this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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I dunno. Math asks me to just accept it's normal to have 60 watermelons and is trying move bulk orders of melons on a regular car. The goal is to figure out the problem and not accept that the person who is a wholesale watermelon dealer in denial is commiting tax evasion.
Or to discover that the melon seller has a regular job in ag and gets a bunch of melons on the side from the field and sells the harvest at cost to make up the part of their paycheck that was paid in perishable food.
Should we shame the seller for breaking the law or sympathize for being forced into that situation? People don't have the energy to care; they just came for a maths question.
Sorry, dude, what you said must have been very interesting, but at some point I just stopped reading to optimize a watermelon workflow instead. Weird.
I don't know how i got here, but I seem to have purchased 7 watermelons.
I wrote a melon API to facilitate the melon management and shipping
but... this is not the math you see at STEM, this is the math you see at high school at best. There's no deeper meaning in actual STEM math problems, they are way too abstract or specific. There's no watermelons, it's just some a, b, n1, nk... maybe some physics formulas that apply to velocity, mass... I read 0 problems in my uni math and physics courses where they used real world examples.
I see your point but that's for high schoolers, not STEM students or alumnus.
It's weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can't prove empiricism is "true" it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.
Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the "goodness" of your preferences is and so on.
Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.
So idk, I think it's less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they're at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn't guarantee you'd have good opinions.
This is what bothered me in the original discussion, making it seem like being in STEM somehow doesn't prepare you at all for critical thinking in general. On the contrary, I believe too there are people who develop it in part because of the S in there. It's not necessary, but it's an important tool.
Hopefully people don't need a college degree in literature to understand basic subtext. We ask kindergarteners to do that with Dr Seuss.
I think it's about learning that it's worth doing more than anything else.
My physics dissertation was actually about how many watermelons you can fit in a 1996 Honda Accord.