Necessary Knowledge?

[Desu]

ITT: We talk about things that you should know that school does not teach you. I'll go first.

How a car engine works.
Personal Finance

[Fuckthesystem]

http://www.school-survival.net/

How to fight it.

[Thought Criminal]

done

http://www.northeast-hs.pinellas.k12.fl ... motive.htm
^^im in this one^^

http://www.northeast-hs.pinellas.k12.fl ... Finance.ht
^^pieman is in this one^^

[Desu]

Not all schools will have anything about "automotives", and my old high school had personal finance but it was terrible. The stuff they "teach" you in there is harmful, and most likely taught by someone who doesn't know how to manage their own finances.

[Thought Criminal]

wow really?
my mom took personal finance and back in the day nobody worried about social security theft. so they put up a sheet on the wall with the numbers and someone stole my mom's. she dosen't have to worry about it though cause the guy got caught. he apparently took everyone's number who was in that class.

[Swift]

To think for yourself.

[Pieman]

thought criminal Wrote:done

http://www.northeast-hs.pinellas.k12.fl ... motive.htm
^^im in this one^^

http://www.northeast-hs.pinellas.k12.fl ... Finance.ht
^^pieman is in this one^^

2nd one doesnt work. And i'm in the Academy of Tech, not Finance.

[Thought Criminal]

Oh oops.

[Desu]

What college doesn't teach you about the real world.

This is mostly referring to suit-and-tie jobs. I'm (hopefully) going into one like that soon. Can anyone think of anything else that may be necessary?

Making a long-distance phone call...
Sending a fax...
etc.

[SoulRiser]

To trust yourself above other people. I don't think there's really any "how to" about this, just that school discourages it.

[Trekkie_Aspie]

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”


― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

[xcriteria]

Information and media literacy -- how to find and make sense of information, establish its credibility, and so on.

Code:

tl,dr: this is a huge post and it could probably be better organized, but I think I covered some points that are worth reading.  Part of information literacy is figuring out what's worth taking the time to make sense of.  Much of how we pay attention is guided by habits.  Some things are neurally primed to be more appealing (a single paragraph that you can agree with or not) than a massive dump of text of unknown value.

That means more work on the part of the reader.  So, a tradeoff has to be made, between time spent figuring out how to explain things in the most effective way, vs. the burden being put on the reader or learner to do so.

That leads to a key bit of necessary knowledge: how to teach.  Not just how to teach a class, but how to present your perspective, experiences, and insights in ways that has a chance of getting others to listen and engage.  How do you teach a teacher?

I'm still trying to figure that out, but I think it's an important goal to strive toward.  Feedback on how to structure complex topics is always welcome.

So many things to suggest. How to empathize, take someone's perspective, discover other people's interests, figure out what you want and what you don't want. How to figure out what makes sense to do.

Maybe it's worth asking a very general question: how does anyone actually go about gaining or sharing knowledge? Can the timeframe be accelerated, or it determined by your genetic program and people you happen to encounter, who dish how the necessarily knowledge as needed?

Those are important questions because a good number of teachers and parents subscribe to the idea that it's "wrong" to jump ahead in a sequence of learning. No peeking ahead in the book! For much of history, elders kept knowledge to themselves and only dished it out in a manner thy saw fit, often only to people who jumped through the hoops the culture or the Powers That be determined.

The Internet and a media-saturated society make it harder to hide away key bits of knowledge. (See I hate you guys.)

So, what knowledge among all that is actually necessary for real life?

More necessary knowledge:

Research skills... the active form of information literacy. How do you dig through a big, open-ended universe of text, data, video? How do you figure out what people, places, and things to go to in order to discover something new? How do you know what to trust? How do you know what questions to ask, and how to make reasonable judgments about the answers?

One form of research is simply scouring Google (or Goolge Scholar), or in the analog world, looking items up in a card catalog. Another form comes from anthropology, called participant-observation, which is basically participating in a (usually foreign) culture, but observing and thinking about norms, practices, and traditions in a way that people often take for granted.

Since we live in a time when many norms, practices, and traditions are being questioned and redefined, so many more choices are available. If you asked what was "necessary knowledge" in a pre-industrial society, you'd probably get very different answers than in the modern, hyper-connected world that's filled with opportunities to learn and decide.

For example, consider this problem:

(05-20-2009 06:02 AM)Desu Wrote:  Not all schools will have anything about "automotives", and my old high school had personal finance but it was terrible. The stuff they "teach" you in there is harmful, and most likely taught by someone who doesn't know how to manage their own finances.

Some schools may provide electives in various topics that are worth taking. Unfortunately, it's hard to know ahead of time. While you could actually be misinformed by a teacher, the bigger risk is likely to be just not learning effectively about the topic in question.

For example, with personal finance, a class about a bunch of "shoulds" and concepts isn't the same as actually applying them at different situations that will arise in your particular life.

Personal finance is basically about making decisions. A basic piece of personal finance advice is "stay in school" and "get a degree" so you can "make more money." When you start from that, and then start thinking about money, you miss out on some broader questions related to decision-making in general, including how you use your time.

Is it worth it?

That leads to a discussion of whether a given academic program, class, or even assignment is worth doing. In other words, is it a good use of time (including the teacher's time!) from an opportunity cost perspective?

Opportunity cost means the cost in terms of possibilities you give up when you make a choice. If you spend $5 on a lottery ticket, you don't have that $5 for lunch. If you spend 3 hours reading this post, you can't spend the same 3 hours studying for your personal finance class or playing a video game. (Unless, of course, you think of this as way to acquire knowledge, and think of hacking through these paragraphs as a game.)

