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Why do we still teach people to calculate?

Why Do We Still Teach People to Calculate? - Freakonomics

So the whole approach can be potentially totally different and allows us to, in a sense, throw in much messier types of problems and see what happens without necessarily knowing the techniques in detail that we need to get the answers. Now let’s set you on a project where we’re just going to remind you of these four steps, but we’re going to give you a slightly more open-ended thing for you to do by yourself with a little bit of help to guide you.” Because where we want people to be in the end is: Here’s a problem — economics or mechanical engineering or life. This is exactly what Conrad Wolfram and I were talking about — the kind of common sense and data literacy and ability to think about how to formulate and answer a problem that these researchers botched, in this case, because they didn’t understand an important fact about the world, which is that the share of left-handed people had changed over time.

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