Dammit, trending small majority not heard of it 🙁
Wanted to use it as a metaphor for a piece. Didn’t realize it was that obscure.
I think I learned it in 8th grade by which time I think STEM kids were already on a separate track. For the curious ones:
I keep forgetting how early STEM forks off from mainstream. In my high school, there were 4 tracks: CS and biology on STEM side (targeting engineering and medicine for college) and commerce and arts for humanities/social science side. I think ~40% was STEM and that was high.
There’s a bunch of “charismatic megascience” stuff that non-STEM people hear about like theory of relativity and e=mc^2 but the 90% of mundane shit STEMmies pick up over 8 years of high school and undergrad is basically alien territory for 2/3 of the population.
I feel like PV = nRT (pronounced pivnert, obviously) comes up in my daily life way more than I would have thought, and it's got to be in that 90% as well
Yeah I don’t think you can casually drop that into a conversation and expect to be understood. But the underlying intuitions should be available to all (balloons, boiling kettles, pressure cookers...)
In DC/MD on public school side, testing in 5th grade funneled kids to “magnet schools” starting in 6th grade, so the divergence started by 12 years old?
There must be research on resulting worldview (+ socioeconomic mobility) schism out there by now.