Comment Re:How hard can that possibly be? (Score 1) 663
I rather suspect that what we are seeing is a question which is designed to mimic how students are being taught. If so I doubt the presentation is really a significant issue. I'd be willing to change my mind if someone can demonstrate objectively that there's some general detriment to being taught this way. For example if you could show that someone taught to frame problems this way significantly limits or hinders them from grasping something else of obvious higher value.
An example of that might be that who seeing a six on a line drawing of a cup couldn't comprehend how it might not mean "6 cups" or "6 units of coffee". If that inability is due to their education then clearly it produced some limitations - doesn't sound like it's holding our engineer friend back in his work though. So at least he has that.
Now if this isn't a question very close to the way students were taught then again it might still be a useful diagnostic. I tend to think that, in the real world nothing looks like a textbook question and math doesn't need to be *applied* to a problem so much as mathematical problems need to be *extracted* from situations. Often that involves being creative. Chaitin often refers to math as being as much art as science. I tend to agree. Steven Levitt isn't well-known because he was a human calculator. Levitt is well-known because he was able to extract mathematically solvable problems from the real world and derive some interesting and counter-intuitive results.
So my standard, at least for now is that math needs to be taught in ways that help people to recognize opportunities to use it. If your math fails to do that, such as making you incapable to recognize a simple subtraction problem. Blame the question all you want, I'd still say that this is a sign that there's a significant gap in your ability to use your math.
Then again perhaps in some part of the world people like our engineer are rewarded not for solving problems but for whining and complaining that the world presents it's data in a way that is significantly different from the way they were taught in school.