a general academic tendency to want to rationalize why the fields you didn't specialize in and don't know about aren't that important to know about. There's an only half-joke that academics always want to reduce every field to their own: to an economist everything is analyzable with economic tools, to a sociologist everything is culture, to a physicist everything is physics and its minor epiphenomena, to a philosopher everything is philosophy plus implementation details, to a dynamical systems theorist everything is just instantiations of dynamical systems, etc.

stanleydrew• 14 years ago

This is only mildly amusing because I know Bertrand Russel more from his work in mathematics than from his work in the humanities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russells_paradox

bluekeybox• 14 years ago

A rhinoceros in the room prevented me from reading as much Bertrand Russell as would have been necessary to make the grandparent poster proud.

crusso• 14 years ago

Early 20th century physicists were very well-read in philosophy

Philosophy's usefulness to Science died off in the early 20th century for a reason.

Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson commented upon this very issue in their Poetry of Science talk. Very insightful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RExQFZzHXQ&feature=playe...

_delirium5• 14 years ago

I can believe that as regards science practice, and think a lot of epistemology of science and such isn't that relevant or useful to the practice of science (everyone seems to have kind of a half-worked-out theory of verificationism or falsificationism or something similar that they claim to subscribe to, but things mostly work pragmatically in practice).

I'm more thinking of physicists who, especially in their later career, decide to write what are essentially philosophy works, only they: 1) don't acknowledge them as such; and 2) they are therefore often not as good as they could be, and sometimes bad. For example, Roger Penrose's stuff about physics and consciousness is a bit strange, and it probably wouldn't hurt if he cared more about existing work in philosophy of mind. And Hawking's most recent book has good science, and an interesting philosophical proposal of "model-dependent realism", but strangely refuses to consider it to be a philosophy proposal or discuss relevant existing positions.

Physicists veering off towards "big-picture" philosophy-ish stuff later in their careers isn't new, but this sort of seat-of-your-pants approach seems newer. Looking at the philosophy-oriented works Max Planck wrote later in his career, for example, he's impressively well-read in both physics and philosophy.

philwelch5• 14 years ago

I do not think that's true. Are you familiar with the idea that scientific theories have to be falsifiable? That was formulated by Karl Popper in the mid-20th century.

If anything, the rise of analytic philosophy and the introduction of greater logical rigor to philosophy in the early 20th century made it relevant again after a largely fruitless 19th century. Go ahead and ask a scientist whether Popper or Hegel is more useful.

neutronicus2• 14 years ago

In Physics, the general feeling is that "philosophical interpretation" is simply out of the scope of our work. I think this derives mainly from the intensity and ultimate futility of the disagreements over the interpretation of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century. It's seen as a waste of time and a seed of acrimony that we're better off not indulging in as a field.

gruseom• 14 years ago

I think _delirium's point is that unconscious indulging in it is worse than conscious indulging in it.

kafkaesque• 14 years ago

Oddly this seems to be a recent phenomenon. Early 20th century physicists were very well-read in philosophy, and their interpretations are accordingly sophisticated and rarely run into novice problems. Same with mathematicians; it's hard to even separate whether someone like Frege was a mathematician or philosopher.

Bertrand Russell and Frege are part of philosophy of science, a relatively recent period in philosophy.

It is widely accepted that philosophy of science was initiated by Immanuel Kant (late 18th century) in the Western world, and since then, philosophers have been trying to give solutions to some of the problems he first posed.

What's more, most of the Western world at the end of the 18th century underwent a period called Enlightenment. This meant, all of a sudden, there was a huge emphasis on science and empiricism throughout all parts of society (Academia included, of course).

Before that, 'philosophy of science' was known as (observations on) natural history, and then the term 'natural philosophy' was created.

Thus, since mathematics is the language of science, this is why you can't/couldn't tell whether a philosopher of science was a mathematician or a philosopher.

Even nowadays, most programmes (my own research covers Canada and major American universities) only offer philosophy of science courses, but many do not explicitly state 'philosophy of science'. I know this because I almost majored in philosophy, but I specifically wanted to go away from this branch and instead wanted to specialize in pre-Socratic philosophy, but there were no programmes dedicated to this.

