If you want to define the debate in that way then sure, memory plus considered analytical skills is better than memory without analytical skills, but I don't think anyone was questioning that. People are more likely to question the importance of memorising things (because it's "boring") than of considered analytical skills.
One question that pops into my mind: can considered analytical skills actually be taught? I'm not sure they really can, they might be just plain old innate, in which case perhaps classes should focus on the thing that can be taught, which is stuff.
And you still need to have memorised things like what America is or who Hitler was.
Maybe you knew those things already before you started the class, which is nice, but no doubt there's a lot of other facts out there which you could have memorised which would help you in piecing together the historical narrative.
People criticise the rote-learning approach to things, but I think it's possible to go too far in the other direction. If, for instance, you teach your eight-year-old kids to memorise the capital cities of all the countries in the world, then that's not a huge deal of information right there, but at least you can guarantee that they've heard of every country on Earth, which puts them ahead of most adults.
Furthermore, they'll have noticed a bunch of patterns, like all the places starting with "San" or all the places ending with "-town" which can help them piece together things like which countries were Spanish or British colonies, which leads to an understanding of the history and culture of these countries, and so forth.
One maths class we were only warned that we had to use Euclidean paper.
I did great in exams with cheat sheets, but poorly in the few truly "open book" exams, because I didn't know how to properly prepare for an open book exam. My silly undergrad brain thought "Woohoo, open book, I guess I don't have to study all this stuff, I can just look it up when I get there" which led to two hours of feverishly flipping back and forth in the book.
>I stated that if one has less money than someone else, they are much more likely to have to deal with things like being assaulted or killed or going without enough to eat etc.
So just to clarify, there's a lot of Harvard and Dartmouth graduates (in non-economics) going without enough to eat, are there?
I'd also suggest that one of the reasons people perceive the study of human behaviour as unscientific is that it so frequently is.
Studies of human behaviour are inextricably bound up in politics. Many studies are designed, whether consciously or unconsciously on the part of the authors, to advance the authors' own political or social agenda.
Even if you avoid that problem, many studies are just plain statistically lousy, and employ deeply non-random samples.
And finally you've got the annoying problem that people know they're being studied and may modify their behaviour accordingly.
Don't be mad that some other people's brains are bent on stuff of no particular benefit to you. Their brains, their choice.
Just be glad that some people's brains are bent on stuff of benefit to you, and concentrate, if you like, on what of general benefit you can do with your own brain.
In the form of time travel being talked about, the answers are:
a) Yes, you disappear from the time you were in.
b) Yes, you're in two places at once for the duration between your arrival and your departure
c) Forwards travel in time doesn't cause too many philosophical problems (since we're already doing it) which is why nobody talks about it. But there's no requirement to wind up exactly where you started.
Actually the only vaguely plausible-ish (though by no means convincing) designs I've heard of for physically realisable time machines work like this. You do some horrendous things with spacetime curvature and you get something that can send you back in time, but no further back than the point at which you constructed your horrendously curved spacetime thingy.
Paul Davis has a short book How To Build A Time Machine which does it this way, if I recall correctly (it's been a while since I read it).
The touchiness of certain varieties of nerds with bizarre hobbies occasionally just makes them look worse.
If you have a weird hobby, people are going to make fun of it. Heck, if you have a mainstream hobby then there's someone out there who's going to make fun of it too. There's no point in getting upset when they do, just laugh it off.
Everybody on this planet is a bit weird in one way or another, and we should all reserve the right to make fun of each other for our peculiarities.
Before people get too worked up about this they should consider it from the other point of view.
If you're going to get strict about getting paid for every hour you work, you'd better believe I, as your employer, am going to start getting strict about making sure you're really working for every minute of those hours. No goofing off, no idle chit-chat, just work.
How many of us would be willing to be held up to this standard? I sure as hell wouldn't.
Yeah, I know how they feel. I worked in the US for several years and something like a tenth of my salary was stolen by something called "Social Security".
Do I ever see any of that money again? Nope! Only if I work in the US for ten years do I have any hope of getting some money out of the Social Security system (if it's still going in its present form when I retire, which I doubt).
Sure. Bread. It's so convenient and easy, and it shows up in 90% of the things that you might be able to get for breakfast and lunch at the average food joint.
100 calories of nuts or broccoli costs a whole lot more than 100 calories of bread or rice, and this is reflective of the greater agricultural demands of pretty much everything else versus bread and rice.
One question that pops into my mind: can considered analytical skills actually be taught? I'm not sure they really can, they might be just plain old innate, in which case perhaps classes should focus on the thing that can be taught, which is stuff.