Bacc

[Vae]

My point exactly, you don't need to understand maths, and if everything collapsed you'd have a much bigger problem than people not knowing the basics.
It wouldn't be point and click, it would release us to create far,far greater things at a much faster pace.
The present system is like teaching an artist how paints are made, maybe some do learn it, but it's utterly irrelevant.
Grammer is just snobbery, with it's roots in the upper class Latin circus.
Spelling is just convention, there is no PROPER way to spell anything.

I think I probably entirely disagree and think you miss the point.

You need to study and learn maths to be comfortable with using numbers and also the logical way of thinking and deduction that it entails. The vast majority of jobs require at least some level of maths skills to be able to perform them. While you can use a calculator, spreadsheet or computer to perform a calculation, unless you understand maths do you even have a clue if the answer is correct or not.

As for spelling and grammar if you can't do either then you just look an utter idiot who is both stupid and lazy. You can't communicate properly and people aren't going to take you seriously. So however valid your points are they will be dismissed. You might believe that there is no proper way to spell anything but you're in the vast minority who believe that. Everyone else just thinks you're thick.

 

[Syri]

No they will evolve, much as life does into more complicated versions.

My wife has a really cool website for her running group, she has no idea whatsoever about html, doesn't know how anything technical works, but has created using Yola something that is very presentable and is in fact the end game that we want, the technology is irrelevant.
My phone has an app that calculates written mathematical equations, completely useless, but in every respect totally sidesteps the need to understand anything but the answer.
I need to know the 'rules' of a process about as much as I need to understand the algorithms running in my GFX card while I'm using it to create a 3D game.

It's fine to say that you have a program that writes the html for you, or an app that calculates equations. Thing is, there are people that need to make the programs and apps that do these things. You can't make a program to do something that you don't understand yourself. You would have no way of knowing if it was doing it right or not.
If we rely on the previous generations of computers to design the next, how do we know if they're getting it right? Or if they're doing it in the most efficient way?
If the computers break down, how would people communicate or keep records if they rely on those computers for every aspect of writing?
I think that using computers to save time is a good thing, but I think it's good to still know how to cope if a computer is not there, at least on a basic level.
Those who want to pursue such things further of course have that choice, it is after all what the GCSE options are for, and the further education paths that follow on from that. Up until that point where you make your choice though, you can learn some valuable skills, that could just be of some help if ever the technology you rely on happens to fail you.

 

[Bugz]

Job what level of Maths were you educated to?

 

[ileks]

You make kids learn everything so they can find out what they are good at. If I didn't have to do maths when I was 13/14 I would probably have said fuck it and had the same attitude as you. Now I'm in my second year of uni studying topological spaces

Or was your point not about education but life in general? No one is making you learn maths or how to spell etc... But people who go along with that attitude are generally the ones that remain plebs their whole life

 

[mycenae]

There are a myriad of jobs and vocations out there that require you to be able to do basic math and communicate using basic grammar else the whole process comes screeching to a halt.
Just as one example, take my job. I'm a childrens nurse. Every medicine I give, every bag of fluid I put up, I have to calculate and tailor to each individual child based on their body weight. The drs prescribe it, and I then have to calculate out the dose based on a simple formula...ie what you want, divided by what you've got times what its in. Thats simple enough and can easily be done by a calculator. HOWEVER, you have to have at least an idea of the figure you'll be coming to, else you can end up killing someone if you hit one too many or one too few zeros when you're doing the calculation.
If a child is precribed 0.45mg of morphine orally and you've got a syrup which is 10mg in 5ml, if you get your decimal places wrong, which is a very easy mistake to make, you could end up giving that child 10 times the dose of morphine they should have which will kill them.

How can you say that a basic concept of maths isn't important?

 

[Job]

I've got A level maths, only to get promotion at work and can safely say I have never used a single ounce of that pointless journey into convoluted mathematics and never will.
All your answers are stuck in the past, yes It's not going to work now while the old school are still in charge, people who think spelling mistakes mean you are thick or put your CV in the bin for grammatical errors, those fucking dinosaurs will extinct themselves in the new world.
All those notions are based on social condition that is ceasing to exist.

Here's some even more outrageous ideas from Job, you may laugh but trust me.
1:Cheating should be encouraged.
2lagiarism should be allowed till it becomes pointless.

 

[TdC]

 

[Krazeh]

I've got A level maths, only to get promotion at work and can safely say I have never used a single ounce of that pointless journey into convoluted mathematics and never will.