Not all decisions are made in terms of immediate tradeoffs, though. If you have 30 hours of free time per week, or 168 total hours in a week, you can think about how to allocate them. If you have $1000/month in income from working 160 hours at $6.25/hour, is it worth spending half of that money on food and the other half on school? If you hate your job or your academic program, is it worth spending many hours researching other options?

Khan Academy on opportunity cost:

Hidden stuff:

This Khan Academy video jumps right into some technical terms like production possibilities frontier, but Khan's example makes the point, there's only so much you can do with so much time (or other resources) in a given circumstance:



Watch on YouTube

Real-world decisions

Much of life doesn't fall into place as easily as a personal finance class would lead you to believe. If you have a stable job and career and everything is going according to the storybook American dream, the situation is totally different than struggling to figure out what path to take when you don't like the options you see around you for work or for learning.

Finding a better map

Navigating decisions tends to be easier when you know the terrain. Maps can help with that. In real life, the maps people use to see what's coming may be incredibly limited.

Here's another set of knowledge that has already been put together into a class. Dan Ariely is one professor who studies and teaches behavioral economics, which is about how people really make decisions, as opposed to the "shoulds" that you might get in a class or lecture. He recently did a Coursera course, A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior, which you can still sign up for now that it's over and watch the videos.



Watch on YouTube

Quote:"In this class, what we're going to do is cover a bunch of topics that are related to our everyday lives. What do we decide to pay for things? What do we decide to purchase, or not to purchase? How much do we end up loving things, and disliking stuff? How much do we care about our workplace, why why? Why do we value some things and not others? And finally, we'll talk a little bit about why we lie and why we're dishonest. And with all of those topics, we'll try to think about why we do things wrongly. Why, for example, do we text and drive, why do we procrastinate, and what can we do about them.

So the idea is both to understand what we do wrongly, and to think about what we can do to improve it, and I promise you it will be a fun experience, so if you have the time, join me."

All of that raises some big questions, including about what is right and wrong, good and bad, optimal and suboptimal. And it raises the question of having time and deciding how to use time.

(SoulRiser posted a thread about time management, Time management is impossible with an excerpt from Chris Guillebeau, which might be a good place to branch off that discussion.)

How to write, speak, listen, read, and interpret things (communication)

That's another big set of necessary knowledge. As the gigantic tvtropes category Poor Communication Kills demonstrates, failure of communication can lead to all kinds of drama. Studying failures of communication might be a good way to learn about how to do it better.

However, as this becomes another Wall of Text, I'm caught experiencing conflict over what to include and exclude, what to link to or put inline, and how readers will react as a result.

Conflict

Conflict, especially decision conflict, is another thing that's rarely covered in school or by parents. Unless, of course, it's a class about making sense of fiction. But sometimes experiencing conflict can provide the opportunity to think thinks through in more depth. Avoidance of conflict, and the related feeling of cognitive dissonance, can lead people to shut down thinking, feeling, and learning entirely and move on to something that requires less effort and provides no meaningful rewards.

Breaking out of autopilot: habits, time perception, and how to pay attention

(Click to expand. Two short bonus videos!)

Hidden stuff:

1. Time perception

Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains in this 2 minute video how to break autopilot and do new things to actually get more experience out of life. This can also lead to more moments of learning than you'd otherwise get in a given period of time.



Watch on YouTube

2. The power of habit

Learning about how habits work, and learning to think about habits and patterns in daily life can be extremely useful. Journalist Charles Duhigg wrote a book on that topic based on a combination of experience and research. This video provides a brief summary and Nikhil Goyal post My Notes on Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit



Watch on YouTube

Philosophy and psychology (and neuroscience)

These areas are usually reserved for study in college, but they're actually quite important. What's the right thing to do? What range of things are available to do, or worth doing, and then how do you decide among them? This applies to how to try to communicate, how to figure out what kind of work to pursue, whether to begin or end a relationship, how to go about finding help, and when, where, how, and whether to take a stand when you feel strongly about something.

Huffington Post: For a Better Society, Teach Philosophy in High Schools

A lot can be learned about those questions, as well as philosophy and psychology, from fiction, and even from documentaries, some kinds of reality shows, news reports, or vlogs. But learning is more than just taking in information: it requires reflection and integration, or connecting the dots between various moments of learning. In other words, making sense of your past (including past learning experiences) and being able to apply them in the present and future.

By learning to think that way, it's possible to learn a lot more as time goes on than passively reacting to the present, with a bunch of unprocessed information buried somewhere in your memory.

(05-19-2013 10:21 PM)Trekkie_Aspie Wrote:  “I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”

― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

That's a great list. So, how do you learn those things? Some would argue that it's just a matter of time, of aging, and eventually, due to the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" you'll somehow pick those things up.

I think that to some extent, you can actually learn many of those things proactively, without waiting for decades to pass. But, how? That's a bit of necessary knowledge to give some thought to. Learning to listen is one starting point.

What else?

[xcriteria]

(05-22-2009 10:09 PM)Desu Wrote:  What college doesn't teach you about the real world.

This is mostly referring to suit-and-tie jobs. I'm (hopefully) going into one like that soon. Can anyone think of anything else that may be necessary?

Yeah, things are a bit different in real world situations beyond suit-and-tie jobs. Even if you do one for a while, there's the question of how to get it to work for you, or how to find something that actually does use your mind. The world is full of opportunities, but it takes a time investment to learn about the range of them out there, let alone to dive in and try them out.

Office politics could be a big one. Ed Muzio has a bunch of short, informative videos mostly about workplace dynamics, how to enjoy your work and interact effectively: http://www.youtube.com/user/emuzio/videos?view=0

(05-22-2009 10:09 PM)Desu Wrote:  Making a long-distance phone call...
Sending a fax...
etc.

For things like these, ehow or other google results could probably do just fine.