[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.