As for my personal opinion on students/teachers of science vs. arts, I feel many science students lack an appreciation of philosophy and how much it did for the sciences in its early years. Most science majors shove philosophy with the rest of the arts, but, as an arts major, philosophy is the hardest arts subject and can be equally demanding as a physics course, because it is the only subject which requires an extremely rigorous knowledge of science and arts. And there are simply very few people who hold such knowledge. Philosophy is the ultimate interdisciplinary subject where in a given class, you can talk about the laws of speed and light, 18th century subtexts vis-à-vis slavery, and biology (the growth process of plants and trees).

ced• 14 years ago

There is a lot of physics that suffers from "bad metaphysics" precisely because of its practitioners reinventing metaphysics, in the guise of "interpretations" of physics, when they are unaware of obvious problems that arise, which even a small amount of reading would've made them aware of.

Could you give examples? I'm not sure what you're referring to.

shrikant• 14 years ago

Maybe the commenter was referring to the "quantum energy" BS spouted by the likes of Deepak Chopra? (but in nicer words that I personally would've put it...)

Tichy• 14 years ago

Isn't the difference that you can do practical stuff with maths, but not really with literature and art (except, granted, create more literature and art, which might be the only jobs left in the future)?

Perhaps knowing maths is a bit like having dirty fingernails from doing manual labor. A certain class of people is proud of not having to do manual labor, and hence they take pride in their clean and long fingernails. Others will despise them and value "real work" higher.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

Ah, but pure mathematicians see themselves as having the clean fingernails, studying the mysteries of the cosmos unsullied by practical application. :)

derleth10• 14 years ago

> Perhaps knowing maths is a bit like having dirty fingernails from doing manual labor.

Never tell this to someone who pursues pure mathematics. It's so absolutely opposite their whole mindset that math should focus on anything other than the beauty of mathematics that comparing it to manual labor may well make their heads explode.

krakensden• 14 years ago

> This is a bit of a curious post. I'm not sure the antidote to people being proud of ignorance in science/math (which is a problem) is to be proud of ignorance in the humanities (which is also a problem).

I don't think you really mean ignorance in the humanities, you mean ignorance in philosophy. Being able to distinguish all the various cantatas of Bach is the most trivial of trivialities. More broadly, I suspect talking about "the humanities" as a category is worse than useless, because you get passionate defenses of literacy in reply to weeping and moaning over the sad state of modern dance.

Talk about literacy, philosophy, history. Talk about theater and dance. Talk about visual art and music. Talk about rhetoric and economics.

dinkumthinkum• 14 years ago

I think this misses the point a little bit though. I believe he acknowledges that that is probably not a good thing but he is trying to point out the phenomenon of it being "acceptable" to well-trained in humanities but be prideful of not knowing mathematics but the reverse is considered strange.

vegas• 14 years ago

Chad Orzel isn't glamourizing his lack of systematic knowledge, merely acknowledging it in a forthright and fairly humble manner. I'd argue that he's trying to avoid coming off as and arrogant physics/math nerd.

In fact, here is direct textual evidence contradicting your caricaturization:

"This is the exact same chippiness I hear from Physics majors who are annoyed at having to take liberal arts classes in order to graduate. The only difference is that Terrance can expect to get a sympathetic hearing from much of the academy, where the grousing of Physics majors is written off as whining by nerds who badly need to expand their narrow minds."

I give you an F in Reading, and a B in Rhetoric. I concur entirely that the lack of intellectual breadth amongst both technical and non-technical academics is quite obnoxious, and I'd argue that the rather pointlessly competitive nature of academic subfield is a holdover from when academics were basically young courtiers trying to secure themselves a nice sinecure. Sometimes this energy can produce great things, I'd venture that at this point we are just making the remarkable research discoveries that are largely just waiting around for some humble systematic work, further away.

cperciva5• 14 years ago

I don't mind the innumeracy of so many liberal arts intellectuals... as long as they stick to liberal arts. Alas, they do not.

