Comment by eftychis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eftychis | Hacker News Reader

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With that kind of thinking though we can reach logical results like:

- writing prose and composition is unnecessary, as at best one will write on slack and social media;

- doing pushups, calisthenics, or running is unnecessary: few jobs require that;

- learning about how the government works, civics or sociology or psychology should be skipped: all these are taken care by the employer that is not going to let you go vote anyways (still don't understand how/why it is not a mandatory holiday, but what do I know);

- debates should be banned: promotes arguing against cops and employers both having detrimental outcomes;

- art is for the rich and private schools: poor populous should not be dreaming;

I suggest -- my 2 humble cents -- the writers of this abomination take a class in logic. Unfortunately, that is math and requires fundamentals they don't want covered.

P.S. My grad school anecdote: our perception and experiences as "international" grad students of the math understanding of incoming undergrads was abysmal to put it lightly. I don't want to be in any future TA shoes.

I don’t see how that is a logical conclusion. There’s such a thing as opportunity cost and interests. If someone wants to learn something, they should, but the problem is forcing those to learn something when they would rather learn something else. There are basic things that everyone should know, like reading. Instead of calculus, logic would be better, and especially probability and statistics.

I agree. Though I loved calculus (and took it in HS and college) my brother hated math in general and forcing him to take it or other advanved math class and get a bad grade is unfair.

Probability and stats requires calculus

It doesn’t, especially at the introductory level. Sure, at a certain point, it would be needed, but that would be for someone wanting to become a statistician, not the general population.

To be fair to the above poster: probability and statistics definitely does need calculus and other math beyond an introductory level. And you see that gap when you read social sciences work applying statistics and making rudimentary, and requiring insight otherwise, mistakes.

Beyond introductory level both probability and statistics have a lot of "counterintuitive" pre-probability and statistics results, that also explain a lot of the misconceptions the public faces in not understanding the notions.

Probability and statistics are topics that our democracies would be better of if people understood them: then they would understand perhaps topics like polling, and we wouldn't perhaps have misuse of the topics in Court like Sally Clark's case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark

[But I guess we would have to drop lotteries as a taxation system also. [/s]]

Essentially what I am saying is suppose the politicians' reasoning, that @currymj suspects and offered above, and I agree with them is the likely one, was to be true.

Then the word calculus (and university admission perhaps with other goals in life) can be treated as variable(s). There is no inherent reason the set of deduction rules are dependent on the choice of topic. Let us denote the reasoning for brevity as a proposition p(s, g) with s\in Subjects g \in Goals:

Start substituting other subjects in there. Their reasoning goes that for an s \in Subjects to be in AcceptedSubjects \subset Subjects it must hold that:

p(s,g):=\(For the majority of students), \exists g \in Goals: p'(s,g). Where p(s,g) relaxes also the goal here -- doesn't have to be college admissions. Then start adding art, debates, writing and other topics I mentioned.

>but the problem is forcing those to learn something when they would rather learn something else.

so, most of my high school classes? I'm not against a more customizable high school experience, but that seems like a harder sell than trying to convince these boards why this initiative is a horrible idea.

>Sure, at a certain point, it would be needed, but that would be for someone wanting to become a statistician, not the general population.

Depends, I guess. Physics has the same issue. Where introductory physics can be taught with formulas, AP physics expects you to understand the calculus behind the formulas and not simply spout out random factoids. There's no particularly best approach here.

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