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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

I never imagined how much focus and fascination society would place on computer science when I chose it as my major over a decade ago. There were under 5 CS majors in my graduating class of hundreds of students. This has me wondering about the future. What will be the next big thing with which we will see articles claiming

"Soandso is the first president to do X"[0]?

or "...X will be a fundamental skill—just like reading, writing, and arithmetic..."[1]

Are there any so-called fundamental skills left for us to discover?

[0]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/10/president-obama-f...

[1]: http://socialissues.cs.toronto.edu/index.html%3Fp=279.html

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It's probably time for us to rediscover logic as a fundamental skill. But that's a prerequisite or corequisite to computational thinking.

Yes! Propositional logic and conditional/indirect proof strategies should be taught before any kinds of "proofs" are taught to students (I'm looking at you, trigonometry).

Right. It's briefly introduced in geometry (or used to be) in the typical US high school curriculum, but not thoroughly and not as a distinct concept from geometry. It deserves its own sequence of material, and it should be applied to multiple areas so students can see the value of it more easily.

When the only application is geometry, and they hate geometry, they won't care about the "tool" being used.

Aristotelian logic can and should be taught at the elementary school level. Bring back the Socratic method while we're at it! And Euclid's Elements! The Greeks contributed well to education.

Used to be taught in the 19th century and early 20th century, along with rhetoric and the classics.

I think we made a great mistake by getting rid of them.

No, the fundamental skill is the ability to convince other people that you have the fundamental skill.

I didn't say the, I said a. What you refer to would be an aspect of rhetoric, another fundamental skill.

Coming from a language that doesn't really have articles, I was wondering if I should use "the" or "a". I think I could use both, because it cannot be proven that there is only fundamental skill with that property, or that they cannot support each other.

Anyway, my comment was a social commentary - it doesn't seem that pure logic is really what ultimately matters in human society, sadly. That is, if some other people are using logic wrong, you will also gain if you use it wrong in order to convince them.

Although I would also say that empiricism is much more important to rationalism (logic). There are many ideas that seem very logical, yet they are very bad, because people intuitively misunderstand some aspect of reality in their model.

I reckon rationality/rational thinking, decision theory, bayesianism, being aware of cognitive biases inherent in the human brain, in a word lesswrongiansm.

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