Nate Silver, he of the 538 blog fame during the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, was recently featured on the Bill Simmons podcast. It should be noted that Nate's original fame was as a baseball nerd and so it was quite natural for him to be on Simmons' (mostly) sports blog.
In a typically incisive comment and question progression, Simmons stated (paraphrasing) that Nate's correct prediction of the 2012 Presidential election felt "like a victory for math," but then went on to question why people don't enjoy math so much in school. Again paraphrasing, Nate's response was that: "in English, kids get to read good books; but that in math, they only do problems and that math would be far better if everyone learned from fantasy football or something similar."
Absolutely. And Nate's the prime example. He was obviously a precocious kid at math, but ended up suceeding because he started learning from what he enjoyed and built a baseball model. Then he used the knowledge from that to gain international acclaim and be proclaimed as one of Time's 100 Most Influential Persons in 2009.
This stuff can't be taught in school under the old paradigm of education. In that world, information was a premium, so teaching facts was paramount. Some educators made a cursory glance towards 'teaching how to think,' but the primary responsibility was to teach who the first president was, what was involved in the New Deal and the atomic properties of carbon. But that shit's easy now.
There's google. And wikipedia. Almost every class has a computer. And almost every kid has a smartphone of some sort. Knowledge is free and accessible nowadays. It's what kids do with it that matters now. And this applies to medicine. Sure a medical student needs to know basic anatomy - but honestly, that stuff isn't clinically useful and if it's really true that 50% of our medical knowledge exires within 5 years, then facts are even less meaningful.
The medical community has been advancing in the 'gaming' of health-care - from using crowdsourcing to find complex answers to biological properties to using exergames for obese kids. It would be cool to see this level of gaming be incorporated into the basic and continuing medical education and for the term 'gaming' to lose its shallow connotation.
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Posted by: psd to email | December 12, 2012 at 04:43 AM