His class on ignorance sounds absolutely fascinating. As a non-physical science student, whose last signficant experience with the Chemistry, Biology, and Physics was in high school in a memor-intensive class, I found this class to be so important. As a high school student, I knew economics was deeply flawed but I did not see many other fields that was open for reinvention and comfortable in uncertainty — perhaps too comofortable and too arrogant. Nonetheless, I think a large part of what kept me going through many boring economics lectures is because I knew at the end of the journey the questions I will get to ask are all about the unknown: how will the Indian economy grow? how do you lift people out of poverty without creating staggering new levels of inequality? how do you educate a billion people? I am now reflecting that in high school it did often seem to me a lot of science was already known. If I had known several key question remains unexplored and that it is a realistic possibility that I could be studying in pursuit of answering such a question, which I am sure is the case, I would perhaps have remained far more interested in at least one of those three sciences. Link
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This is a very insightful thought. As an economics concentrator myself I also had have not had any meaningful interaction with these sciences since high school. I remember liking the more broad and wondrous ideas that I learned about but those seemed much less frequent than having to do things like memorizing the periodic table. I think I was possibly subconsciously pushed away from these fields due to the association with these kind of classes instead of the more dynamic problem-solving classes. A class like his class on ignorance could do wonders on keeping young students interested in science.