TotallyHuman
Well-known member
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2019
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People sometimes say "why do we need math in school it's not like we're ever gonna need it irl" and they are fucking retarded, because mathematics is more than necessary irl, especially nowadays. If you wanna make something more of yourself than a janitor eventually that is (not that I have anything against janitors. If I was financially independent I would probably spend time cleaning the streets or beaches or other places. We need janitors. It's just that it's a dead-end job is what I mean)
I have never questioned math or physics or chemistry or indeed geography in school.
What I have questioned was the liberal sciences. Which aren't sciences at all. Arts, classical literature, history, that kind of thing. I kind of always believed it was more of ideological education. Which to a great extent it is.
It was, to me, something more needed to society than an individual and to an individual it was needed to the extent of being accepted and integrated into society and not becoming a potential criminal or political dissident and such.
I mean, yeah, you need art and music and all to be more than an idiot savant, or a dumb soulless machine doing A and B each precious and limited day of your life and appreciate your own existence - but is it truly necessary for this particular set of books, visual art, music and this view of the historical events for an individual?
But! I now realised the value of ideological education to an individual.
We, fellow humans, like to pride ourselves as these creatures above the rest of the animal kingdom due to our ability to make rational judgement and act outside of instict and upon our will.
But most of our choices are rarely made using reason and are based purely on emotion. Even those decisions, or I'd like to say "decisions", that we think were made using reason are often made relying on emotion and habit.
We're just biorobots is what I mean. There is this tiny speck of "you" in yourself and a whole load of cogs and wheels.
While writing this wall of text, which normally I'd call brain work, I am pretty much doing it on autopilot rn, I have the idea of what I want to write and am being very distracted most of the time and thinking about other things, for example. My "will" part of the brain worked on it for a small amount of time and sent the rest of the leg work to the lower-level workers in my brain. My internal Large Language Model, like chatgpt4, but cooler, probably, maybe, hopefully. To the cogs and the wheels.
Which is not a bad thing. It's natural. Using the brain is very energy-intensive and working the brain is a lot more intensive still. We naturally tend to conserve our energy if we can, thus we let habit take the wheel.
And if we aren't used to work our brains and make decisions, we will continue letting habit take the wheel even more but even the most brainwormy of us are still rarely actually working our brains, they just, figuratively speaking, think for themselves 1% of the time instead of 0.1% of the time like most of us. (I'd say the numbers are waaaaay way smaller but nvm)
And this is where ideological education comes in. How to make right choices? You read good books, it will create the right moral system in you and you will experience the correct emotions when you need to, thus will make decisions closer to optimal even if you don't really think about it. Which to some - or to most I realised - would be pretty obvious. Not me though. Oh well.
I have never questioned math or physics or chemistry or indeed geography in school.
What I have questioned was the liberal sciences. Which aren't sciences at all. Arts, classical literature, history, that kind of thing. I kind of always believed it was more of ideological education. Which to a great extent it is.
It was, to me, something more needed to society than an individual and to an individual it was needed to the extent of being accepted and integrated into society and not becoming a potential criminal or political dissident and such.
I mean, yeah, you need art and music and all to be more than an idiot savant, or a dumb soulless machine doing A and B each precious and limited day of your life and appreciate your own existence - but is it truly necessary for this particular set of books, visual art, music and this view of the historical events for an individual?
But! I now realised the value of ideological education to an individual.
We, fellow humans, like to pride ourselves as these creatures above the rest of the animal kingdom due to our ability to make rational judgement and act outside of instict and upon our will.
But most of our choices are rarely made using reason and are based purely on emotion. Even those decisions, or I'd like to say "decisions", that we think were made using reason are often made relying on emotion and habit.
We're just biorobots is what I mean. There is this tiny speck of "you" in yourself and a whole load of cogs and wheels.
While writing this wall of text, which normally I'd call brain work, I am pretty much doing it on autopilot rn, I have the idea of what I want to write and am being very distracted most of the time and thinking about other things, for example. My "will" part of the brain worked on it for a small amount of time and sent the rest of the leg work to the lower-level workers in my brain. My internal Large Language Model, like chatgpt4, but cooler, probably, maybe, hopefully. To the cogs and the wheels.
Which is not a bad thing. It's natural. Using the brain is very energy-intensive and working the brain is a lot more intensive still. We naturally tend to conserve our energy if we can, thus we let habit take the wheel.
And if we aren't used to work our brains and make decisions, we will continue letting habit take the wheel even more but even the most brainwormy of us are still rarely actually working our brains, they just, figuratively speaking, think for themselves 1% of the time instead of 0.1% of the time like most of us. (I'd say the numbers are waaaaay way smaller but nvm)
And this is where ideological education comes in. How to make right choices? You read good books, it will create the right moral system in you and you will experience the correct emotions when you need to, thus will make decisions closer to optimal even if you don't really think about it. Which to some - or to most I realised - would be pretty obvious. Not me though. Oh well.
