rationalskepticism.org

aufbahrung wrote:The universe might be complex, might even be too complex for human understanding but equations that describe the qualities of the real everyday comprehesible universe are going to be both more useful and more enlightening to most adults let alone children.

If they're wrong though, they're going to be neither useful nor enlightening - quite the contrary.

Or they might only be useful in certain contexts, and understanding why that is might be enlightening.

Things should only be made as simple as possible necessary for communication, and not a Planck length simpler.

aufbahrung wrote:You do not need to examine the intricate behaviour of the internal combustion engine to understand the simpler side of things involved in driving a car.

The two are entirely unrelated. Driving a car doesn't even require you to know that the car is powered by an engine. You could think miniature pixies push the car and it wouldn't hamper your ability to drive.

But if you want to talk about force, combustion, and machines... no amount of appealing to pixies is ever going to be useful or enlightening.

aufbahrung wrote: Obviously there is a place for quantum mechanics and they have a office in some building to examine important obscure and dull equations of their own making.

You're misunderstanding the most vital point and actually exemplifying exactly why kids need to learn this stuff so they're not left misinformed - quantum mechanics is underpinning absolutely everything; every interaction that occurs in the universe; that's not expressly to do with determinism as you need to specify what state you're talking about to know that.

Sure, you don't need to be able to work with quantum mechanics to boil a kettle, but to understand how a universe in which kettles boil water works, you absolutely do need to have at least an elementary grasp of the nature of nature, or else you basically know nothing.

This thread isn't talking about having kids boil kettles; it's talking about educating kids about reality. It's not hard. Kids don't struggle with this if it's introduced as the basis of their understanding - it's only when kids are misinformed and essentially misled that they struggle to process new ways of looking at phenomena. My son's only 6, and he's long known about different states of matter, the basics of what happens when water freezes and becomes ice, how gravity operates, that converting fuel to do work also releases some of the energy as heat... and he loves to know more. So why not teach kids what we know - that should be the actual question here.

aufbahrung wrote: I was astounded by math as a grew older and its power to do some amazing things, almost like magic, but it'd be a waste and have put me off to introduce calculus before I hated football.

What?

aufbahrung wrote: Strangest thing about reality is that it is comprehensible.

Sounds like a religious claim to me.

aufbahrung wrote: Push that too far and you doing that dunning-krugger thing of overestimating your audience.

Ummm. That's not a Dunning-Kruger thing.

aufbahrung wrote: Before you know there's generation passed and a doubling of star trek pyschobabble on the geek forums and half the amount of intelligible information.

An intriguingly self-evidencing sentence and yet another example of why educating children is actually vital - so they become informed adults. Given the progression of knowledge in the last century, and given how we've allowed that knowledge to become the foundation of all aspects of our modern world, it would be a travesty to allow the gulf in knowledge continue to grow. We need to teach what we know to be true, not what we know not to be true. Just as we abandoned other poor ideas, or at least refocused their value, so we need to make sure that kids are prepared to engage in the modern scientific world we all inhabit, consciously or not.