[kowbell]

The “when are we going to use this” question is about when “we” ourselves will directly use it - not when we will use something that uses it.

I don’t have to use any calculus to get a weather report, etc., because other people do that for me and give me their results - it’s part of their job.

Calculus is indispensable and is used in our everyday life - but most of us won’t use it ourselves, or need to know the specifics, or really even know the broader parts of it.

[lloeki]

> The “when are we going to use this” question is about when “we” ourselves will directly use it - not when we will use something that uses it.

You don't have to use it directly for it to be useful.

Having some knowledge/experience with it means you can assume a level of trust in the result of a system that uses it, even if you don't touch it directly.

If you don't it's either blind trust (which requires quite a leap of faith) or, more probably, distrust.

By and large, there's very little of what we're taught (whether it's math, or logic, or science at large, or literature...) that we use directly in our everyday life. Nonetheless it helps build an internal compass that helps us eyeball/gut feel what we can trust or not trust.

The growing distrust in recent key events (climate change, covid...) is largely due to that compass being broken, and to me that's in good part due to a failing of education systems at large.

[asdff]

But for these things they are often really quite uncontroversial. Are you calculating the weather by hand to confirm NOAAs numbers? Definitely not. In the end you have to put trust in things you don't understand, because you can't learn the exact underpinnings of each and everything you face in life within the span of one human lifetime.

[just_boost_it]

I agree with this 100%. The insight into Calculus that we get in high school is pretty fleeting, but you do at least get to see the ingredients that go into things like weather reports. Otherwise it just becomes a magic black box. Maybe it doesn't work for a lot of people, but it just has to stick for enough people that we can continue to tell magic apart from science at the society level.

[MajimasEyepatch]

You probably don't need to know how to compute a derivative, but there are tons of related concepts that are helpful for reasoning about systems in the world. You can always Google the chain rule, but having a general sense of the trend is often all you need.

For example, you don't have to remember how to derive it, but knowing that y'' = y is a positive feedback loop (exponential growth) but y'' = -y is a negative feedback loop (oscillating) is really useful in all sorts of common sense scenarios.

Learning is about concepts more than facts or algorithms.

[thfuran]

>knowing that y'' = y is a positive feedback loop (exponential growth) but y'' = -y is a negative feedback loop (oscillating) is really useful in all sorts of common sense scenarios.

I'm not sure what sorts of situations you keep finding yourself in, but I think they're pretty atypical.

[lamontcg]

positive and negative feedbacks happen in climate systems and economic systems.

if you want to have a chance of understand the economic news it is a good idea to have familiarity with them.

[bulatb]

Oversimplifying leads to confidently wrong predictions based on superficial understanding. Basic intuition about differential equations doesn't meaningfully help you with the math of economic models, nor is math alone enough to understand what happens in a complex system made of people.

You may be better off not knowing anything and knowing that you don't.

Edit: Not to say it's good not to know things in general. Just that there's some minimum you need to know for it to practically help you, and sometimes it's a lot.

[lamontcg]

Zero knowledge doesn't prevent anyone from being confidently incorrect (in fact it seems to encourage it).

[bulatb]

That's true. But if zero knowledge doesn't help, and a little more won't either, then why make people suffer to acquire that little bit more?

Which I guess just brings us back to the top of the question. My bad.