Anonymous #1 4w

Yeah me too. And it’s not that small of a minority either.

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Anonymous #1 4w

I mean. Yeah, I know because I learned the mnemonic device from school. But also like. When would this information be remotely useful to anyone not in a related field? So like sure it's weird to me people don't know it. But honestly, who cares?

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Anonymous #3 4w

To me it's like knowing Shakespeare or other classics so that you understand references. It's not important, but it's neat to be in on that shared knowledge. Personally, I feel like Pythagorean theorem and basic geometry is more useful in my day to day

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Anonymous #3 4w

This take is interesting because it highlights the dangers of intellectual apathy. Information doesn’t need to be immediately critical to your work value or personal life to be important. Example: I could say the same thing about vaccines. Knowing how vaccines work isn’t remotely useful to anyone not in medicine, and arguably not important for a lot of people in it either. But not knowing the basics and not being interested in learning anything about it has fueled massive vaccine skepticism.

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Anonymous OP 4w

And that’s led to misinformation, misunderstandings, and ultimately preventable deaths. There are so many things wrong in the world that are fueled by ignorance and a lack of interest in learning about a subject. Resistance to nuclear power is another. Summing my point up, you need to have a broad knowledge about everything and a curiosity to learn in order to be an informed citizen. Ignorance is danger, and saying “who cares” about whether someone knows basic facts is a symptom of this.

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Anonymous OP 4w

Addressing your Shakespeare point specifically, reading books and building reading comprehension isn’t something done just to be in the “in” crowd. Reading comprehension is the backbone of media literacy, and I shouldn’t have to tell you why that’s important. And a lack of knowledge about space has allowed things like Starlink to take form, contributing to the potential of Kessler Syndrome that the public already knows nothing about due to a lack of curiosity. Basic knowledge is important.

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Anonymous OP 4w

Building a knowledge base is iterative. It needs a foundation of basic knowledge.

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Anonymous #4 4w

In all seriousness though, I do know the gist of the order, and I can name all the planets. I don’t think I ever learned the acronym people are talking about for the order, though. I know Mercury is closest to the Sun, Jupiter is biggest, Saturn has rings, we’re in the middle and Mars is our neighbor, and Uranus and Neptune are the last two (and then Pluto if you want to count it, although it’s technically demoted to a dwarf planet).

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Anonymous #4 4w

I never learned the acronym either, to be honest. None of my classes ever went over astronomy.

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Anonymous OP 4w

Yeah, I think we had a unit on it maybe once or twice in elementary school and then it was never mentioned again

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