What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

I think you are just proving my point. As an example, FM radio. You and I know how that works, and, I reckon that just the two of us could build out our own station and hand-soldered receivers, even making it stereo. Personally though, I would hope that we would go straight to a DAB-style radio with a few data layers for weather, the schedule and whatnot.

However, from what I understand, the only people listening to FM radio are car-dependent commuters and people that have a trade, whether that be building, hospitality and so on. They all know how to find their favourite radio station and get the volume to a level that they can hear. What percentage of these people know how the radio works beyond that? Or are we talking rounding errors here?

As for LLM things, the hundreds of millions that have ChatGPT installed do not need to know any maths whatsoever. They just write prompts. There are some outliers, such as students trying to cheat on their science projects, maybe they should put down ChatGPT and pick up a textbook, but none of them need to know about 'positional encodings in large language models'. They just don't want any of that, the goal is not to do any 'system two' thinking.

This does not mean that a very small amount of programmers need to know such things, but the vast majority of people have better things to bother themselves with.

Game programming, it is the same again. Millions or even billions might spend their lives in front of consoles, but the people writing the games are relatively few in number, and when you take away the people making textures, running tests and whatnot, an even smaller number of people need to know the tricky maths.

I am not sure whether you were just trolling me or not. Where I live, most people have jobs where they definitely don't need to know anything more than basic arithmetic.

Your weird take has made me think again.

The thing was that I went to a school where I was one of the lucky few to be in the top set for maths. We had a deal with our teacher where he could leave us unattended and we would collaborate amongst ourselves to get all of our assignments done. He would just pop by at the end of the week to see how we all got on and to set the next assignment. Only on rare occasions would he have to actively teach us.

Our class was calm and we brought in home computers (as it was then), board games and cards. We would be betting our lunch money on games of Bridge, since that was (weirdly) the hot game to play. We all passed with A's.

All of the other classes had maximal supervision, maximal homework, additional 'special needs' classes and utter carnage, should the teacher leave the class unattended for a femtosecond. They were taught properly, but none of them were any good at maths and none of them went on to do anything that paid the big bucks.

Arguably, when it came to arithmetic, due to the low-key gambling and games playing, everyone in the top set had an edge over everyone else. They were merely learning by rote. We were learning in a collective self-directed way within a culture of learning that we very much developed by ourselves. We also learned how to collaborate to solve problems, which conventional education considers to be cheating. Our 'client' was the teacher, and we needed to keep him sweet as we didn't want to lose our privileges. So that was the motivation, not the usual nonsense about how you will never get a job unless blah blah'.

Hence, I have another truly epic weird take. With art we also teach the history of art as a separate subject. So why not have 'the history of maths' as a separate subject?

Imagine learning about what was discovered in antiquity, before people had calculators, slide rules, even pens and paper. Why did that Persian mathematician need to devise tools for doing clever things with numbers 2500 years ago? What are these tools useful for in today's world? How do you code up a script to implement such tools to save on the mental arithmetic?

Such an approach could get nearer to your truly weird epic take. We would be introducing the wonders of maths to kids in such a way that they would be learning a little bit about ancient civilisations as well as the applications in the modern context.

From what I understand, 'rave' was a late 1980s to early 1990s phenomenon. It was a time when everyone had an excellent time, high on drugs. Nobody was 'calculating generator loads and building power grids' even if you had 14kW of sound system to plug in, monitor speakers and some lights obtained for the weekend from the local theatre.

Electrical items would be plugged in with a slight risk of electrocution or fire, possibly in a pig's shed, in the pouring rain and in the dark. But this was not a worry since the show had to go on and there was the danger of the police turning up in force, with the legal right to steal the whole sound system, which could be big enough to require a semi truck to get it places.

Either the setup worked or it didn't. There was nobody doing advanced maths to get it working, and yes, there would always be a setup problem or two, which happens with kit that is made to work hard. The far more useful skills were the soft skills, so teamwork and coordination, not maths.

