Personally, I think it’s most important to know when you get the phone call asking you to donate to the campaign fund for someone running for the Senate in a completely different state. Because it’s important. It’s so important. You don’t want THEM to get this seat. You need to DONATE NOW!!!
Of course you may be too cheap to donate to any campaign fund, in which case all you need to know is how to hang up the phone. But if you might be interested in donating under some circumstances, you need to know a few things. How many Senators there are is one. How many Senators are The Wrong Party* is probably another. Because we’re talking cash, here.
*Or how many Senators vote for and against your List of Important Things. Party isn’t everything.
5th graders are around 11 years old, right? Isaac Asimov was wary of boys around that age because they tripped him up occasionally. He told the story of one who asked him what was the second closest star. His reply was that after the Alpha Centauri system, the next closest was Barnard’s Star. The kid said, “Hmm, I thought the Sun was a star.”
The best tools we have for figuring things out are reason and the scientific method. But reason is worthless if you don’t have the facts or if the facts you have are wrong.
You’re not seriously proposing that’s what those responders were thinking, are you?
1/3 of those polled believe the phrase “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is in the Constitution. I wonder where they got that idea. Another 1/3 are not sure. Log In ‹ Blogs2@CLS — WordPress
A while ago some guy who thought that was elected, and he’s supposedly a Constitutional expert. “We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we are all created equal” – President Obama, SOTU address, January 2010.
Can’t find a cite, but I seem to remember reading that this is a myth. A solid base of factual knowledge (often gained through memorisation) is essential to doing any creative work in a field.
Isn’t the ability to prioritize and discriminate among data an aspect of intelligence? What about the ability to hold blocks of data in your head for extended periods of time–the ability to move large amounts of data into long-term memory? I don’t doubt the main list’s importance, and I don’t doubt that over-stressing rote memorization is possible, but to minimize it to a parlour trick and say it’s absolutely useless (if that’s the intended implication) is going a bit far.
My son was in a geography bee about 5 years ago. I was quizzing him to prepare, and the question came up, “how many territories does Canada have?” He said three. I said, no, it’s two. We went back and forth for a few minutes until he showed me a current map. Dang! You guys snuck that one in on me. Nunavut? Really?
I knew the 10 provinces, though. My dad was Canadian. I had to know that one.
It depends. I’m terrible at math because I have a mild form of numerical dyslexia. On any given day, most people do lots of basic math in their head though. What math is important to know? Arithmetic, basic algebra, and basic geometry. By basic I mean really, really, easy stuff. Everything else is either only utilized by a technical field, or theoretical. With the above skills, you can solve pretty much any problem that comes your way. Even so, it’s hardly necessary to know any of that by rote any either. A calculator can give the correct answer every time.
I had a situation like this in chemistry 102. The prof marked me wrong, because I didn’t use the formula he did. He didn’t even look at my answer to see if it was correct. After I asked him about it, and then showed him that my formula was just an algebraic transformation of his, he looked at the answer I got, saw it was right, and gave me credit.
Sure. The artists of Ancient Egypt were, by today’s standards, largely crap. For a particular skill, not having to figure everything out from start is good. But, learning grunt knowledge is really just an issue of time, not intelligence.
The far more important aspect of general knowledge is as a tool for learning. The real world is what your intelligence is going to go towards and so having a basic idea of how people, institutions, nations, etc. work is a good thing. But more importantly, it gives you something to develop your intellectual skills against in a way that people find more useful and interesting than dealing entirely in abstractions.
A person who is intelligent will almost certainly know a lot of random information since he has the intelligence to recognize its value and because he developed his brain on such data. But that’s only a loose correlation. And more importantly, most of that information will have been encountered in the context of some sort of study, not simply as a list of facts to be memorized.
Who are they, exactly? These other people from “America,” this is.
There’s only one country whose official name has the word “America” in it, and two with the words “United States” so which do you feel we should incorporate into the name of this country’s people for the sake of clarity?
