[pessimizer]

I don't buy that. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not only basic, but can be stated in a sentence. Being able to generally recall the plot of Romeo & Juliet (or any Shakespeare play) is objectively harder than being able to spit out that sentence. I'll make the bold claim that Second Law of Thermodynamics would be recalled by far more scientists than the plot of Coriolanus would be by MFAs.

The worst thing we do is fail to teach statistics to liberal arts majors. Then, as citizens, they make obvious mistakes about the relative costs and effects of things they advocate for or are against, and can be easily manipulated in any direction with attacks on their availability heuristics.

[asdfman123]

I would bet you money if you asked a random sampling of college grads, 10x the number of people could roughly summarize Romeo and Juliet than the second law of thermodynamics.

[MichaelZuo]

Which is a bit of shame since the two cultures are of roughly equal importance to the future prospects of college grads.

[jameshart]

The Two Cultures isn’t just about lamenting that science knowledge is underrepresented though. The tragedy is that for a typical college grad they can do one or the other but not both.

[groby_b]

>>> is objectively harder

I don't think it's objectively harder - at the very least, [citation needed]. It might be subjectively harder for you. But one is a random factoid, the other one is a story. Humans are, in general, exceedingly good at stories. Facts, we tend to focus on the areas we know. You and I might be good at physics facts, or software facts. Somebody else might be good at agriculture facts, or knitting facts, or what-have-you.

But stories are universal. They connect. It's how most of humanity learns and shares knowledge. (See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02036-8)

There's a pretty good likelihood that stories are ultimately easier to remember for a larger number of people than facts.

>>> Then, as citizens, they make obvious mistakes about the relative costs and effects of things they advocate for

I'll note that you're possibly wrong about relative costs of learning, too. What matters isn't only what you learn (though teaching stats would sure be a good thing), but also a willingness to approach issues with a bit of humility, and not claiming something as absolute fact until it provably is.

[silvestrov]

"a random factoid" would be "the NY subway has 493 stations".

The laws of Thermodynamics are fundamentals like "what is democracy"

[groby_b]

I'm talking about the shape of the information, not its relative importance.

Humans deal better with one shape than the other. That's the reason so many memorization techniques rely on stringing things together in stories.

[cwmoore]

"First be a human" is objectively hard. Stories "appear designed to coordinate social behaviour and promote cooperation" from your link, as a functional component of groups of people. Scientific laws, and other random factoids abstracted from character plotlines typically do not "arise spontaneously in children".

The frequent retellings of familiar stories with new characters and plot twists suggests to me that there might not be as much learning involved in stories as pattern recognition. I have no citations to back that up but would be delighted to read a story that critiques the accepted story story.

[watwut]

Why would frequent reteling sugest there is not much learning?

[cwmoore]

Because so many of the stories are already familiar.

[fastaguy88]

Perhaps a version of the second law can be described in one sentence ("heat flows from hot to cold", perhaps), but when I go to the Wikipedia page, it's quite a bit more complicated than that (e.g. existence/importance of entropy). Romeo and Juliet is quite a bit simpler -- forbidden love, mistaken suicide.

[adammarples]

Yeah, the one sentence would be "entropy in a closed system can only increase"

[noduerme]

> make obvious mistakes about the relative costs and effects of things

Didn't that ship already sail when they became liberal arts majors?

[macrolocal]

These days English majors do tend to know about entropy, thanks to Stoppard.