A short time ago, I was involved in debate over instituting a new affirmative action program at my university. "We're failing this group terribly! We must do something about this!" came the rallying cry.

I responded with university admissions statistics, high school graduation statistics, and census statistics, showing that the largest reason behind our apparent lack of members of that group was that we were an urban institution which drew students mostly from the local area, and members of that group lived mostly in rural areas where the population as a whole tended to attend more rural institutions. (Canada has far more of a trend towards attending "nearby" post-secondary institutions than the US does.)

I was accused of trying to confuse the issue "by introducing numbers and percentages", and the admissions policy was adopted.

simonsarris2• 14 years ago

Is there a good reason to think this is not either a curious outlier or strawman? Is that situation alone actually good reason to demand people "stick to the liberal arts"? Or is there something else here among your reasoning?

For the record, I have a degree in CS and Philosophy, so its awfully tough to "stick to the liberal arts".

cperciva5• 14 years ago

That was the most blatant example, but I see members of the university Senate voting for what they "know" over what they have evidence for on a regular basis.

(And the philosophers aren't the problem... although that might be partly because our philosophy department is quite strong on logic.)

ElliotMingee2• 14 years ago

Not to derail the thread here, but I'm genuinely curious: what prompted you to pick up degrees in both CS and philosophy? I know pg is in a similar boat, however I didn't meet anyone in undergraduate or graduate school pursuing that path. Given how important reasoning is in both disciplines, I don't think it's an unnatural coupling; however, I'd be very interested to know if you felt they complemented each other.

saulrh• 14 years ago

It seems to me like a reasonable generalization of the part where experts don't talk authoritatively about things outside their fields. You have degrees in CS and Philosophy, but I doubt you'd write about as related to your field as CPU manufacture, much less completely unrelated fields like aircraft design or particle physics. Staying out of shakespeare, political science, art history, and archaeology is just a broader extension of the same principle. In the reverse direction, if you know nothing about statistics, using statistics in your reasoning is probably a bad idea, and if someone brings in statistics you should pull in someone that knows how to do statistics so you're not making a decision that you don't understand. "Staying out of things you're not qualified to talk about" could prevent a lot of problems.

Homunculiheaded2• 14 years ago

As someone with a BA in English and wrapping up an MS in Computer Science, I really think anyone who considers themselves an "intellectual" should know both the theory of probability and Foucault. I'll be the first to agree that probability will land you more jobs, but from a purely intellectual angle I woulds say these have equally helped me undertand the world around me.

I've been in rooms of really smart technical people who have a child-like understanding of social and cultural issues that effect them (discussion about gender on HN can be a great example of this). At the same time I've been in rooms of extremely well read humanists who cringe at any attempt to understand the world through mathematical models. Both of these groups exhibit a clear intellectual poverty that limits their overall understanding of the world.

The worst part isn't merely that each group has such ignorance of the other's domain, but that each will proudly defend this ignorance. The "enjoy working at starbucks" and "buzzes like a fridge" comments are equally anti-intellectual. The first thing that needs to change is this attitude.

slurgfest6• 14 years ago

How does one determine whether Foucault's statements are true or not? At any rate, why should I accept them?

If the answers to these questions are negative, then in what way can Foucault be put on the same level as the theory of probability, so that it is a shameful thing not to know anything about what Foucault says?

abecedarius2• 14 years ago

I can explain the broad value of probability: Cox's theorem, in theory, and broad use in mathematical sciences, in practice. What makes Foucault comparable? (Honest question from the ignorant. Though I'd be less skeptical if you'd said something like 'postmodern critical theory' instead of a name.)

pfedor2• 14 years ago

Your point may be true, but this is not a good example, since the question discussed was of political nature, and even very smart people will ignore whatever evidence contradicts their political choices. That your argument was ignored had nothing to do with the innumeracy of the faculty members, and everything with them being liberals. If the room had been full of Google engineers, the outcome of the discussion wouldn't have been any different. (Although obviously they wouldn't use the phrase "confuse the issue by introducing numbers and percentages.")

cperciva5• 14 years ago

True. I wasn't shocked that I was out-voted; it was the accusation that introducing data was a ploy to confuse the issue which shocked me.

evincarofautumn2• 14 years ago

Perhaps the sciences are just harder to pretend to care about. I don’t mean that derisively—it’s just that the arts are very approachable because you don’t need to understand everything in order to appreciate it.