Why did you choose to take maths at A Level if you didn't enjoy it? It's not like you're forced to take certain A Levels or even take them at all. You made a concious decision to study advanced maths, the education system had nothing to do with it. Not that any of that changes the fact that just because your job doesn't require you to use what you learnt it doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of jobs out there that do need people with a good understading of advanced maths.

All your answers are stuck in the past, yes It's not going to work now while the old school are still in charge, people who think spelling mistakes mean you are thick or put your CV in the bin for grammatical errors, those fucking dinosaurs will extinct themselves in the new world.

Spelling mistakes and terrible grammar usually do mean you're thick, or lazy, or both. In any case it makes it more likely that you'll be unable to present the professional image most employers are looking for in any written correspondence they may produce. There's nothing 'new world' about not being able to string a sentence together properly or not being able to spell; all it does is present a terrible impression of yourself to whoever is reading the mess you wrote.

All those notions are based on social condition that is ceasing to exist.

And you're basing this claim on what?

Here's some even more outrageous ideas from Job, you may laugh but trust me.
1:Cheating should be encouraged.
2lagiarism should be allowed till it becomes pointless.

And what would these frankly stupid suggestions achieve? In what possible way would allowing cheating and plagiarism improve education or the society we live in?

 

[Job]

Because 'cheating' is a notion that relies on an artificial scenario to validate it's
description.
Where do you draw the line on what cheating is? It relies on the idea that you have to 'know' it yourself or you haven't put in the effort to understand, but to move forward we have to accept that everything we know so far belongs to everyone, is it cheating to use a billion years of evolution to be me?
I know it goes against everything you know, but it will happen, it's happening now the old rules are becoming less relevant everyday.

 

[Krazeh]

Because 'cheating' is a notion that relies on an artificial scenario to validate it's
description.
Where do you draw the line on what cheating is? It relies on the idea that you have to 'know' it yourself or you haven't put in the effort to understand, but to move forward we have to accept that everything we know so far belongs to everyone, is it cheating to use a billion years of evolution to be me?
I know it goes against everything you know, but it will happen, it's happening now the old rules are becoming less relevant everyday.

What? This is just nonsense.

The idea that knowledge belongs to everyone doesn't mean that people can just copy off others when asked to show their understanding of a topic. What it does mean is that everyone is entitled to access and learn the knowledge we collectively hold.

To be honest I really wouldn't want any part of the kind of world you think we'll should end up in where noone learns or knows anything and are required to rely completely on artificial mechanisms in order to function.

 

[Job]

But we do already, do you know the process from synapse to muscle function when you're moving you arm..maybe, probably not, it just works, all that knowledge is irrelevant except to someone trying to fix it.
Our knowledge sits on top of a world of things that just 'work', we need to move on to a greater understanding of the world by making everything we know
just work and not bog ourselves down in the details.

 

[Syri]

I've got A level maths, only to get promotion at work and can safely say I have never used a single ounce of that pointless journey into convoluted mathematics and never will.
All your answers are stuck in the past, yes It's not going to work now while the old school are still in charge, people who think spelling mistakes mean you are thick or put your CV in the bin for grammatical errors, those fucking dinosaurs will extinct themselves in the new world.
All those notions are based on social condition that is ceasing to exist.

Here's some even more outrageous ideas from Job, you may laugh but trust me.
1:Cheating should be encouraged.
2lagiarism should be allowed till it becomes pointless.

Why not just say "I don't like learning" and leave it at that?
I can understand about the maths thing if you have to learn it despite not needing it, but all of your other points just have no base to them.
Spelling is a very important part of written communication. If I decided to write Square as skwair and someone else writes it as sqear, you can see an instant break down in communication. Furthermore, take regional accents into it, and you get completely indecipherable words. Having standard spellings simply ensures that if someone writes something, anyone else educated to the same level can read it.
Encouraging cheating and plagiarism? what is that going to do? tell everyone that taking shortcuts is right? let's go telling everyone to jump the queues at the supermarkets next, or better yet, just help yourself to the items from the shelf. Rules are there to ensure that assessment can be made fairly, and give a good judge of a person's actual capabilities. If you're going to live from someone else's work all the time, where is anything new ever going to come into it? what will happen when nobody knows how to actually keep things going if they break down?
You might not like the educational system, and I'll be one of the first to admit that it has it's flaws. Saying that it should all be scrapped though is just helping nobody. Having to cover so many subjects, and be graded fairly on them, helps not only to establish what general level a person is at, but also to give them an idea of what they want to do going forwards in life. If everyone's just copying each other, they'll end up with no clue what they're doing, and we'll just have a nation of headless chickens.

