In a discussion about this picture
“Math student here. The majority of the math that they teach in high school is completely worthless to the average person. The curriculum here in Ontario is particularly bad: there are a bunch of mandatory courses that are all building up to calculus, but then the first calculus course isn’t required, so most students who don’t like math end up with a knowledge of a bunch of concepts that aren’t even mathematically useful without calculus. And honestly, I love calculus, but it’s only useful if you’re going into science or engineering. For most people it’s too abstract to have any real use.
What they should be teaching in high school is statistics. Even the statistics class I took in high school didn’t cover Bayes’ theorem, which is something that everyone should know. Giving people basic knowledge of how to evaluate data, and showing them how this can be applied in real life situation, would help to eliminate lots of the stupid fallacies we see today in political debates and the like.”
He is right about that.