I’m a designer at heart, but my work is firmly in the hard sciences. I’m excited about what I do, and it shows. That’s what gets people interested—ferocity, passion.

You have to be able to describe your work in accessible terms, so that other people can appreciate it without having to understand it in depth. Not all people want to understand everything—it’s hard work. Work that we hackers can take for granted because, by our nature, we enjoy it.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

That's probably true for some parts of science, but I think the general public pays at least as much attention to science as to art, when something catches its attention. How many people who don't know the first thing about particle physics were tweeting about the Higgs Boson? Probably more than the number who tweet about Damien Hirst! Astronomers are good at getting public attention and cultivating a sense of "astronomy appreciation" among laypeople as well.

evincarofautumn2• 14 years ago

Sure. But we’re not all Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye, and we don’t all work in fields that make it to “pop science” status. My work is in compilers—not exactly well known outside academia and the programming community. It doesn’t come for free.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

I think that's worrying - people don't have the language to begin to understand the Higgs boson.

Not just that they don't know what a boson is, but they don't really know what particles are, or what energy is, or what mass is. And so when you need to explain what the Higgs Boson is you need to give the simple lies we tell people when we explain physics

I live in the UK. BBC Radio 4 has a "flagship" news and current affairs programme called 'Today'.[1] Science is routinely handled as if the audience are idiots, while arts are given free range to be reasonably esoteric.

[1] Today website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm)

dkarl• 14 years ago

Perhaps the sciences are just harder to pretend to care about. I don’t mean that derisively—it’s just that the arts are very approachable because you don’t need to understand everything in order to appreciate it.

Your second statement is the core issue; pretense has nothing to do with it. The sciences are harder to care about because reaping the rewards of science requires reaching a minimal level of competence.

In art or literature teachers are happy to pass students who never really grasp the basics of how literature is constructed and interpreted. They only demand one thing: that you put enough effort into studying basic critical techniques that you learn to imitate them somewhat. Even that is subordinate to their main hope, which is that you see something in a work of art or literature that inspires a new perspective about something in your life or in the world.

A literature class built around those standards is a valuable and enriching experience, and it can even be valuable and enriching for someone really competent who shares the same classroom with people who aren't.

How could that be accomplished in math or science? If you only require that the students engage with the experience of investigating math or science, and you don't require that they develop competence at applying scientific knowledge, then the students will develop appreciation for the field and perhaps some good will and appreciation for people who are competent, but they won't learn anything useful they can apply in their own lives. They won't learn to read popular science articles intelligently. They won't gain a better understanding of their own health. The only positive outcome is that they might believe that scientists are okay people after all and not scary soulless monsters. (A lot of people in academia would consider that a negative outcome anyway.)

To illustrate the contrast, suppose I believe my spouse is cheating on me, and I think of Richard III and recognize the same feelings of anger and paranoia in Richard III's feelings towards his wife, and I gain a richer perspective on the possibility that my spouse is cheating on me. By mandatory general education standards, academia is willing to grant that I have successfully engaged with literature. It doesn't matter whether I understood Shakespeare's devices correctly or how many layers of meaning I penetrated. It doesn't even matter that I got Richard III and Othello mixed up. What matters is that my range and depth of understandings was enriched by my reading of the play. Most importantly, it doesn't matter whether my beliefs about my spouse's behavior are accurate or not. If I decide to trust my spouse, and four years and two children later I find out that my suspicions were founded all along, and two kids grow up with divorced mistrustful parents, then that is not a failure of my literary education.

