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Author: TwinBird

Mar 14th 2011 at 7:23:21 PM

@Fanra: Wishful thinking.  Before the printing press, there was no stigma to illiteracy.  Although forty years ago you'd have needed much more knowledge to do anything meaningful, the level of computer literacy we take for granted today would have been well beyond anyone but the people with that level of knowledge.  Just the concept of bits and bytes requires information theory that didn't exist a few hundred years ago.  If planes become as accessible as cars are today, loads of what we now call flight jargon will become common sense, even though it won't be quite as much as a pilot today needs to know.  Just keeping a car at speed requires a grasp of friction and momentum that would have been specialized knowledge a hundred years ago.  The current trend in computers has shifted from simplicity toward robustness, reflecting a greater demand for functionality that, although fundamentally unchanged over the past twenty years, the average user then - who in those days would have been quite a bit brighter than the average ''person'' - wouldn't have ''heard'' of.

Calculus is not "general scientific knowledge."  It's a basic tool for finding the rate of change or aggregate effect of a function.  Already a specialized form of it is taught to ''businessmen'' - not economists, ''businessmen'' - to keep track of their assets.  If you plan to track anything at all in continuous time, you need it.  If you plan to tally any increase or decrease over a period of continuous time, you need it.  If you plan to resolve any problem that resembles Zeno's paradoxes, you need it.  The innumerate are fortunate that so far it's been possible to restrict the functions enough to abstract this away at the bottom level.  With the floor rising both in terms of pervasiveness and in general prowess, this is likely to change.