But alot of math applied in the economy may require the existence of a ‘dumbed down’ mathematically illiterate population to support those who sell its applications. So when one says ‘what is the benefit of math or any other (eg critical thinking) knowledge’, this partly depends on who ‘we’ refers to. And, what ‘society’ ‘needs’—again society is subjective (like legal citizen’ or ‘human rights’) as are ‘needs’ (eg following ronald reagen, i refer to the Koch family as the ‘truly needy’ because apparently they need billions of $—-maybe i can prove this to be a fact following Rawls and Amartya Sen).

Alot of the current push for education seems often to derive from a few people to need some people to have an intermediate range of scholastic skills—yeah, you need algebra, maybe some programming or software skills, but this is required essentially to do ‘lower level’ tasks required for ‘higher level’ tasks performed by say ‘managers’. (eg a Recent post by Ben Goldhager on Bad Science blog suggets that over 50% of neuroscience papers published make an elementary statistical error (this was published in PLOS). No dought these people have many competencies, but not apparently in statistical inference—hence one can even question why they are doing research and being supported by a staff who are not encouraged to think they could be involved in ‘higher order’ tasks such as research design. (This might as well be theology—-the blind leading the blind, and getting paid to lead as well.)

I see research all the time (eg from Georgetown u ctr on labor supply) about how ‘ we’ or ‘our society’ projects we need mostly home health workers, service industry workers, etc, and maybe not so many scientists. Its possible the republican congress and fox news don’t need anyone who understands statistics; same would be true of many religious evangelists. (the blog ‘math under the microscope’ also says basically a vanishingly small % of people need to know any advanced math—its only required for research; other than that its pop entertainment—maybe the kinduh stuff jonah lehrer did (i read his new yorker article on E O Wilson, which was interesting, if somewaht incomplete from a population genetics point of view—tho it wasnt in J Theor Biol or TPB.).

i guess maybe i’m a biased keynsian—people should be organizing society and needs based on less busy and destructive work, and more towards developing advanced capabilities (eg sen) whether valuing nature, or arts, or sciences…).

It may be possible that rather than ‘society needs stupid people’ some people are say ‘genetically’ stupid and so they will always prefer Rush Limbaugh and junk food, or this may be an emergent phenomena neccesarily correlated with ‘laws of large numbers’ (eg perhaps like the ‘junk dna’ or the failed histories seen in the fossil record). But ‘another end of history’ may be possible, even if at present ‘there are no academic jobs’ because most future work will be maybe be in hotel work at conferences on global warming, or airports transporting gore to a film screening.

another kind of related question is, for example, if one glances at the variety of theories on arxiv (in math, cs, logic, physics…) how many of these are needed apart from those who either produce them for work or produce them as a labor of love (or maybe hate—eg the various dissenting views, eg vixra.org). Dyson fo example showed schwinger and feynman were redundant, and someone did that for heisenberg and schrodinger. Different perspectvies have value in various contextx (as likely do forms of language or music or art or recipes, economic skills) but when is redundancy innefficient (eg too many school grads of various types) and possibly a ‘socially unnecesary’ ‘scam’ (eg new form of junk food).
also, one wonders what academics as a subset of the public should know—how many can read or understand what the person in the next office or next building or who wrote the book next to their in the library wrote, and what should be the criteria for deciding what they should comprehend.
again one ends up with the problem regarding what people can actually know, whether geneticlly or socially constructed. (if that equation of consiousness discussed on the blog–tonis?—is true, then maybe a solution of that might be the answer.)
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