In time the rave scene was commercialised to the festival nonsense we have today. A proper rave was a full-on temporary autonomous zone where you could have small children trying to sell you acid tabs or ecstacy. Everything about it was illegal and nobody was sober.

Moving on to festivals and organised mandatory fun events, you have to have an entrance fee, the guys providing the music have to be paid, there has to be a small army of people in high visibility 'security' jackets and you certainly don't have small children trying to sell anyone any drugs.

In this secondary 'professional' context, where the goal is to make money not give people the best party they have ever been to, you really do have to 'calculate generator loads and build power grids' or else you won't get the venue, insurance or the event happening.

Clearly the free party scene is not what it was. Kids today have their five hundred social media friends so they don't need to socialise in real life. However, there was a time, not so long ago, when it all came together wonderfully, with the rave scene, and, part and parcel of that was the complete lack of professionalism. There was fun in taking your life into your own hands.

The aerial circus sounds fun (as does the canopy making). However, across all of the extreme sports where some acrobatics is needed, nobody is doing maths. Engineers behind the scenes, maybe, but the performers? It is all about dedication and practice. To take a relatively modern 'sport', parkour. That dangerous jump from building A to building B, that is done by eye, gut feeling and intuition, after lots of experience doing other jumps. No parkour person is going to whip out the old slide rule to work out the parameters of such a jump.

You mention the carabiner, which is a mountaineering gadget. Again, nobody doing mountaineering is doing fancy maths to select the right carabiner for the job. It comes down to intuition again, and what you and your climbing partner have fielded for the day.

Regarding finance, maths is allegedly useful, but how many bookkeepers are doing any maths beyond addition, subtraction and calculating percentages, mostly for tax paying purposes? In America, where everything is financially engineered and the economy is all about debt payments, maybe more maths is needed for the average citizen, but those hundreds of millions struggling to make their car payments just need a living wage, not added maths skills.

I will stop shouting at the clouds now, however, have you done any of your canopy designs in Blender with the cardboard box plugin that enables you to unwrap a 3D shape into 2D flat surfaces? If that is a no, then give it a go and see if it works for your projects. Note that it enables you to do a render that the client can approve before printing happens.

Okay. A lot of the blame for this has been previously placed directly at the feet of stuff like AP programs that claim to teach, e.g., calculus to a bunch of people who aren't ready for it; it becomes a prestige thing or expected for admittance to college, which results in a bunch of people being taught to the test and not actually gaining the foundational mathematics education they actually need to understand the subject. I don't see how encouraging this sort of thing actually helps with the problem of universities needing to do remedial math education to people who supposedly know the material already, but it appears to be what you're arguing for. If you're arguing for lower education reform in general, great, but that has little to nothing to do with how highly elite colleges weigh the math portion of SAT scores.

I feel compelled to point out that for people who want to learn mathematics, there are more and higher quality resources than there ever have been before. For the most part they are absolutely free, and unlike virtually every other subject on the planet they are generally not the sort of thing where you can be led astray by misleading material. I simply don't see how such people are being suppressed in any way, or why (from the perspective of advancing the state of the art of mathematics) I should care about the "non Terry Taos" in your words, who are merely above average at math but don't actually intend to pursue it as a career. There are plenty of other skills that are actually eroding at a high rate, or have huge startup and lab costs, or are otherwise underappreciated and underpaid relative to their importance to society; I don't think mathematics is one of them.

Decline in math skills in an international test before COVID: https://www.edutopia.org/article/pisa-math-scores-fall-globa....

> U.S. students remained relatively steady in science and reading in 2015 compared with 2012, when the exam was last administered, but dropped below the global average in math.

> Of the 35 OECD member countries, the U.S. was among the lowest-performing in math—finishing 31st—continuing a downward trend that started in 2009.

> Outspending all but two countries on education, the U.S. joins countries like Norway and Switzerland that provide significant funding to their school systems yet aren’t seeing the same high performance from their students as other countries that spend less.

It is even more an indictment of the education system if, this long after COVID, so many students are doing so poorly.