Bill James has a fun and interesting excerpt arguing that we are very good at developing sports talent, and saying that's a good thing. This has attracted some interesting commentary. We have Alan Jacobs, who says James got the math wrong, and Ross Douthat who basically just agrees with Jacobs. Most interesting is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who highlights what sports has to do with race and opportunity.
But the thing that struck me was one throwaway sentence that we in the United State are very very good at teaching people to drive automobiles.
It's true. Driving is not a trivial skill. It's moderately hard. As hard as learning calculus, I would say. But yet, pretty much everybody learns to drive, but not everybody learns calculus.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1 comment:
Great post as usual, and the best part is your own comments. I wonder if with computer graphics we could show that calculus is part of our daily lives, for example on the GPS planning a route etc. We know driving is necessary to do what we want to do. I guess calculus is "under the hood" of so many things and we don't really need to understand this. I know this is not your point, it is that in terms of difficulty if driving is available to the masses things like calculus are too.
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