alt Hacker NewsIt's funny when you think you know something pretty much thoroughly. Then you learn a bit more and realize that your understanding was a bit simplified, had gaps or there was a whole other level to it.
The feeling is a strange mixture of disappointment, awe, annoyance and excitement.
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Y'know it's funny how, at least in my experience, education worked.
We're handed a bunch of simplified models then build on them. The consequence being that the landscape is very narrowly revealed.
This itself is a consequence of the architecture, at least in the US we don't really specialize until college/university.
Nobody really comprehends the depth of things until then, and troublingly enough we don't understand that until we're 2-3 years in.
For instance we have DNA, right? It gets replicated in cells via mitosis and in specialized cells called gametes via meiosis, the latter form is used for sexual reproduction. That's the gist you get in High School, you might talk about the polymer, nucleotides, nucleotide construction (which are superficial)
That isn't even close to the end, just off the top of my head there are elements in the DNA that code for several processes like methylation, allow interfacing with proteins which have myriad effects like up or downregulating transcription, they can also change the local topology forming loops that facilitate the process. There's a bunch of crazy shit that happens at the histone level.
And any one of those Substituent parts is probably worth discussing for a week in lecture at least but they're glossed over for more advances classes. For instance those regulatory molecules, in sufficient concentrations, can overpower histones that keep genes turned off, and that has downstream consequences in general regulation and cell differentiation.
I think that in the long run it compromises mental rigor. It also allows people to carry with them a sense of complete understanding when it's superficial and shallow. Having never experience the depth that the real world goes to kind of limits the horizons of people that aren't naturally curious and never shows them the potential for how deep shit can really get and when it does it is still superficial by the dint of the expectation placed on students being so narrow.
It also leads to a carefullness and lawyerization of language, that the laymen mistake for a lack of confidence.
"All evidence points towards x under the constraints y, z and q."
vs
"Its like this: x"