Textbooks
I just finished reading and taking notes on a chapter in my macroeconomics book and my mind decided it wanted to be weird.
It started when I was wondering why parts of the book were set up with a specific format compared to others. That got me thinking about the information in textbooks. How do we know if the information in them is accurate? I know some of it just makes sense logically when you apply the concepts to real-world situations, but what about things like history? How do we know that when it says in a textbook actually happened like that or even happened at all? The only way to be sure that the information is really accurate is if the textbooks were based off the what was written by people in that time period about their lives or other people's lives at that time. That's more likely to be accurate than just someone today studying about past events and applying certain ideas to them to come up with a general basis for what it was like, but there is still the chance that the people who wrote about other people's lives in that time could still be wrong...Also what about science? I know that you can show that some ideas make sense using numbers and equations, but these theories are based off of people's experiments in the past. But what if they were wrong?
So basically I started thinking about how everything we are taught in school might be based on false assumptions and just bad information...And how if this were the case, our world would've been shaped by all these false ideas to make the world the way it is today...
I'm not sure if any of this makes sense when you read it, but it makes sense in my head. I don't necessarily think this is the case, but my mind just kind of latched onto that idea and we a little crazy.
Anyway, I'm going to go read my book for a while and pretend that I'm not weird...
It started when I was wondering why parts of the book were set up with a specific format compared to others. That got me thinking about the information in textbooks. How do we know if the information in them is accurate? I know some of it just makes sense logically when you apply the concepts to real-world situations, but what about things like history? How do we know that when it says in a textbook actually happened like that or even happened at all? The only way to be sure that the information is really accurate is if the textbooks were based off the what was written by people in that time period about their lives or other people's lives at that time. That's more likely to be accurate than just someone today studying about past events and applying certain ideas to them to come up with a general basis for what it was like, but there is still the chance that the people who wrote about other people's lives in that time could still be wrong...Also what about science? I know that you can show that some ideas make sense using numbers and equations, but these theories are based off of people's experiments in the past. But what if they were wrong?
So basically I started thinking about how everything we are taught in school might be based on false assumptions and just bad information...And how if this were the case, our world would've been shaped by all these false ideas to make the world the way it is today...
I'm not sure if any of this makes sense when you read it, but it makes sense in my head. I don't necessarily think this is the case, but my mind just kind of latched onto that idea and we a little crazy.
Anyway, I'm going to go read my book for a while and pretend that I'm not weird...