Okay this points to a deeper frustration I have with the way science is taught, where people essentially come out thinking that the labels for things are the same as the things themselves https://twitter.com/badideasgirl/status/1306676656439013383

And it's frustrating because we could be doing *so much better*

Like I learned mathematics in a class where all the labels for variables and such were chosen by the students, and it drove home immediately that "x", "y", "theta", and the like were all arbitrary names chosen by human beings, much like us

In the class, we were actually *doing* mathematics: labeling, observing, guessing, testing. We weren't just being taught about the mathematics that other people did centuries ago.

And *who cares* if Euclid or Leibniz or whoever did it first. We can still do it now. No law saying only one person's allowed to do it.

Thing is, a lot of people who self-identify as "bad at math" manage to be good at video games that are a lot harder than, say, basic algebra. Why? Because the video game let them learn by exploring, trying and failing, driven by their own desire to get to what's next.

Modern-day math education is, by comparison, like learning to play a video game by reading a transcript of a Twitch stream. You're expected to just, like, understand why the streamer made the decisions they did, without having a chance to play the game yourself.

I don't have really anything to close up this thread, except to say that if you wanna learn more about the system I learned math in, it's called The Math Circle by Robert and Ellen Kaplan. I highly recommend their book OUT OF THE LABYRINTH: SETTING MATHEMATICS FREE.

It would be neat if I could tie this thread back to the original point about biology, but meh, maybe another day