In contrast to the literary example, if I read the CDC web site about MRSA and then read a web site that says all so-called infections are actually manifestations of nutritional imbalances, and then I decide it's perfectly appropriate to visit my grandmother in the hospital with an uncovered wound on my arm while she's recovering from surgery, then that's a complete failure of my science education, even though I engaged with writing about infection and enriched my range and depth of understandings about infection. Right answers may not be important to the process of doing science, but they are vital to reaping its rewards.

The difference is that art and literature fill the same role that Bertrand Russell described for philosophy (quote from a recent HN thread):

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation....

This is the pragmatic approach to literature that colleges would like all graduates to appreciate. That means introductory literature classes can be enriching without demanding that everyone achieve any basic competence at literary analysis. Introductory science courses are useless unless the students achieve some basic level of competence. That means that mandatory science education is a very different proposition from mandatory art and literature courses. The minimum useful standard is much, much higher (unless the purpose of science education is merely to teach people to trust mainstream authorities.)

hsmyers• 14 years ago

I was lucky enough to spend a fair amount of time in college with a senior citizen who was aiming for a fine arts degree in painting. As in most colleges, this does not require algebra which she thought was a shame as she had been home schooled and had a thorough background in mathematics as was expected of a young lady of her class and social standing. That 'woke' me up to the decline in education standards in the second half of the 20th century. Not only in this country but around the world. If you think I'm wrong, just compare the textbooks available now with what was available in say 1910! Would you even be allowed to use a text book by Hilbert? I doubt it. I will grant you that she was exceptional and typically excelled in any endeavor she chose---she was I believe the first American woman to be allowed a role on stage at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin as an example. Decline and Fall are us I guess...

neutronicus2• 14 years ago

You're comparing educational standards for the wealthy to educational standards for everyone.

wpietri• 14 years ago

But he's doing it across a couple generations. Our material wealth is so much greater that it's reasonable to ask whether our level of education has kept up.

ef4• 14 years ago

By 1910 universal compulsory education was already in full swing in many places. Take Massachusetts, for example. If you examine the textbooks being used in Massachusetts at that time you'll see the same phenomenon -- they're much more advanced than modern textbooks. And they were not just for the rich, Massachusetts already had compulsory education.

And by the same argument: where are today's equivalent textbooks for the rich? Our wealth gap is as big as ever, yet I see no books even for the rich that are so advanced.

mangler• 14 years ago

Yeah, the next time you go to your local yoga class and the local bleached bimbo starts babbling on about quantum physics (for some reason, a favourite subject), ask them if they can solve a quadratic equation. Guess what, they can't. But that is not a reason to desist! The quantum physics banter lives on...

So, learn from these smart people. Fake it and bask in it!

rickmb• 14 years ago

"our economy is teetering because people can’t hack the math needed to understand how big a loan they can afford"

That is not so much caused by a lack of math as it is a surplus of delusional optimism. No amount of math will ever beat that. Not only is it a bad example, I can't think of any better examples, and apparently neither can the author.

It may be that my utter incompetence in math makes me less than objective, but I fail to see any convincing argument in the entire article.

SagelyGuru• 14 years ago

Being an intellectual ought to be primarily a matter of attitude of respect towards knowledge of all kinds and, above all, a strong curiosity and interest in learning.

Thus what is particularly sad is not the fact that some subject or another is avoided and ignored by (intellectually) lazy people but that such people, proud of their ignorance, nowadays pass for intellectuals.

'My subject is more important than yours, so I am not going to waste time learning from you' is just a post-justification for being a dullard and a bigot.

pessimizer• 14 years ago

Case in point:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-...

I find it a bit sad how he thinks that people should be taught long division, which is what we have calculators for, but algebra is a step too far. The only reason I think people should be taught arithmetic is so that they understand algebra. After algebra, Calculus I for people who want to actually be knowledgeable about the world around them (No heavy series and no multivariate), and then I don't care what they do, because I trust that they understand how the world works.

Instead, Hacker suggests that we drill those future artists and writers on duplicating the functions of a calculator for 12 years, and then throw them into the voting booth. Bleah.

The Innumeracy of Intellectuals (2008)

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