Comment by defrost
2 days ago
I'll second guerrilla - you can absolutely benefit from mathematical thinking without pushing into territory higher than undergaduate studies.
You can even benefit from the thinking taught in good high school coursework (or studying online).
At an arithmetic, bookkeeping level you can better appreciate handling finances and the seductive pitfalls surrounding wagers (gambling, betting, risk taking).
My claim isn’t really that there’s no benefit or utility to math — that’s obviously false — but that maybe its benefits to regular people are more modest than the cheerleaders want to admit.
What are the costs (in your estimation at least) to "regular people" (regular by your metric) of not engaging in easy bake low level "mathematical thinking".
* How many have a lower return on { X } through not understanding compound interest, tax brackets, leveraging assets, etc.
* How many have steady net losses through "magical thinking" wrt gambling, betting, hot stock tips.
You’re sort of making my point — there are people out there who think math education sets the mind free and opens the gates of higher cognition, and then others talking about hum drum stuff like tax brackets and compound interest. If the benefits really just amount to a few units of pre-algebra content, that would be disappointing.
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