The rest, Marx, Plato, Rousseau, Hobbes, Hegel, I'll agree with. Marx in particular may have indirectly gotten more people killed than anyone else. Buuuttt...
Calculus has numerous practical applications in engineering. I know a couple engineers and you really can't do your job without it. MRIs to diagnose disease rely on the fast Fourier transform to make the pictures. Whether it should be taught to every high school student is another thing, it's really more for engineers and statistics is much more practical for most people. (Knowing how people manipulate outliers in averages, for instance...)
As for Ptolemy, that's been translated from ancient Greek and he may have been more lucid to his original audience.
The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) don't use calculus. The unused Continuous Fourier Transform uses calculus (integration).
Even if the FFT did use calculus, it would still be useless for everyone other than 0.0001% of the population, therefore students shouldn't be forced to learn it.
I was never much for academia's love fest of old dead guys. I tend to refer to all philosophers as old dead guys to remind everyone they are not saints.
I feel like philosophy and cynicism go hand in hand far to often, not that its a good reason to be an asshole, but I do understand how one could develop hatred if they lived in a cynical reality.
I can appreciate you shifting the needle on their revered status.
"Old dead guys" -- haha, that's a fitting description. I like that. A bunch of living people write much better material than the old dead guys. It's unfair that old dead guys get so much reverence for poor-quality writing while excellent living authors get ignored.
The thing that irks me most, is when people quote an old dead guy when talking about modern culture or the internet. Like gee you're really reaching for the experts on modern culture, defiantly not cherry picking quotes that support your agenda when taken out of context and applied to modern life, yet it lends a air of credibility cause no one wants to say the old guy was dumb.
Ahh yes, the appeal to authority / the argument from authority / argumentum ad verecundiam. Applying an old dead guy's writing to modern culture or the internet does seem funny considering that the modern culture didn't exist at the time of the old dead guy.
Good point about cherry-picking. On one hand, the old dead guy is supposed to be an authority, but in the other hand, his material is being cherry-picked and quite often the rest of his material is low-quality, contradicting the appeal to authority.
“The explanation is that it is easier to admire a person when you can fill-in the gaps in your knowledge of the person with likeable information from your own imagination.”
Would you advocate this in interpersonal relations?
Oh I see, that sentence was unclear. I've now fixed it by changing it to:
"The explanation is that it is easier to admire a person when you can fill-in the gaps in your knowledge of the person with likeable information from your own imagination, but this means that you end up admiring a fictional person instead of the real person."
I don't see an alternative to having firm leadership over an organization, regardless of whether or not it's a country, corporation, federal agency or something else. The leader sets the tone and holds people accountable. Each level below him/her does the same. If that doesn't occur than people will drift aimlessly. I've worked in a corporation that had strong leadership and have worked in one that had very weak, bordering on nonexistent leadership. There was a big difference.
The rest, Marx, Plato, Rousseau, Hobbes, Hegel, I'll agree with. Marx in particular may have indirectly gotten more people killed than anyone else. Buuuttt...
Calculus has numerous practical applications in engineering. I know a couple engineers and you really can't do your job without it. MRIs to diagnose disease rely on the fast Fourier transform to make the pictures. Whether it should be taught to every high school student is another thing, it's really more for engineers and statistics is much more practical for most people. (Knowing how people manipulate outliers in averages, for instance...)
As for Ptolemy, that's been translated from ancient Greek and he may have been more lucid to his original audience.
Plato in particular is massively overrated IMHO.
The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) don't use calculus. The unused Continuous Fourier Transform uses calculus (integration).
Even if the FFT did use calculus, it would still be useless for everyone other than 0.0001% of the population, therefore students shouldn't be forced to learn it.
I agree that Plato is massively overrated. 😃
I was never much for academia's love fest of old dead guys. I tend to refer to all philosophers as old dead guys to remind everyone they are not saints.
I feel like philosophy and cynicism go hand in hand far to often, not that its a good reason to be an asshole, but I do understand how one could develop hatred if they lived in a cynical reality.
I can appreciate you shifting the needle on their revered status.
"Old dead guys" -- haha, that's a fitting description. I like that. A bunch of living people write much better material than the old dead guys. It's unfair that old dead guys get so much reverence for poor-quality writing while excellent living authors get ignored.
The thing that irks me most, is when people quote an old dead guy when talking about modern culture or the internet. Like gee you're really reaching for the experts on modern culture, defiantly not cherry picking quotes that support your agenda when taken out of context and applied to modern life, yet it lends a air of credibility cause no one wants to say the old guy was dumb.
Ahh yes, the appeal to authority / the argument from authority / argumentum ad verecundiam. Applying an old dead guy's writing to modern culture or the internet does seem funny considering that the modern culture didn't exist at the time of the old dead guy.
Good point about cherry-picking. On one hand, the old dead guy is supposed to be an authority, but in the other hand, his material is being cherry-picked and quite often the rest of his material is low-quality, contradicting the appeal to authority.
“The explanation is that it is easier to admire a person when you can fill-in the gaps in your knowledge of the person with likeable information from your own imagination.”
Would you advocate this in interpersonal relations?
Oh I see, that sentence was unclear. I've now fixed it by changing it to:
"The explanation is that it is easier to admire a person when you can fill-in the gaps in your knowledge of the person with likeable information from your own imagination, but this means that you end up admiring a fictional person instead of the real person."
I don't see an alternative to having firm leadership over an organization, regardless of whether or not it's a country, corporation, federal agency or something else. The leader sets the tone and holds people accountable. Each level below him/her does the same. If that doesn't occur than people will drift aimlessly. I've worked in a corporation that had strong leadership and have worked in one that had very weak, bordering on nonexistent leadership. There was a big difference.
I think this accidentally got posted in reply to the wrong article?