Quote Originally Posted by Bobb View Post
These all stop being lies when prefaced with "it doesn't exactly work like this, but it's close enough for now."
Agreed.

Thank you , Bobb. You've already given the answers I would have given and lack the time to answer in detail.

Quote Originally Posted by Trekkin
Aside from poesy, what will you do with your truth when you find it, pendell?
Research it, understand it. Apply it. Pass it on to others as effectively as possible given the constraints of human nature.

I'm asking seriously, because without what you call pious lies there would be no science education. Filthy indefensible lies like "the sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering" and "the Earth is a sphere" and "plants produce oxygen by photosynthesis" and "all matter is made of atoms" and countless others are necessary to fit the world into a child's brain,
You can start with that, but at older ages you explain to them the concept of simile and metaphor and show that , while this is not the literal truth, it nonetheless is close enough to the truth to give you a good estimate. Sort of like rounding to three decimal places instead of to six.

All of life as humans understand it, to my mind, is an approximation. I've never used pi beyond a certain number of digits but by your standings evaluating pi as 3.14 is a "lie" because I'm truncating the remaining digits. Which I am, but we need to truncate at some point if the number's going to be useful in a calculation at all.

The same goes for explaining how the big bang happened, or where new humans come from, or wave-particle duality.

For that matter, on that last: metaphors are not just how we explain things to other people, it's often how we imagine theories in the first place. Lots of people know about Shroedinger's cat, for example, but not one person in a hundred on the street can show you the underlying equations, or even understand them.

and more lies like "you will definitely need trigonometry in real life" and "this will be on the test"
Depending on the job you have there is definitely a use for trigonometry and advanced mathematics. I found integrals necessary when I was writing code to simulate IR seekers in air-to-air missiles. And trigonometry was necessary when describing the geometry of an air engagement.

If I was talking to a young person, I'd show them something like EW 101 . If all you want to do in life is pump gas or work as a walmart checker, you don't need advanced mathematics. But if you want to be an astronaut or work on rockets or, heck, even make money at a bank, you're going to need at least some of it.

As towards "this will be on the test", the best solution I found to that in grad school was a professor who had a quiz in every class. Literally. And it counted towards your grade. Everyone showed up prepared. I learned more about computer graphics than than I ever had.

Then they grow out of being legally required to attend class, and they spend the rest of their life with an elementary-school grasp of how the world works and no need or desire to learn anything else. They live in a very human world, doing tasks set by humans to earn wages provided by humans with which to pay the prices set by humans for the human-made things they happen to want. They want -- indeed, they need -- their every injury to be someone's fault, their every triumph a product of their own superiority. "Their" team won good at sports ball because they "wanted it more"; they'll beat cancer because "they're a fighter." "Everything happens for a reason." "You matter." None of these things are at all consonant with reality, but they make people happy anyway -- and they will get hostile if you try to disabuse them of the lies that get them through the day.
The vast majority may be as you say but one out of a hundred will put in the effort and will contribute meaningfully to the world we live in.

That's one thing I learned from venture capitalist type people -- they throw a lot of money at a lot of different projects, and most of them never pay off. They cut them off quickly. But that one drug out of a thousand, or that one business out of a thousand, becomes the next facebook or the next google or the next penicillin. And that one success pays for all the failures.

It's the same thing in genetics, isn't it? Most of the sperm and egg cells produced by humans never come to fruition, and of those that conceive quite a few will miscarry due to genetic defects. But that one payoff out of a thousand pays for all the effort on the way.

And that's why I want to educate the masses. Besides which, I think truth is useful even when people live in willful ignorance of it, because objective truth, like reality, doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. We don't need the entire world to believe it. We just need enough.

Respectfully,

Brian P.