The comments are pretty good!
I used to be an author like you, but then I took an AI in the knee.
Bill Gates weighs in.
In the United States, the best opportunity for reducing inequity is to improve education, particularly making sure that students succeed at math.
Sure, software billionaire, the best way to reduce inequality is to give kids more software.
I don’t think bill gates is depending on seeing software at this point in his life.
His assessment that making kids good at math is going to help them succeed is pretty on point.
I couldn’t give a single toss what dear ole Bill has to say about anything.
Really? I wonder how many math jobs there are?
Has anyone else opted into the Bard beta yet? Not super impressive, so far.
I mean career options are going to continue down the paths we see. Either service/ retail, trade, or knowledge. So unless you want to work retail, or learn a trade (which is valid!), then get better at math seems… correct.
Tech bros insist they must be the techno-priests of a new church talking to the machine spirits as the primary estate. News at eleven.
With everyone i’ve met whose had this problem, pretty much 100% of the reason they didn’t get a degree (either associates or bachelors) was because they couldn’t handle the math.
Yeah, I can tell you that our DevOps team doesn’t use any calculus on the job, yet they all had to take advance mathematics courses to get their degrees.
Math is obviously incredibly useful in a lot of fields but it seems we tack on requirements for it where it’s really not needed.
Every science job I’m anywhere near now benefits from math, the more the better. We used to live in a world where there were 20 people at the bench and one person crunching numbers, and that ratio is flipping. Most people now have at least some math background, and those that don’t are going to fall further and further behind.
I feel like every job in the future that doesn’t suck is likely to be a math job.
In the future all bands will play mathcore.
I will agree that often the math is arbitrary though.
You don’t need to calculus or college-level physics to code for the most part.
But you tend to need those to get a degree in computer science.
Algebra? Definitely. Most of coding is forms of algebra. But you don’t need to calculate the area under a curve or know the coefficient of friction of a sled.
I feel like actually doing calculus isn’t really the important part.
What’s important is having a solid grasp of what math actually is. Math is not just a set of procedures they teach us in school, for doing things like long division.
Math is actually about manipulating data.
This is part of why, in the US, so many people are bad at math. Our schools don’t really teach math well. I think folks tend to either have a natural aptitude for it, and it clicks for them, or else we just kind of teach archaic procedures for doing basic arithmetic operations and then that’s about it.
Some of the new meetings for teaching math actually address this fundamental problem, and the way they tech kids math does seem to get more at the core of understanding how to manipulate numbers and data, beyond just rote memorization of steps.
But often, these teaching techniques are rejected by parents, because the parents see the stuff in homework, and have no idea what’s going on. But it’s not because the teaching methods are bad, it’s because the parents themselves were never taught math properly.
But for something like programming, while it may not actually be about doing calculus or trig (although I actually run into trig a lot, and definitely things like matrix medication), coding is all essentially math. It’s just manipulating the data.
Let me see if I have this discussion right.
Bill Gates says math is a key to kids’ success in the future. Someone then says Bill Gates is only pushing math because he’s a software dude so everything is math and software to him.
Timex then says Bill Gates is right and math is important.
And now we’re at some folks arguing that math is unnecessary bullshit for most jobs, so Bill Gates is wrong? Do I have this right?
It’s a weird flex to say kids should continue to get shit math education.
I’ll say this, @Timex has it right. The important thing about math, and higher level math, isn’t the formula, it’s the thought process. The knowing something is possible.
One of the best classes I took in college was Discreet Mathematics, which is basically the math of coding, laid out before computers existed. It was, essentially, the mathematical process of logic operators. Very useful stuff, even if I didn’t wind up doing a ton of direct coding. Because it was the method.
Much like I think people, rightly, talk up humanities and liberal arts classes these days, after too long of being looked down from some corners. It isn’t the literal writing a book report on To Kill a Mockingbird, or the exact proper way to use a semicolon, it was about the method and process. Of learning basics of textual analysis or grammar fundamentals. Those classes have value outside of their direct sphere because the process they use has value.
It may not matter that you never calculate an integral, but it very may well matter that you understand the principle of one. Because things like integrals have all sorts of impact on data science. You want to understand trendlines? The rate change in a data set is an integral. So even if you never pull out the formula, understanding how integrals work can help you understand and see patterns in data.
I do a lot of matrix medication when my numbers just don’t look right. Sometimes instead of inverting a matrix I just give it a Xanax.