 

[Will]

There's nothing 'new world' about not being able to string a sentence together properly or not being able to spell; all it does is present a terrible impression of yourself to whoever is reading the mess you wrote.

Nice use of the semicolon.

 

[Job]

OK. let me take you through something like spell checker.
Writing by hand is becoming a curiosity, everywhere in every scenario people are using computers, sometimes completey unecessaryily, but there you go,
Now spell checker is at the point where some people use it ,others don't for what ever reason, that's how 'spelling' mistakes get through.
Now when spell checker moves up to automatic, when Microshite get around to improving it 200%, then for the vast majority of documention 'spelling' will be irrelevant, people won't say 'can't you spell?', they'll say,'is your spell checker working?'.
At that point the whole notion and snobbery of your spelling ability is made redundant, 5000 years of eletism from the earliest days of the written word reduced to nothing with the realisation that it can be done by a chip the size of grain of sand, which kind of reinforces it's actual importance.
What I've started doing as well is typing the approximt word and letting google say 'did you mean this?'..Oh yes thanks google..i did.
I'm not daft enough to think new snobberies won't take over, probably spell checker databases 'Oh my god he uses such a chavy spellbase program'
But that's humans for you.

 

[SilverHood]

Job, again though, you can write semi legible letters and emails, that will pass the spell checker, but still make you look like a semi literature muppet.

For example, chap I used to work with would send emails that read like this:

"All client connection are up. client XXXX down 5 minute longer they're support contact not answer phone."

If it was sent to senior management I'd have a go at him for making our team look like we couldn't compose an email to save our jobs.

Or if it was sent to clients, I'd have a serious go at him. Because clients we do business with expect professionalism, and if we cant even write an email properly, how can they trust us with business critical data?

I work in IT and we fire people for not being being able to write properly.

As for maths - how do you know the calculator is giving you the right result, if you cant work out the answer yourself? And "excel can do it" is not a valid answer. Excel just takes input and gives output. To get to the result set you need, you have to understand how to get it. Otherwise, how would you know it was right?

 

[Job]

I understand what you're saying of course, but every answer you give me is
'think w're idiots,'expect professionalism', these are based on people wasting their time with the small details to give a polished look to something that the old school brigade associate with expertise.
All of those things can be done by computing and in fact in happens everywhere right now, it's just not as in depth yet but that will come.
How long before you trust a robot to operate on you instead of that time served surgeon, not very long I think.
Here's an example, my ex built a website to start a music agent site, with no knowledge whatsoever, she used a template, built the site and ended up booking Kanya West for his first gigs in the UK.
His people saw the site, were fooled by it's 'professionalism' and setup up the whole thing because she had put all the 'right' looking things in place, all of them were off the shelf products.
Ha it was hilarious though, we were a gang of pillocks, but it came off and he was well chuffed, sorry I digress.

 

[mycenae]

I will ALWAYS trust a surgeon to operate on me over a machine....I work with them every day. The robot surgeons that operate today are CONTROLLED by time served surgeons and always will have to be to some degree due to the unpredictable nature of surgery. If a routine tonsillectomy suddenly goes tits up and the patient starts to bleed, you have about 1-2 minutes before that patient goes into shock and has a cardiac arrest. A robot cannot possibly be programmed to cope with all the possible outcomes of even the most routine surgery.

Regarding your argument on spell checking.....I admit that in the future you're going to have uber spell checkers that will be profession specific so what I am about to tell you probably wouldn't happen, but it still goes to prove that even if you spell check you still need to check yourself!
A girl I was at Uni with was writing an A&P essay on the human brain, specifically about a part called the hippocampus. She was in a rush to finish it and wasn't really concentrating when she spellchecked it. She got the essay back, having failed it, with a note saying, 'next time, leave yourself enough spare minutes to actually check your spell check.' All the hippocampus's had been changed to hippopotamus!

 

[Thorwyn]

A girl I was at Uni with was writing an A&P essay on the human brain, specifically about a part called the hippocampus. She was in a rush to finish it and wasn't really concentrating when she spellchecked it. She got the essay back, having failed it, with a note saying, 'next time, leave yourself enough spare minutes to actually check your spell check.' All the hippocampus's had been changed to hippopotamus!

:lol: