stem education

Those who stick with a discipline long enough to reach the undergraduate level often end up surrounded by others with similar interests, preferring the company of those who share the experience and vocabulary sufficient to support high fidelity conversation. Interests could be downstream of taste, or temperament, or some other abstract part of personhood which informs the conscious mind in subtle ways. Maybe we tend to prefer similar people because they are better at satisfying a need to feel understood; the more experiences people share, the easier they find it to converse.

maybe.. I'm not a psychologist

But I find myself gravitating toward those whose knowledge is a superset of mine, or at least has some intersection with it. The ability to answer questions and ask them makes you a good interlocutor; notably, this ability doesn't seem to require any particular credential, like a college degree. Those with multidisciplinary curiosity tend to have various credentials or none at all, and those credentials are a result of curiosity, obsession, or discipline (oppose: those whose knowledge is mostly confined to the area in which they are credentialed — this relationship is backwards, where knowledge was obtained as a byproduct of the pursuit of the credential).

pretty abstract. a conrete example: I was talking to someone with a degree in a different field. I asked a material question, and their answer was that that specific subject wasn't taught as part of their degree. So it would seem that their knowledge is bounded by what was prescribed in the curriculum. To be fair, it may not be possible to actually know everything about a subject, but the point is the attitude about how knowledge is obtained.

Separately, I spoke to someone who was shocked to discover that I actually believe in evolution, immediately challenging me to explain how apes still exist if humans are supposed to have evolved from them. Then this person couldn't grasp the concept of divergent populations becoming isolated and subjected to different selective pressures (my off-the-cuff explanation; there's probably more to it). The inability to use scientific reasoning troubled me, and it makes me wonder how many people go through life without reasoning.

What should people be forced to learn? how much knowledge is enough? We have broadly agreed on several things: language, etiquette, academics in the standard K-12 curriculum. Then each person's interests guide their learning, and that is fine, to an extent. But what knowledge is dangerous to not have?