« First, Arthur Benjamin is right. In full accordance with Ken Robinson’s theory — that most education is a prolonged form of university entrance, wherein the curriculum and culture favors you heavily to become a university professor — the geekier subject of calculus wins out. Don’t get me wrong; calculus is completely necessary for millions of people to do their job properly, and it is an important subject in many spaces. But statistics, probability and distribution is absolutely essential to understand the onslaught of data we face increasingly often.
I believe one of the main reason for the current wave of stupid superstitions like homeopathy and similar crap is the simple fact that we don’t learn how to recognize valid statistics and how to evaluate studies and probability and numbers. This stuff isn’t really hard, but a lot of my pals still believe in supernatural connections because of some “weird” experience - like they thought of somebody and then got a call from that person. It takes thirty seconds to calculate the probability of that happening to you if you’re taught how to do it (hint: it happens by chance, several times a month, depending on how often you get called). Instead, we learn stuff we never really use (except when writing videogames). (via waffle → Subject: Subjects)